KitchenAid Artisan Series 5Qt. Tilt-Head Stand Mixer

I've had my Artisan for 5 years now. Made 100s of loaves of bread, many batches of cookies, cake batter, you name it. It's a good mixer in the class it's in - the medium price, medium power, medium size realm that's just about right for any home cook. It beats your $30 hand mixer by miles. It runs fairly quietly, it's easy to clean, the beaters it comes with do the job quite well. It's pretty hefty and solid, you can work it hard for quite a while before the motor gets hot. It's a very good mixer. But it's not the GOAT mixer, and you kind of have that expectation because it's a KitchenAid. Think of it as your first KitchenAid mixer; it will do every regular mixing job you'll have. It's good enough to make you want to bake frequently, but when you get to the point you're baking all the time, you'll find you really want the strongest motor version of the next larger models instead. The bigger semi-pro models are better but at much higher cost. The Artisan goes on major sale every holiday season; buy it then. The mixer WILL walk when you're mixing a big batch of dough. It WILL walk when you knead 24oz of bread dough at speed 3 or 4 to get that "slap and fold" kneading action going. The plated beaters WILL lose some of the white coating eventually. The bowl WILL pop off it's mounting ring when you're mixing hard and large. You want to use that splash cover when you're dry mixing flour, because some will fly out even if you pulse it as the lowest speed. On mine, the hinge pin walks right out of the hole no matter what I'm mixing. The next models up weigh a lot more than this one, have a larger base, are taller and don't really work under the wall cabinets on your kitchen counter. They have a crank lift, so they don't have a hinged mixer head. The bowl is pinned to the lifting cradle, so it can not fly off ever. The walking hinge pin issue is easily solved by putting a little scotch tape around one end of the pin to make a tighter fit in the hole. The walking mixer issue can only be solved by hanging on to the bowl and the mixer head. The flying off bowl issue can only be solved by hanging on to the bowl. Sure, it's an easy release design, but it is not robust enough. A better design would be a half-turn's worth of threads instead of an eight turn. The bigger mixer's bowls sit on big thick pins in the bowl cradle. They never fly off. So this is NOT a set it & forget it. You mix, you stand there and pay attention, and then you're done mixing. This is also not the mixer you want if you are going to make serious quantities of bread all the time. It does NOT come with an S hook/spiral kneader, which is the preferred kind. The C hook does an acceptable job but the spiral kind are much better. You can buy a very expensive spiral hook for it from Europe, and your mixer head will jump up and down when you use it, until you make a little spacer from a matchbook cover and some tape. This goes in under the lift up part between the base and the hinge adjuster screw. Then the spiral hook works great. So overall, it's a very good mixer you can get for a great price during the holiday season. For most folks this will last forever and be more than enough to meet their mixing needs. The little shortcomings are easy to overcome, but I do wish it had bigger rubber feet and weighed 15lb more.