According to WIRED, Dreo is running a three-day sale on its Chefmaker air fryer. The device pairs a built-in temperature probe with steam cooking and app-guided finishing—letting it handle thick cuts of meat more like a compact combi oven than a standard basket fryer.
Consumer kitchen tech works when it removes skill, not when it adds features. Most air fryers sell speed. This one sells confidence, especially to people who want steak or roast without babysitting a pan or learning oven timing the hard way. That's where the category is headed.
The product category is still weirdly hard to explain. Calling it an air fryer undersells what it does, but that label is exactly how this kind of device reaches a mass audience and gets a shopper to click before they realize they're looking at a compact, software-assisted oven.
Kitchen tech makes sense when it targets one annoying human problem: ruining expensive meat. Sensors and software beat a tablet glued to an appliance. If these hybrid cookers keep dropping into impulse-buy territory, the pressure lands on legacy oven brands and every cheap air fryer still treating "hot fan in a basket" as enough.
Filed to the Technology desk · Aug 1