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Hello.

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It is still november.

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With that out of the way, does your microwave
oven have a popcorn button?

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Yeah, mine too.

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Lots of microwave ovens come with a dedicated
button for popping microwave popcorn,

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yet on nearly every bag of microwave popcorn sold in a store

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you’ll find a rather stern warning making it clear in no uncertain terms

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that that button is forbidden.

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Do NOT use the popcorn button.

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This might make you question

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“why do we even have that button?”

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and you know what? That’s a great question.

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But I’m gonna tell you something wild and devious:

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you should try it and see what happens.

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Try it.

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You know you want to.

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See, I got this question from a patron of the channel recently.

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Jolly Orville Secret Redenbacher Time II
has a great incentive to tell you not to use the popcorn button.

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The popcorn producers of the world don’t know anything about your microwave,

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and some microwave oven manufacturers are dirty little liars

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and put a popcorn button on microwaves that have no business having one.

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Oftentimes that button doesn't do anything
but set a pre-programmed cooking time

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and if you use it your popcorn will be either burnt to a crisp
or hardly popped at all

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with an approximately zero percent chance of
proper popping performance.

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Since nobody likes wasting popcorn,

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the popcorn people put a purportedly proper popcorn preparation primer
on every package of popcorn which usually involves

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listening for a gap of two seconds between pops to signal it’s done

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and don’t you EVER use the popcorn button.

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Not in this family!

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[voiceover]
Pardon the interruption but I need to make a correction:

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Of the brands shown here, 
Jolly Time stands out by not warning against using the popcorn button.

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As you’re about to learn, this is actually a nice gesture

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because it means they trust you to use your brain and experiment.

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And that’s the kind of hard-hitting investigative journalism you can expect
from Technology Connections.

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As far as the rest of those brands, though -

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here’s the secret they don’t want you to know:

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Some microwaves are smarter than others and have
sensors to determine when things are done cooking.

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Like popcorn.

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And how do you know whether your microwave is among those better ones?

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Try the popcorn button.

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If you press the popcorn button and your microwave asks you the size of the bag,

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Danger, Will Robinson!

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That is probably a bad popcorn button which is sure to disappoint you.

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But if you press it and the microwave just starts…

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you might have a good popcorn button.

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Perhaps you still need to press the start button to make it go,

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and it might even give a message saying
that it’s designed for bags of a certain size,

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but so long as it doesn’t ask you to enter
or choose between values in ounces or grams,

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your microwave likely has some sort of sensor with which
it can determine when the popcorn is done and thus it will stop automatically.

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What sort of sensor, you ask?

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Broadly, a microwave with proper popcorn popping prowess
will have one or possibly two sensors onboard:

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a moisture sensor and if it’s very fancy a microphone.

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Microphones in microwaves are, I think, not super common

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so you are more likely to just have a moisture sensor.

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But don’t underestimate the power of moistness!

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With a bit of logic, that sensor can be used for all sorts of useful things,

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including automatic reheating of a meal or,

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if you go back in time to when appliances were actually trying to be smart
and not just connected to the internet,

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following specific parameters
to enable automatic cooking of specific kinds of foods.

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Sadly, the days of the
Sharp Carousel Multiple Choice have been over for like 20 years

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(at least outside of Japan).

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But lots of microwaves still have a moisture sensor.

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One way to tell whether you have that sensor
is if your microwave offers functions like “Sensor Reheat” -

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which, if it does, you should give that a try next time you’re reheating leftovers.

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It has worked surprisingly well in my experience.

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What a microwave oven is doing when using
that feature is analyzing the rise in detected moisture over time.

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More moisture indicates food is beginning to let off steam,

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and depending on how quickly that steam is detected,
it can roughly determine how much food you put in

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(and how cold it was)
and thus how long it needs to heat it for.

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If you’re lucky enough to have a moisture sensor in your microwave,

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you may very well have a decent popcorn button.

