If you have ever left rice at a high boil until all the water is gone, plus a few more minutes, you would immediately recognize the appeal of a machine to prevent that.
Don’t ask me how I know. 
My wife is the one who puts things on the stove and then walks away to do things on the computer. We’ve had our share of trouble over that.
This is why I love my rice cooker - it cooks any variety of rice and it comes out perfectly every time, even if I mess up the water ratio.
Also, I cook steel cut oats in it. Set the oats to soak in the pot overnight, then turn the rice cooker on before I get in the shower and by the time I’ve made my way back into the kitchen I have a pot of perfectly cooked oats ready to eat. Hard to beat for an easy breakfast.
I have a friend that has a steamer basket inset for his rice cooker. He’ll cook an entire meal in one go - rice in the pot and then a protein and veggies in the inset that cooks while the rice does its thing.
Bring it to a boil in a pot with a well fitting lid. As soon as it starts to boil, turn the heat down to almost nothing, leaving the lid on.
About 20 minutes for white rice, about 40 minutes for brown, depending on just how you like it. (And no I am not using converted rice.) Exact timing on any of this is unlikely to matter, except that if you don’t turn the heat down when the pot boils it may boil over and make a mess on the stove.
Does some of it wind up on the ceiling?
Because if you do that with what were supposed to be hard boiled eggs, they will wind up on the ceiling. As well as on much of the rest of the kitchen. Not very good for the pot, either.
If the appeal of a rice cooker is that otherwise the above is likely to happen, then I do now understand the appeal of a rice cooker.
I used to have a very nice rice cooker. The problem (hah!) was that 2 cups dry weight was the minimum it would do. Which is great. Because I love me some steamed rice (jasmine by preference). But after I hit 40, I really, really needed to cut back on calories and carbs. And that’s when I ditched it. I still make rice, but rarely more than a cup’s worth (tops) which is harder on most good quality rice cookers. And my PCP is already telling me to cut back on simple carbs again because I’m far too close to pre-diabetic for someone at 50 with a family history of diabetes.
But dear god, the set and forget is just so much nicer - because while I like to cook, I’m darn lazy.
I feed our dogs Merrick brand kibble, which is high quality but grain free. I add brown rice to their meal. So I make rice on a regular basis and cool/refrigerate it for the dogs. When our dinner involves rice I just make 2 cups in the rice cooker, use what we need, and dump what is left into the dog Tupperware.
But that’s the thing. For more than forty years, this has been an “appliance that I have”. Don’t really feel like changing that up now.
I did make it clear that the loss of the Hitachi rice cooker happened more than two years ago, didn’t I?
Perhaps I should have started this thread then.
Weld it, maybe?
-imagines trying to feed the snakes or cats -rice- and the bloody, painful wounds of their displeasure-
Well, you’re usually best off with what you know, right? Although I recall that my sister gently mocked a gift I gave her for Christmas one year. She was a prolific cookie maker during the season, giving them to all her friends and family, and a lot of those cookies had zest as an ingredient. For many years she used one of those old-fashioned zesters, which are labor intensive, so that year I gave her a Microplane. “Wow, I’ve got a tool!” she teased. She called me a year later and apologized, saying that it was the best damn thing she’d ever used in the kitchen.
Fuck, sorry. My interpretation was that you still had it and you only now got rid of it.
Yeah, I was thinking maybe sodering or welding when I thought of the tape. I think that would probably do better.
My friend was gifted a (IIRC) Korean rice cooker (something about the gifter though my friend’s previous one was suboptimal).
Issue one is it takes 220 V – my friend uses a variac (https://variac.com/).
Issue two is all the displays and labels are in Korean – my friend has a cheat sheet nearby.
IIRC it makes a cheerful tune when done.
Brian
I probably never would have bought a rice cooker for myself, but I received one as a wedding gift and another one as a later gift. Now I’m hooked.
BTW, brown basmati rice looks and tastes much like white rice and is a great substitute if you don’t like regular brown rice.
I’m one of those people who are fond of brown rice. One of the reasons that I like my rice cooker is that I often make a mix of brown rice and quinoa and it cooks them together perfectly every time.
I get that it feels like a frivolous item and my friends often laugh at some of my splurge purchases. With that said, anytime I stay in a different place for more than a day, the things I miss most are my Toto Bidet Seat, my Opal Nugget Ice machine, and my Zojirushi. Not one of those are necessary, even in a first world country, but they sure are nice.