The sewing machine at a factory that makes home sewing machines mostly pointless. I guess that’s more like the pop-top cans that have made electric can openers less useful, but you’re right there’s not a home-clothes-maker-o-matic.
I’m pretty sure home sewing machines have been mostly “pointless” for so long that almost nobody alive today had a mother who in any way needed a home sewing machine. Ninety percent of US clothing has been ready-made since around the 1950s.
Devices that my parents had but I don’t - electric can opener, electric knife, and a meat slicer.
I’m going to cheat a bit because I still have a some of the cookware…
REAL Pyrex cookware. Same for REAL Corningware with the blue cornflower.
A Litton stove with pyroceram cooktop elements. The stovetop was divided into four sections so if you accidentally broke one you didn’t have to replace the entire cooktop. And the pyroceram was much better than today’s glass top stoves - NEVER scratched.
Before that, they had a (GE?) stove with a built-in cooking pot sunk into place - in place of one of the burners. Sort of a forerunner to the crock-pot.
A microwave oven with a big round time knob. Turn the knob to set the cooking time and the oven automatically started… Could be done without even looking at the oven. (There was also a rocker switch to select COOK/DEFROST.)
A television in a walnut furniture cabinet. No remote control. It also had a “tuning eye” that let you see how strong the signal was on UHF stations.
A built-in blender motor and buttons sunk into the kitchen counter.
Drifting a little from “devices”; waterbeds, beanbag chairs, and encyclopedias.
No my parents – but I was reading a magazine and came across an ad from the early 60’s for a combination clothes washer-dryer. Load the dirty clothes and detergent in - and remove cleaned and dried clothes.
What a great idea. But I guess it was too expensive or broke down too often and was dropped.
“Needed” in the sense of having no access to ready-made clothes? Sure. “Needed” in the sense of being in routine use, whether to modify those ready-made clothes because they don’t fit, to make clothes because somebody in the household can’t find what they want to wear or can’t find it in a size that fits, or to make clothes and quilts and other things because someone in the house just plain enjoys making the things and/or designing their own stuff? None of those reasons for having a sewing machine have gone away. I know people right now who do all of those things.
My mother used hers routinely in the 50’s and 60’s, sometimes for alterations and repairs, sometimes for redesigning existing clothes, occasionally for making something from scratch. I would find it really useful to be able to use one for alterations, as almost nothing fits me properly, but I never liked sewing and therefore resisted learning how; and there’s always something else I find more urgent to do than learning how now. So I go around with my cuffs and sleeves rolled up, for instance.
Sewing machines when I was a kid didn’t seem to be used exclusively for alterations and repairs; those paper patterns littered every home with a stay at home mom I visited. I suspect in recent decades retail clothes (especially for kids) have just become relatively cheaper in time and money than making them at home.
Instant hot water tap. Not just hot, but HOT, 190 degrees, ready for your cup of tea.
That replaced the water cooler after my parents remodeled the kitchen in the 80’s, which also eliminated the under counter trash compactor.
My grandmother had a wall mounted can opener, with a big crank handle. That thing was cool.
Right, my mom used her sewing machine routinely for that sort of thing well into the 1990s. Alterations are something I remember a lot of, especially pant cuffs. She did enough sewing that she’d have a fit if we used her “fabric scissors” to cut paper. I think Halloween costumes were one of the last bastions of fully from-scratch clothes, but now they’re so cheap (literally and figuratively) too that there’s little point.
I know people who do all those things, too. But I was replying to someone who said the newer counterpart of a sewing machine is
The sewing machine at a factory that makes home sewing machines mostly pointless.
It seems to me that the only home sewing machines made pointless by a factory sewing machine are those that were used by people who didn’t have access to ready-made clothes or commercial alterations for one reason or another.( including that they were too expensive) A sewing machine used by someone who enjoys sewing or for those other reasons has not been made “pointless” by factory sewing machines.
They still make them today, although, as I remember, they didn’t do a good job of washing or drying. I assume they’ve improved over the years, but most people still buy them separately.
Automatic bread machine/maker. Put the ingredients in, press a button, and few hours later a loaf of fresh bread.
My mom used hers quite often, okay bread if everything worked right. Usually she would find a recipe to try with some weird combination when I just wanted a plain sandwich bread for a PB&J.
We got one as a wedding gift (looked to be regifted) 20+ years ago and tried it a few times. Got donated to the local Goodwill type store a few years later.
They’re still called sewing machines but you can connect them to your computer, which runs a program that controls the device.
It’s definitely a different experience from pushing the pedal and manipulating the fabric by hand.
Mom had a Cuisinart food processor that she used quite a bit. I don’t have one, and don’t particularly want one. We have a mandoline for slicing cabbage, a hand grater for those rare occasions when we want to grate a brick of cheese, and everything else I somehow manage to slice by hand.
Just wanted to pop into this side note, and say that my FiL wears shirts made by my MiL daily. He prefers older styles that just aren’t made anymore, so the choice is to make them or change his habits… Heh. My wife learned to use a sewing machine early, but her use for it 95% of the time was to make garb for SCA events, which we have largely stopped going to in the last 10ish years (got very political and as casuals, we felt less and less involved).
She’s also made a few quilts (too much work in her opinion to do more) and all of our hanging window blinds, because any made with heavy enough fabric to block light well were strangely expensive.
All that being said, if she hadn’t already had her mother’s hand-me-down old sewing machine, I doubt the desire / need to do any of the above would have justified buying a new sewing machine over our life together. Used? Maybe, but …
My parents had/have the following:
Garbage disposal (illegal where I live)
Microwave (never bothered to buy one here)
Fry Daddy / Air Fryer (never had either)
Fridge which provides both filtered water and ice cubes
Instant hot water tap
Meat slicer (mechanical)
Electric knife
Tankless hot water heater
Electric blanket
CPAP (don’t need, I think)
I’ve seen trash compactor mentioned several times. My parents had one. They used it for a few years. I never fully understood why they stopped. I remember my mom complaining the squashed cube was heavy. I think the bags came from Sears.
The compactor sat unused in the utility room for a long time.
They offered to give it to me. I didn’t need it.
They’re also less efficient if you’re washing more than one load of laundry in a row, because you can’t run one load in the washer while the other’s in the dryer.
There are still other uses. When my daughter was little she wore a dress my wife wore when she was little. She asked for pockets - and my mother-in-law still had the material, so she used her sewing machine to sew some on.
We still have one, but it hasn’t been out f the closet for probably 20 years now.
My wife likes to make blankets and quilts, especially for the grandkids, and my pants always need shortening, so her sewing machine gets used regularly at our house. Her old one, which she had before we got married, died, and she bought a new one a few years ago… and AFAIK, it doesn’t connect to a computer.