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See, unless you’re getting it from Uncle Joe’s Discount Cornhole,

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a bag of microwave popcorn will stay sealed when it begins to pop.

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Since it’s sealed, the moisture sensor can't detect anything at first.

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But once the pressure in the bag builds past a certain point,

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the bag will either go “boof” or possibly

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“pfffft”

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and let out a big ol’ cloud of steam.

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The microwave will easily detect that,

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and by comparing the time it took between the start and the sudden moisture spike with a lookup table built into its programming,

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it will pretty accurately guess the size of the bag it’s popping 
and how long it should keep cooking until it’s done.

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If you’ve got a microwave like this, that popcorn button
might work perfectly for most kinds and sizes of popcorn.

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Notice, though, that I said “might” and “most” -

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this Samsung microwave oven has a pretty decent popcorn button
but the location of its moisture sensor isn’t the best.

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When you use its popcorn function,

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it fires up the fans for a few seconds to clear the air around the moisture sensor before switching on the magnetron.

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After a short delay it begins cooking.

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And you can clearly see that the display doesn’t say anything other than “Popcorn” until shortly after the bag bursts open.

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Then it picks a time remaining value and stops cooking at the end.

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This works pretty well…

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if the opening of the bag is pointing to the right when it bursts open.

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The sensor is clearly somewhere up in here,

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and if the steam gets shot right into this area,

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the microwave only takes a few seconds
to pick a remaining cook time.

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And once it does, it’s usually pretty bang-on.

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But if the popcorn bag was pointing away from this region,

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it tends to take just a little too long to detect the moisture spike,

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so it thinks the bag is bigger than it is,

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and it cooks just a little bit too long.

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Generally it just singes a few kernels,
but it’s enough to be disappointing.

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A faster-spinning turntable would be one potential solution here,

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or perhaps the microwave just isn’t churning up the air inside of it well enough.

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But here’s the thing - despite not being perfect,

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I would still happily press that button.

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Because I’ve dared to use this microwave’s popcorn button and observed its quirks,

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I learned that it beeps when it determines the remaining time,

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which is usually somewhere around 20 or 30 seconds.

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[beep]

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That gets my attention so I get ready to stop the microwave.

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Sometimes I don’t need to stop it early at all,
other times I’ll stop it with 5 or 10 seconds remaining.

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And if I’m popping one of those small snack bags?

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I stop it when it beeps.

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So while its popcorn button isn’t perfect enough to just hit and walk away,

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it does eliminate enough of the guesswork when buying a different brand,
type, flavor, or size of popcorn that I find it extremely useful.

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And I have indeed used microwaves with a perfect popcorn button.

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Like the Sharp Carousel sitting in front of me.

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I made a whole video about this which you can check out if you like,

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and if you’re extremely bored you can also look at the video on my
second channel where I audited its popcorn popping performance.

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A different microwave from my childhood also had a perfect popcorn button.

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Sadly that one didn’t last long at all but it was great while it lasted.

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And, wouldn't ya know it,

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my new microwave oven at home has perhaps
the best popcorn button I’ve ever used -

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but it’s got a twist.

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Actually, two.

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I suspect that this fella has a microphone listening for popping sounds.

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That might sound pretty expensive to implement in a consumer device,

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but remember the video I just made on the Clapper?

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Yeah it’s not exactly groundbreaking technology.

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Every time I have used the popcorn button on this microwave,

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it has run the magnetron until just after
there’s about a two second gap between pops and then it decides

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“ok it’s done!”

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It throws a time remaining on the screen but
you can tell that the magnetron has shut off and it doesn’t restart.

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It has done this and worked perfectly with
different sizes and types of popcorn,

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even a cheesy popcorn which I absolutely regret purchasing.

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But I don’t think I’ve tried a snack-size bag yet.

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How’d that work, future me?

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[munch]

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Went just fine, past me.

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Coulda gone a little longer but it’s not burned.

