The first time I met the nine-in-one kitchen gadget that’s supposed to “replace your air fryer and everything else,” it was perched on a spotless marble counter in a tiny city kitchen that smelled faintly of garlic and TikTok ambition. It looked like a spaceship had tried to disguise itself as an oversized lunchbox: glossy, rounded edges, a shimmering digital panel that pulsed gently like a heartbeat, promising more than any single appliance ever should. The influencer—barefoot, linen apron, perfectly messy bun—tapped the screen and grinned toward her phone camera. “You guys,” she whispered conspiratorially, “this thing literally does it all.”
The machine hummed to life with the sort of low, confident whirr you’d expect from a device planning world domination. Steam curled up, fragrant and dramatic, from its vents. On screen, thousands of little hearts floated past, a digital stampede of approval. And somewhere, miles away, a home cook sat at a cluttered kitchen table, staring at their own fed-up pots and pans, thinking: Is this the future, or just one more expensive shortcut for people who don’t actually like to cook?
The Rise of the “Do-It-All” Box
For a brief, intense moment, the air fryer was the darling of every cramped apartment and midweek dinner. It promised crispy fries without the oil, roasted vegetables crisped in record time, and leftover pizza resurrected like it had never known the cold silence of the fridge. Then came the instant pot era: another countertop revolution, another rush on shelf space. We built small, chrome altars to convenience.
Now, the nine-in-one kitchen gadget has arrived, strutting onto the scene with a smug little beep. It dehydrates. It steams. It sautés. It slow cooks and pressure cooks and air fries and bakes. It keeps your food warm and possibly whispers affirmations if you read the marketing copy closely enough. Instead of a single hero function, it offers a sprawling buffet of options, like a Swiss Army knife that has no interest in ever folding away.
The promise is seductive: one device to rule your counter. One glossy box that lets you wheel half your cupboard to the donation bin. No more mismatched lids. No more dust-coated rice cookers lurking in dark cabinets like kitchen ghosts. Influencers adore it because it looks sleek on camera and it ticks all the boxes of algorithm-friendly content: transformation, novelty, speed, and a dash of “I know a secret you don’t.” But every time a creator sets down the gadget with a proud little tap and says, “I haven’t used my stove in weeks,” a deeply tired, deeply suspicious home cook somewhere audibly groans.
Influencers, Algorithms, and the Performance of Ease
If you scroll long enough, you begin to notice that the videos all follow the same quiet script. There’s the soothing click of the lid closing. The gentle chime of digital buttons that light up with each tap. A close-up of seasoned chicken thighs or glistening vegetables sliding into a nonstick basket. A jump cut, and then suddenly the final reveal: golden, crisp, beautiful. The creator leans forward, breaks a piece in half with their fingers. Steam drifts up like breath on a cold morning. “Look how juicy,” they murmur, and somewhere between the frame and your hungry mind, a small part of you thinks: I want that life.
But the life on screen is not your life, and the kitchen in the video is almost never your kitchen. You do not, for example, have an endless budget for groceries, a ring light, or three free hours each afternoon to film multiple angles of your dinner. You have a half-bag of wilting spinach, a chipped ceramic plate, and a lingering sense of guilt about the sourdough starter you let die in 2021. You also have questions. Does that nine-in-one box really make this easier, or does it just rearrange the steps in a way that looks easier?
Influencer kitchens are built for storytelling as much as for nutrition. They are theaters of convenience. But what many furious home cooks argue is that these gadgets don’t actually save as much time as they claim—they simply move the labor to invisible places. Prepping, marinating, chopping, preheating, cleaning, drying: all the work you don’t see tucked behind a vertical video with a lofi beat.
“Scam for the Lazy” or Just a Different Kind of Convenience?
Scroll into the comment sections beneath the hype and you’ll find a different kind of chorus: people who bought the nine-in-one machine, tried it, and then posted angry, unfiltered reviews between photos of their unevenly cooked chicken and soggy fries. They talk about underpowered heating elements, complicated interfaces, and instruction manuals that read like they were run through three languages before landing in English. They talk about plastic smells that linger for weeks, burned bottoms, and batches that come out right… but only after the third try.
“This thing is a scam for lazy people,” one commenter spits beneath a sponsored video. “If you can’t be bothered to learn to use an oven, you shouldn’t be cooking.” The replies spiral from there, some defending the gadget as a lifeline for folks with disabilities or tiny apartments, others accusing the company of banking on attention spans shortened by social media. Under it all floats the same uneasy question: at what point does convenience stop empowering us, and start hollowing out a skill we once valued?
There is a particular kind of pride in mastering a pan, a pot, a humble baking sheet. In learning which burner runs too hot and where the sweet spot of your oven lives. It’s a relationship, built over years of small mistakes and unexpected wins. A countertop gadget that offers you nine lifelines at once can feel less like a tool and more like a tempting exit door: why learn the deeper rhythms of heat and time when you can just trust The Program?
