Cook tops are not really kitchenware, but I am not totally sure.

Stove top or cook top or hub…
So many names for the same thing and so many ways different companies spell them: cooking top, cooktop, cook-top and cook top.

We have a Samsung ceramic glass cook top with soft touch controls that are part of the ceramic glass. It plays beep melodies when it turns on or shuts off. And touching the soft touch buttons emits differently pitched beeps.

I tried to cook eggs. Plain old cooked eggs.
I turned on the cook top, set the heat on one of the plates to 9 and and went out. A minute later I went back and the cook top was turned off.
OK. Must have forgotten to turn it on. Wouldn’t be the first time.
I turned the cook top back on and again (?) set the plate to the highest level and left the kitchen.
30 seconds later I heard the shut down melody and investigated further.
Seems that the plate turned itself off after 20-30 seconds. All of the plates failed to heat up in the same way and even though the hot plate indicator lights lighted up, everything stayed cold.

Martina immediately adopted her “Oh no, now it’s broken, (we have to buy a new one, money money money …)” role. She wanted to investigate the bottom of the stove top and cursed Samsung.

Well, my immediate reaction on the other hand was:
Reboot it.

The very technical solution to all problems: The Reboot.

So that was what I did. I flipped the switch in our apartment’s fuse box for the oven and waited the obligatory 5 seconds, but made it 20 to be sure. Turned it back on and a quick check of the cook top confirmed:
All plates were working as expected.

We also have a very cheap Samsung home theatre system (a fancy DVD player, with radio and 5+1 speakers) that came as a freebie with our projector.
The home theatre system is over three years old and it works fine. Except every now and then, it “hangs”. It has to be shut down and turned back on to work again.
Or you have to switch back to radio and then back to AUX to get the auxiliary sound to work again.
IIt is also from Samsung.

The questions we ask ourselves now are:
We have a Bosch washing machine, a Bosh dishwasher and a Bosch oven. So why not a Bosch cook top? (And the answer is of course, money)
And would a Bosch cook top had the same problem?

On the other hand, if I have to reboot my cook top every 10 months and it keeps on working for the next 10 years, I would still be happy with it.