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As climate change brings hotter summers, AC manufacturers are positioning sleek window units as lifestyle accessories. Some of them are less effective than they are stylish.
Last year, during the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, Dan Medley installed hundreds of new air-conditioners in apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
These were not the unglamorous window units familiar to Mr. Medley, 35, a handyman in Manhattan. His wealthier clients seemed to be upgrading to ACs that looked as if they had gotten plastic surgery: their harsh edges softened, their faces sculpted and smoothed.
On Park Avenue, he installed an air-conditioner from July, a start-up that sells gracefully rounded window units with pastel covers. He scoured Home Depots for six curvy Midea ACs for a single client on the Upper West Side. Others went for Windmill, which bills its minimalist unit on Instagram as a “sleek and chic transformation moment.”
Several companies are trying to capitalize on increasingly unbearable summers with a fleet of photogenic window ACs, targeted toward flush and fashionable customers in buildings without central air-conditioning. Their products are more expensive than the average window unit — ranging from $340 to nearly $600 — and their marketing sometimes elides the nitty-gritty, emphasizing svelte exteriors over B.T.U.s.
“These types of things, you’re paying for the aesthetic,” Mr. Medley said.
Coverage of these products has been breathless, occasionally bordering on erotic. “Help! I’m Sexually Attracted to My New Smart Air Conditioner,” read a recent headline in Vice’s product recommendation vertical. The Wall Street Journal described a wave of refreshed ACs as “sexy.”
As air-conditioning becomes less of a luxury and more of a necessity, it follows that some customers will shell out for a unit that looks like an iPad or the robotic love interest in “Wall-E.” But there’s something unsettling about the air-conditioner growing so covetable thanks to the combined efforts of deft marketing and extreme heat. We’re used to it-bags and it-girls; is there any eerier sign of the climate crisis than the arrival of the it-air-conditioner?
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