The Seduction of One-Button Mastery
The nine-in-one gadget’s true magic is not technological—it’s psychological. Those soft icons on the screen don’t just represent functions; they whisper promises. “Cake,” the button says, and your brain translates: You don’t need to understand baking. “Yogurt,” another glows, and you hear: Fermentation is no longer mysterious and slow; just press here. “Rice,” “Steam,” “Air Fry,” all lined up like a row of expertly labeled shortcuts out of uncertainty.
The smartest design choice isn’t the heating element or the fan speed. It’s the feeling that the machine knows more than you do—that you can absorb years of kitchen wisdom with a single touch. There’s something deeply modern, deeply soothing, about offloading responsibility to a device that claims it has done the thinking for you. Burned dinner? User error. Perfect outcome? Credit to the tech.
But under the glossy interface, the physics are still the same: heat, moisture, time, and the stubborn individuality of every ingredient. The nine modes are not enchanted spells; they’re pre-set timers and temperature ranges, approximations based on averages. Food, however, is rarely average. Chickpeas vary. Chickens are never identical. Your potatoes don’t care what the manual suggests—they soften when they’re ready, not when a countdown hits zero.
What It Actually Replaces (and What It Never Will)
In the breathless language of marketing, the nine-in-one is a ruthless conqueror: it promises to replace your air fryer, your slow cooker, your pressure cooker, your dehydrator, your steamer, your rice cooker, even your oven in some bolder claims. Counter space is framed like a battlefield, with this box as the last shiny soldier standing.
But when the noise settles, when the unboxing videos get buried under next month’s gadget, what does it really stand in for? To untangle the reality from the hype, it helps to line it up, function by function, against the tools you might already own.
| Function | What the Gadget Promises | What Home Cooks Actually Report |
|---|---|---|
| Air Fry | Crispy, “fried” texture with less oil, faster than the oven. | Good for small batches, but struggles to crisp when overloaded; not dramatically better than a dedicated air fryer. |
| Slow Cook | Set-it-and-forget-it stews and braises in one pot. | Decent results, but some models run hotter than classic slow cookers; recipes may need adjustments. |
| Pressure Cook | Beans, grains, and tough cuts of meat cooked in a fraction of the time. | Generally strong performance; learning curve can be steep for new users; some fear factor around pressure remains. |
| Steam/Rice | Perfect rice and vegetables with no guesswork. | Rice is good but not always better than a basic rice cooker; steaming baskets can feel cramped. |
| Bake/Roast | Mini-oven performance without heating your whole kitchen. | Fine for small dishes; limited space and uneven browning frustrate serious bakers and roasters. |
The pattern is clear: the nine-in-one is rarely the best at any single task. It’s the friend who can play six instruments passably but doesn’t quite master any of them. For some kitchens, that trade-off is perfect. For others—especially those who already own solid, single-purpose tools—it feels like a downgrade disguised as an upgrade.
The Hidden Costs No One Pans Over
What you don’t see in the glossy videos is the aftermath. The scraping of sticky residue from the corners of the nonstick basket. The careful hand-washing of a bulky insert that doesn’t quite fit in the sink. The quiet annoyance of realizing that, while your all-in-one box is busy air frying, you can’t simultaneously pressure cook or steam anything else in it. Multi-functionality, in practice, often means serial, not parallel, cooking.
The footprint is another stealthy thief. For small apartments, a nine-in-one seems like a space-saving miracle—until you realize it’s as tall as your torso and too heavy to tuck away after every meal. It becomes a permanent resident of your counter, a big, humming monument to convenience that you now have to design your entire kitchen flow around.
Then there’s the environmental and emotional question of what happens to the gadgets it replaces. Old air fryers, rice cookers, and slow cookers find their way into closets, donation bins, or landfills. The cycle of buying “the last gadget you’ll ever need” repeats every few years, each time promising to break the pattern. Each time, quietly, adding a little more weight to the growing pile of forgotten tech.
Lazy, Or Just Tired?
The accusation that these devices are “for lazy people” reveals something raw about how we look at cooking itself. There’s a romantic nostalgia around the idea of the dedicated home cook: someone who stirs risotto patiently for 30 minutes, who seasons cast iron pans with the reverence of a family heirloom, who bakes their own bread because store-bought just won’t do. That person exists, and they are wonderful. But they are not the only valid kind of cook.
Most people are not lazy; they are exhausted. They come home from long commutes and unpaid emotional labor, from caregiving and stacked shifts. They open the fridge and face not just ingredients, but a small, daily test of willpower. For them, a one-button promise of dinner isn’t moral failure—it’s a survival tactic. A way to carve out a sliver of ease in a world that endlessly asks for more.
