Can Algorithms, a Touchscreen, and an Internet Connection Make the Perfect Piece of Toast?

Once it’s plugged in, the Revolution’s screen is on and currently never goes off. Instead of turning off after breakfast, it stays on, a big “R” logo the color of glowing coils in the center. If it’s nighttime and you’re sleeping, it’s on. Fiddle with it a bit and connect it to Wi-Fi and it will display the weather on the screen. Instead of sun, cloud, or snowflake icons floating across the seven-inch screen like they likely do on your phone’s weather app, the current conditions are displayed across the bottom inch of the screen, leaving plenty of room for that logo, which hasn’t budged.

Fiddle some more and you can upload up to 24 photos to the toaster by scanning a QR code that appears on its screen. Having never put photos on a toaster before, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to put on all-day display, but then I thought of the neon-blue vibes on the cover of my wife Elisabeth’s new novel and let it cast its cool glow across the kitchen. If you’ve been looking for a digital photo frame for your kitchen, this might be appealing to you.

On the screen, you also can choose what kind of toast you’re having from among 22 bread types, like sourdough, bagel, multigrain, or cinnamon swirl. The R180’s less-fancy siblings have a mere five or six toasting options. Choose your bread type, then select the level of doneness, using an on-screen photo of the predicted result for each heating level, plug in whether your bread is frozen or fresh, hit Start, and you’re on your way to toasty perfection, or at least should be. (Toast Song nerds, there’s no lever to push down, but you can still watch the wires get hot.)

Using algorithms involving food variables like density and thickness, the toaster measures the incoming voltage and the temperature inside the toaster, then mechanically draws your toast into the slot and starts to glow. A PR rep for Revolution told me they could divulge only so much because of Trade Secrets (their caps), but they could say the company’s “algorithms take everything into account to do what they need to do to ensure optimal toasting.”

Yet for whatever brains Revolution plugged into the machine, it didn’t toast very well. This is a big bummer considering you can get a well-reviewed toaster with a dial and no screen for a 10th of the price. Or you can get a very analog Balmuda, which might even make you happy.

Over and over in my testing, what emerged from the slot after a cycle was consistently way short of the doneness level I chose on the start screen. Among the bread I tested, I tried Trader Joe’s sourdough on the sourdough setting, everything bagels from Eltana in Seattle on the bagel setting, and my own homemade no-knead bread on the artisan bread setting, among others. I used the fresh and frozen settings depending on what state my bread was in, and nothing came out looking like the image of the toasted items shown above my requested doneness setting. Generally, the toast was quite underdone, occasionally it was uneven, and sometimes, particularly for the bagels, the surface became oddly spotted along its edges.