I'm curious about the KitchenAid you got: Which one? Looks like the current Sunbeam mixers are fairly "cheap", compared to the KitchenAid "bowl lift" ones.
We have a bowl lift and I love it, though that's with an asterisk... Ours is a ~7 year old one (maybe 10), and the drivetrain is pretty crappy. The accessory port is driven by some really nasty looking sintered metal gears, and some teeth on ours broke, despite never having used the accessory ("PTO"?) port. I ended up taking it apart, I could get replacements for everything but I ended up disabling the accessory port because that part of the drivetrain was so sketchy. The rest of it was just fine.
The newer ones, as far as I can tell from a disassembly video I watched, are vastly superior in the drivetrain. Ours, has been a real workhorse since I did this fix. I used grease with a lot of molybdenum content, but should have used something rated for high temp, because at one point a few months ago my wife had it smoking.
We have the tilt one and not the bigger lift model. I eventually realized that the reason it couldn't even break egg yolks was that the set screw was adjusted wrong so the beater couldn't even get low enough to do anything useful.
It may be great once you get used to it. I mainly discovered that we don't have any need for a mixer.
The new Sunbeam mixers really are crap. My mom bought a replacement since something gave out on hers that must have been from the late 70s / early 80s. I think she used it once or twice and it either gave out or didn't have enough gusto to even mix up a batch of cookies. She got a KitchenAid that she feels similarly disappointed with as I do.
The thing that was great about the Sunbeam style mixer is that the beaters were at the back end of the bowl and a little rubber nub on one of the beaters "walks" the bowl around and shoves everything through the beaters, so everything gets mixed up really evenly. Plus you can grab the side of the bowl and move it back and forth to break stuff up better.
The other advantage is that the front of bowl is always open for pouring things in or scraping things off the sides.
The planetary gear thing the KitchenAid does just seems weird to me and doesn't seem to actually mix things thoroughly. Probably just a learning curve I've never bothered to go through...
We have a bowl lift and I love it, though that's with an asterisk... Ours is a ~7 year old one (maybe 10), and the drivetrain is pretty crappy. The accessory port is driven by some really nasty looking sintered metal gears, and some teeth on ours broke, despite never having used the accessory ("PTO"?) port. I ended up taking it apart, I could get replacements for everything but I ended up disabling the accessory port because that part of the drivetrain was so sketchy. The rest of it was just fine.
The newer ones, as far as I can tell from a disassembly video I watched, are vastly superior in the drivetrain. Ours, has been a real workhorse since I did this fix. I used grease with a lot of molybdenum content, but should have used something rated for high temp, because at one point a few months ago my wife had it smoking.