It’s interesting that the focus is on porcelain as a cooking surface but misses the biggest reasons for it displacing engineered quartz or granite for countertops. There’s a few factors at play here leading to the prominence of porcelain.

For the induction cooktops, you can cut porcelain slabs to 6mm compared to your 3cm (sometimes 2cm) quartz and granite. This is also why you can use it for walls and floors. The thinner materials allow the magnets to actually function.

The manufacturing process for engineered quartz is now being interwoven with silicosis through the legal system, leading to manufacturers marketing “low silica” quartz at a cost premium. This premium is closing the cost gap with porcelain. This is the main economic and legal reason as jurisdictions- Australia and maybe soon California look to ban these products forcing the market towards natural stones.

If you’re then selecting from natural stones, porcelain is essentially used as printer paper for whatever stone pattern is desired, and given that people tend to want things that look like marble, this “ink” is essentially free for the manufacturing process, making the porcelain look like marble more than quartz or granite.

Engineered quartz is also not a great exterior material, again yielding to porcelain.

I thought the benchmark for pricey induction cooktops was Impulse (I love mine but even at the preorder + tax credit price it was a splurge). But then I realized there’s probably a kitchen equivalent of audiophile gear, where you pay through the nose for something lesser nerds wouldn’t even notice (maybe every nerdy niche has an equivalent of audiophile gear?).

Had a new kitchen and bathroom installed last year. Most surfaces (kitchen counter, shower and general bath room) all Dekton or one of Cosentino’s other lines.

I was apprehensive: it is expensive and “not real stone”.

Super happy with it. Spilling red wine, putting sizzling hot pans on it, accidentally dropping big pans on it. Dekton brushes it off.

Go into debt if you have to.

We're getting a new kitchen and this is all my wife is talking about. Good help me.

Was anybody disappointed that he didn't mention the price of that cooktop? He had all of that leadup with the price of normal glass ($30/ft^2), but never told us what he paid for the fancy porcelain.

I know there is a difference between expensive and Expensive, but is there an induction cooktop that isn't pricey?

I went with a basic Frigidaire model, and sure ~$1500 is not unaffordable. It's just a lot for what it is, because the market is still pricing induction as some bespoke premium option.

This could have done without the "I am a kitchen equipment nerd, you can stop rolling your eyes" immediately followed by "I thought induction tops used tempered glass but they don't??" intro undermining the rest of the article.

It's like a bit like someone opening their article with "I am a bit of a PC building nerd, stop rolling your eyes, so anyway I thought you could just plug an enterprise NVMe drive into any motherboard but it turns out you can't??"

Honestly most often it isn’t actual kitchen nerd stuff but just hyper consumerism under thin guise of “it’s my hobby”, “I am a kitchen/bathroom/garage/phone nerd”

I have caught myself in this many times, mesmerised by shining advertisements that promise when I buy this super duper kitchen appliance or material, my life will be finally complete.

The worst thing is that it indeed works and you are indeed in heaven for the first month of usage.

To keep up the chemicals as the brain gets addicted you must keep looking for ways to increase your revenue just to make more purchases that feel so good.

Of course this is unsustainable usually so you decide that fuck it, what a dead end, let’s read the books from the library instead.

Explained in 1 min video https://hn.watch/?item=50118828