I'm a bit surprised to see how much snark there is in the comment sections of this video. The requests for "let's see an independent chef use this knife to do real kitchen work" make total sense, but the moralizing around e-waste and losing fingers etc feels off balance.

People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives, of course there's a viable market for sharper kitchen knives. And for e-waste, you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things. The problem is so much bigger than that, the energy is better spent in a different place.

This is a cool and novel tool, at least as far as its genuine utility can be verified. It doesn't seem harmful to let people get excited about it.

> People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives

With a mass market electric sharpener and a reasonable knife I spend maybe 15 minutes/yr on sharpening and the knife + sharpener costs less than half this product

The marketing video seems to try to head people like me off, but it also seems to wildly overstate the level of commitment required to have sharp knives

(I do think the tech is cool tho. I just wouldn’t pay $400 for an 8 inch chef’s knife no matter how good it is)

    >People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives...

Most importantly, buying useful things, that will likely be used for a long time and contain about as much e-waste as a single-use vape.

Overall agree it seems cool, and maybe interesting.

"People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives,"

The former, totally agree - i've seen people buy a tormek to do basic knife sharpening (not grinding), which is like swatting a fly with an $800 hammer.

The latter, do you mean overall, or in a sitting or what?

I've certainly seen people on various forums go nuts, and then you have hertzmann staring at knife edges with an SEM, but even if i did it completely by hand with shaptons, it takes like 15 minutes, max, to sharpen 10 knives, through an entire insane grit progression (which i do for plane blades when i need to cleanly slice end grain without going to a super high-angle plane or something. For knives, i was just trying to get a comparison point, i use electric sharpeners in practice).

Or approximately 2 minutes with an electric knife sharpener.

While sure, there is a difference when i put them under my digital inspection microscope, either can slice paper towel cleanly and easily (slicing paper is easy, slicing paper towel ends to be hard because any burr catches really easily)

Are there really even semi-normal people out there spending hours to sharpen knives?

If so, like, why?

(Obviously, again, if they need to be reground because you knicked it really badly, sure that takes a bit, but beyond that)

None of these steels are tough enough to require all that many strokes (it's pretty easy to test it with a marker and see when you remove the marking), and if you are using super custom steels (RIP Crucible :(), carbide, or ceramics, you need CBN or diamond anyway, but the same is still true - given the correct abrasive material, sharpening knives is just not that slow.

I actually travel with an electric knife sharpener if we are going to be staying in an airbnb somewhere for >1 week and are cooking most nights. It's the most consistent thing about airbnb - no matter what level of luxury, etc, they always have many knives, and all of them are dangerously dull. It still doesn't take more than a few minutes to sharpen them all.

> ...you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things.

I think it's a worthwhile message to tell folks that we, collectively, should be mindful about the resources we consume and the waste we produce. For such razor-thin (lol) gains in QoL, I think it's worth reminding people to consider whether it is worth the huge increase in waste. Knives are metal and wood/plastic... awfully efficient tools for the work they get done.

EDIT: And to balance the negativity, I _love_ the Seattle Ultrasonics logo.

I'm surprised there isn't moralizing about the price point. I don't see why the US is so far behind in manufacturing efficiency. Everything seem to be 10-100x the cost of comparable Chinese goods, and US labor isn't paid anywhere close to 100x more.

E-waste can be solved without reducing the number of items. Just requires basic investments in recycling.

This is also make takeaway. I have noticed this more and more on this site. Everything is criticized to an insane degree. If someone hasn't solved world hunger, while at the same time making money and curing their grandma of Alzheimer it will not be received well.