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Not too many kernels, actually.

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Good job!

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Unfortunately I couldn’t determine concretely
whether this model actually has an acoustic popcorn popping strategy.

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The manual doesn’t mention it and neither does its marketing copy.

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It may be that its steam sensor is just… really good,

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but I mean it’s been way too consistent with the whole
“wait for a two-second pause between pops” thing

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for me to call that a coincidence.

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What’s that?

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There’s a button that says “feature sheet”
under “additional documents?”

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Did I write all that before clicking that button?

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Because it says it features a “Sound-based popcorn function.” right there.

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So it is real.

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Good to know.

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The other twist with this microwave, though,
is that it doesn’t appear to cook popcorn at full power.

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It takes noticeably longer than the Samsung machine does,

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and indeed most microwaves I’ve ever used.

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But - it doesn’t have an inverter magnetron and I don’t hear it cycling

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so unless it’s got some sort of half-wave rectified 50% power mode
I don’t know what the heck it’s doing.

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You don’t need to know what any of that means.

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This microwave is also weirdly slow at melting butter for some reason,
but not at heating things in general.

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That’s actually been something of a minor mystery
that I’m still puzzled by so

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I’m honestly not sure if the slow popcorn popping is intentional

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but by golly it nails it every time
so it’s definitely worth the small added wait.

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So.

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I’ve technically shown you three microwaves in this video:

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this Sharp from the late ‘90s.

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The Samsung from around 2010.

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And the KitchenAid from just last year.

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All of them have perfectly functional popcorn buttons that work great,
well-enough-to-be-useful if not perfect, and fantastic respectively.

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And the only way I found that out

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was by daring to use the popcorn button.

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Uncle Orville may not want us to press the button

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but that’s only out of fear of the unknown.

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Orville can’t tell what microwave you’ve got 
and he’s just giving advice for the lowest common denominator.

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But you know what kind of microwave you have!

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Or, if you don’t yet, you can surely find out.

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All it takes is a press of a button!

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At most you’ll waste a bag of popcorn, but even then -

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if you just watch it as it does its thing,
you can stop it yourself if it’s going on too long

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or start it again if it stopped too soon.

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You’re smart enough to figure that out, and you should!

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Honestly you should check out all the features your microwave has.

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Sure, many of them are clunky to access

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(a high-res dot matrix display and actual user interface
could really help with that but that ship has sailed apparently).

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And while they’re often of dubious usefulness,
at least one or two of them might be great!

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I use the sensor reheat function all the time to take the guesswork out of leftovers.

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I just wish Samsung wouldn’t make me pick between 
Casserole, Dinner Plate, and Pasta

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- what does that even mean?

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And who knows, if you didn’t buy the microwave
oven you have at home yourself,

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it might have some tricks up its sleeve
you didn’t know about.

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This over-the-range microwave
can actually be a convection oven!

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It’s got resistive heating elements
in addition to the magnetron

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and will get its insides up to 450 degrees if you like.

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Apparently the new model even does air frying.

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Of course it does.

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Am I ever going to get around to talking about
air fryers?

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♫ steamingly smooth jazz ♫

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Whaddya suppose the difference is between
buttery kettle corn and regular kettle corn?

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I dunno but I bought this cause I wanna find out.

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One way to tell whether you have that sensor
is if your microwave offersh [annoyed flub fliby sounds]

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The moisture sensor doesn’t detect anything at first.

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Ahh…

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what?

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See, unless you’re getting it from Uncle…

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why?

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Hmm.

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It can pretty accurately guess the size of
the bag it’s popking.

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Popking?

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Oh boy!

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Popcorn button might work perfekly for most
kinds and sizes of popcorn.

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Why did perfectly get…

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PAHPCORN

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Which is usually somewhere around 20 or 30 secods.

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00:13:27,665 --> 00:13:30,000
Why did I say seconds like that?

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I dunno, but I’m starting over.

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PAHPCORN