Steamed up over a kettle

Last weekend we bought a new electric kettle. Not of great interest to your day/ week /month and not to mine either except for the fact that its predecessor practically welded itself to its base making it unsafe/unusable.

The new kettle, similar in format to its predecessor, is a cord free type on a powered base: elegant, simple and efficient. And it is a whistling kettle: when the water boils it whistles. Cool. You're saying to yourself there's a 'but' coming.

Right! I was intrigued enough to find out how it worked. The actual cycle is as follows:
1 fill kettle and switch to boil.
2 the kettle switches off when the water is boiling
3 the 'whistle' slowly rises and falls in amplitude over about 10 seconds.

How?

Clearly there is a sensor that triggers the 'whistle' when the power shuts off.
The whistle is actually in the base and is electronic with a speaker, not a device on the spout as in days of old. Very cool,again. Or maybe not.

The whistling spout on an old kettle acted simply as a vent before the water boiled. On boiling the steam pressure generated would build up in the spout and literally drive the whistle. It was an actual whistle, powered by steam pressure. It would begin to sound as the water neared boiling point and reach a crescendo at boiling point, remaining until the kettle was removed from the stove. The audible warning gave you a clue to the imminent boiling of the water and the cue to remove it from the stove before it boiled dry.

Its electronic equivalent fails in several ways:
1 it 'whistles' only after the water has boiled and has begun to cool down
2 it does not indicate that the kettle needs to be switched off because it will already have done so itself
3 If you want boiling water you will have to switch the kettle back on and catch it as soon as the whistle starts.

So we now have a complicated, by comparison, fake whistling kettle that has nothing of the engineering simplicity of its original counterpart. It does not give the auditory clues and cues of the original and pretends to be cool.

The link between steam pressure and utility is lost. For me, it simply reinforces the elegance of the original concept. For my children, this realisation is lost and it's OK for electronics to step into a 'magical' role. This perpetuates the disconnect between function and design.

...I'm off to make a cup of coffee!