An uncomfortable truth: There is no such thing as an air fry oven.

Yes, you heard me. This is just a marketing gimmick.

“Air fry” is just a convection bake preset. Convection bake at 425 to 475° F depending on what you’re doing and optionally use a perforated rack. Hey presto! You’re “air frying!”

Thus you can air fry in any convection oven if you know what you’re doing. Consumers just like to see a separate button for it now that it’s the current fad.

The convection microwaves have similar baking/air frying/roasting/whatever capability as a countertop toaster oven style air fryer. What they specifically lack in almost all cases is the broiling and toasting element at the top, like a normal toaster oven has, which blasts items directly below it with infrared. Their heating element is instead fairly low wattage and hidden behind the convection fan, which is usually located on the side wall of the oven cavity. This has the knock-on effect of most models taking a surprisingly long time to preheat. You can bake and air fry and so forth in them, but this may take longer than you expect.

As far as microwave functionality, they work just fine because there’s functionally no difference between this and a normal microwave except that usually the convection models have a slightly lower magnetron output. Instead of 1000 watts it’ll probably be 950 or even 850.

Never fret about the brand of your microwave because almost all of them are OEM commodity junk made in China, regardless of whose name is on the outside. I believe Sharp, Toshiba, and LG are the primary remaining manufacturers of microwave components, particularly the magnetron tubes, and practically everyone else just buys their parts from these three if they’re not just subcontracting their factories to make the entire things for them wholesale. Current GE microwaves (their over the range models, anyway) are 100% manufactured by LG, for instance.