My mom and my stepmom both have had a KitchenAid mixer now for years and I have LOVED using it. My mom goes through spurts of being a super-crazy bread baker.(Eventually, she purchased a Hobart floor mixer.) She decided to buy me the Professional as a Christmas gift a few years ago. She had burned out her Artisan motor and had to buy a new one. She opted for the more powerful Professional for me to avoid that problem. I do love how it is so much more stable on the highest speeds, no jittering or bouncing arm. The bowl is easier to secure and snap into place than trying to twist into a base once you've spilled batter all over it.

I have one negative complaint: my attachments leave a gap between them and the bottom of the bowl. I would imagine this is to save wear and tear on the bowl, but it has caused problems with some of my mixing. One thing I love using a stand mixer for is meringue as it definitely saves my arm from a hand mixer. However, with this gap, the whisk doesn't even make contact with my egg whites...and my recipe is usually using 4-6. I have to START the whipping with a hand mixer until it fluffs up enough for the stand mixer whisk to reach it, thus dirtying two appliances and taking extra time. Most of the time when making cookies, I have to do several stirs with a spoon by hand as there will be bits of flour in the bottom of the bowl that didn't quite get incorporated.

If you enjoy cooking, but don't really make super-heavy doughs like bread and do more meringues, I would recommend the Artisan. I never had this problem with it.

I was watching an info-mercial on one of the local home shopping channels, about this machine. I only asked my husband for ONE thing, this professional mixer. I don't think I have ever recieved a more welcomed gift! It now is used on a daily basis. I mix cookies, mashed potatoes, and even my meatloaf with ease! I think the best thing I make now is home made bread! My family now enjoys this tasty treat daily! I remember my mother making bread and how time consuming it was. If you own this machine, do not hesitate to use it.

I have to agree with a previous reviewer. I originally received the Professional 6 two years ago as a gift, after I dropped a few hints regarding this model, because I love to bake. This mixer did a very good job at a number of tasks, from mixing cake batters, to whipping eggs whites or cream. During the past 6 months I've taken to crafting artisanal-style bread at home. Years ago I used to make bread entirely by hand, so I was looking forward to having a machine help with some of the kneading, and I expected this mixer should be up to the task. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

In my experience, this mixer does fine with small quantities of bread dough. Providing a recipe has less than approximately 3 cups of flour, the mixer seems to tolerate it fine. However, a number of the bread recipes I use require at least 7 or 8 cups of flour. Many of the doughs are initially quite stiff, and the mixer clearly strains and struggles. Even after just a couple of minutes on speed-2 (the highest mixing speed recommended for dough) the motor casing becomes very hot, and on a couple of occasions the poor thing has sat there eminating whisps of smoke from the housing. This happened again today halfway through mixing a batch of sourdough. As a result, I am now mixing about half of my bread recipes by hand...just like the good ol' days. Good exercise, but at the expense of turning my mixer into a useless counter-ornament, at least where bread dough is concerned.

If you're primarily a cookie or cake baker, and you don't bake bread, or expect this mixer to work with dense, stiff doughs, I'd certainly recommend it. However, if you are a bread baker, I absolutely do NOT recommend this machine. I haven't completely crippled this machine yet, but that's only because I'm avoiding using it for recipes that I now know it can't cope with. The Professional 6 was, to my knowledge, the best mixer Kitchenaid offered at the time I got it. I've owned various Kitchenaid appliances in the past, and can only say I'm rather disappointed in this product. I've noticed recently they now have a "Professional 600". Thus far, the only notable difference between the two models seems to be that the Pro-6 has a 525 Watt motor, whereas the newer Pro-600 motor is 50 watts higher (575 Watts). This seems to me to be a rather paltry difference, and I doubt there is a significant difference in performance where bread doughs are concerned.

Like the prior reviewer, I will not purchase a Kitchenaid again, unless there is a significant improvement in the quality and performance of this product. Ideally, I would love a Hobart, but realistically I would more likely opt for one of the 7-Quart Viking models that have substantially larger motors than the Kitchenaids. Viking is more expensive than Kitchenaid, but I'd rather have a reliable heavy-duty mixer I can count on for ALL of my baking needs.

After using an Artisan model that finally died after more than twenty years of service, we only considered KitchenAid for our next mixer and "stepped up" to the Professional series. The initial problems we encountered when first using the new mixer were all because I failed to fully read the instructions. The customer service person on the toll free number was very kind, despite the fact that the answers to the questions I asked were in the manual. The gear issues mentioned by others have not created any problems after a year of use. Here's to hoping we get another twenty years out of a KitchenAid.

I've read a lot of kitchenaid mixer reviews complaining about the gears being made of plastic and getting messed up pretty easily. I've noticed recently that all of the tags on these in the store make a very visable point that the gears are steel. Has anyone had any gear problems with the all steel model?