“The fact that Instant Pot is already being framed as a corporate cautionary tale—the company that went bankrupt bc they made a product so durable & versatile that its customers had little need to buy another one—instead of as a critique of capitalism is deeply, deeply depressing.”
Pyrex went rapidly downhill in recent years. It’s glass used to be tough af. Then they changed the recipe. I haven’t bothered with anything Pyrex for well over a decade because the last thing I bought inexplicably broke. There’s nothing to mark it against the competition nowadays. They’re just selling glass with a pyrex label.
I’ve heard the more expensive stuff with a blue tint is still good, the argument I heard was that they run two lines, secretly. But I’ve not come across any. Maybe I only shop in the shops made for poors. Or the urban myth that it still sells durable glass was another marketing scheme to trick customers into sticking with the company.
Given this anecdote, if the same company owns instant pot and pyrex, I can believe that the company partly believes that it’s instant pots aren’t profitable because they work. What a world.
The story with Pyrex is more nuanced than people think.
Yes, the type of glass was switched, but for safety reasons. The classic (all-caps, I believe) PYREX was able to handle the thermal shock of going straight from the freezer to the oven. When it did break, though, it broke into sharp splinters. Modern Pyrex needs to warm up some before being put into the oven, but when it breaks it does so in square chunks.
Like all glassware, scratches and chips seriously degrade the strength of the glass, even if those scratches aren’t visible. Failure can happen unexpectedly because of slight impacts to invisible microfractures. Don’t scrape your glass with metal utensils and be careful with secondhand Pyrex, because you don’t know if it’s been dropped before.
Ah, so it’s like when they introduced safety glass so that kids (mainly) don’t cut themselves on giant shards if they run into it and it smashes while they’re playing?
I’ll follow that advice. Thanks for explaining.