And yet, the resentment from passionate home cooks is understandable too. There’s a fear that if we lean too hard on automation, we lose something intangible but important: intuition. The knowledge of how food feels and sounds and smells when it’s ready. The way onions shift from sharp to sweet in the pan, the moment a loaf sings hollow when you tap its crust. No gadget, nine-in-one or ninety, can truly automate pleasure, or the quiet pride of really knowing what you’re doing.
Learning to Cook in an Age of Shortcuts
Maybe the real tension isn’t between the lazy and the dedicated, but between two different visions of what cooking should be. One says: cooking is a craft, a skill worth building slowly, the way you’d learn a language or an instrument. The other says: cooking is a problem to be solved as quickly and painlessly as possible so we can get on with our lives.
Gadgets like the nine-in-one live right in the crossfire of that argument. Used one way, they can become training wheels—a safe, less intimidating entry point for beginners. A young cook might roast their first vegetables in the air-fry basket and discover, shockingly, that they like Brussels sprouts after all. Someone who’s always been afraid of pressure cookers might finally make beans from scratch without worrying about exploding pots.
Used another way, though, the gadget can become a permanent shortcut that quietly blocks deeper learning. When you always press “Chicken” instead of learning what 375°F feels like over 45 minutes, you trade understanding for dependency. You outsource not just labor, but curiosity.
Goodbye, Air Fryer? Or Just Hello, Something More Honest?
So do we say goodbye to the air fryer, the instant pot, the rice cooker—to all the loyal single-task warriors—in favor of this sleek new diplomat of the digital kitchen? Or do we step back from the blinking panel and ask more honest questions about what we actually need?
Maybe the answer isn’t as dramatic as the marketing wants it to be. Maybe the air fryer doesn’t need a funeral, and the nine-in-one doesn’t need a coronation. Maybe it’s as simple as admitting that no gadget, however smart, can fully solve the daily friction of feeding ourselves and each other. It can only shift where that friction shows up.
The best-case scenario might be this: the nine-in-one becomes one tool among many, neither scam nor savior. It’s the thing you turn to on a Tuesday when everything feels impossible and the thought of preheating an oven is a bridge too far. It’s the safety net for college students, new parents, caregivers, people with pain or mobility issues, the chronically overworked. It’s the apprentice, not the master.
And for those who love the tactile chaos of real, analog cooking—the hiss of oil, the weight of a cast-iron pan, the ritual of stirring—maybe the nine-in-one simply sits in the corner, humming gently, waiting for the nights when even purists need a break.
Questions to Ask Before You Bring One Home
If you’re standing at the edge of the decision, cursor hovering over “Add to Cart,” maybe start not with the specs, but with yourself. Ask:
- What problem in my kitchen am I actually trying to solve?
- Which functions would I truly use weekly, not just imagine myself using?
- What tools do I already own that work fine, even if they’re not trendy?
- How much counter space—and mental space—am I willing to give this thing?
- Am I hoping it will change my habits, or just tidy them up a little?
If you’re honest, you might still choose the nine-in-one. Or you might realize that your beat-up baking sheet, your slow but faithful oven, and that old air fryer you almost gave away already handle most of what you need. You might skip the hype and instead learn one new way to use what you have: a better roast, a slower stew, a smarter way to reheat leftovers.
Because underneath all the digital buttons and glossy screens, the heart of cooking hasn’t moved an inch. It’s still there in the sizzle when food hits hot metal, in the way steam fogs up your glasses when you lift a lid, in the quiet satisfaction of feeding someone and watching their shoulders relax on the first bite. No nine-in-one can automate that. No influencer can package it in 15 seconds. It’s the part that only shows up when you do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a nine-in-one kitchen gadget really replace an air fryer?
It can replicate most air-frying tasks reasonably well, especially for small batches. However, many users find that a dedicated air fryer can crisp faster and more evenly, particularly when cooking larger portions.
Is the nine-in-one gadget worth it if I already have several appliances?
It depends on your space, habits, and budget. If counter space is tight and you truly plan to use multiple functions regularly, it can be helpful. If your existing tools work well and you’re comfortable using them, the upgrade may feel redundant.
Do these gadgets really make cooking easier for beginners?
They can lower the barrier to entry by offering presets and safety features, especially for pressure cooking. But beginners still benefit from learning basic cooking principles, which no preset can fully replace.
Why do some home cooks dislike multi-function gadgets so strongly?
Many experienced cooks prefer single-purpose tools that excel at one job. They also worry that heavy reliance on presets discourages people from developing intuition and core skills in the kitchen.
How do I decide if this kind of gadget fits my lifestyle?
Look honestly at how you cook now: how often you cook, what you like to eat, and which tasks frustrate you most. If the gadget directly addresses those pain points and fits your space and budget, it might be a good addition. If not, your current tools—and a bit of practice—may serve you better than any nine-in-one ever could.
