Countertop oven or air fryer, or am I overthinking this?

I went the small oven route two years ago when my flat had just a two-burner hob and I've never looked back. Mine is a Breville about the size of a microwave, sits on the top shelf of my trolley, and it bakes a proper lasagna in a shallow dish, does a tray of cookies, and roasts half a chook on a Sunday no worries. It does take maybe ten minutes to preheat which used to annoy me, but you learn to chuck it on while you're prepping and it stops being a thing.

The uneven cooking worry is fair but mostly solved if you get one with a decent convection fan and don't overcrowd the tray. I rotate anything delicate halfway through and it's fine. Honestly the biggest limitation is the height inside, so a whole roast chook is pushing it, but sheet pan dinners and baking are all doable. I did own an air fryer first and sold it. Great for reheating pizza and crisping leftovers, genuinely rubbish for anything with liquid or a batter. My lasagna attempt in it was a sad dry brick. If you cook mostly single-serve frozen stuff it'd be perfect, but I wanted to bake. If I were you I'd get the oven and a cheap plug-in single hotplate to cover the gaps. That combo covered basially everything I missed from a full kitchen.

I was in the same spot last year in my unit and went air fryer, a Ninja dual drawer one, and honestly I'd push back on the idea that it replaces an oven. For weeknight stuff it's brilliant. Salmon fillets, sausages, roasted broccoli in about twelve minutes, frozen chips obviously. Reheats pizza better than any microwave I've owned, that part alone sold me. But the lasagna question is real. My drawers fit about a kilo of food total, so a family-size lasagna is out, and even a small one has to go in a foil tray squashed into one drawer with the lid of the tray nearly touching the element.

Baking works but it's batch life. Six cookies at a time, and they brown fast on the bottom so you learn to drop the temp a bit. Muffins came out fine, a small cake in a 15cm tin came out fine too, but nothing tall or big.

If I were you I'd think about what you actualy cook. If it's mostly meat and veg for one or two, air fryer wins on speed and bench space, mine lives in a cupboard and comes out daily. If you genuinely see yourself baking bread or doing a tray of cookies regularly, the oven person above is right that the compact oven covers that better. For me it was the oven that woud've sat unused, so I don't regret the choice.

Long before benchtop ovens were a thing my grandmother baked everything in a heavy cast iron pot on the stovetop with a lid and some heat underneath, old camp oven trick. Still works, I've done cornbread that way during a renno with no kitchen. That said, I'd add my vote for the small oven, the modern ones with convection are miles better than the plastic box units we put up with in the nineties that cooked everything on one side. One thing nobody seems to say is check the wattage on the circuit in a rental, older places can struggle running a hotplate and oven at once.

This thread is making me lean toward the boxy oven thing, but my bench is right next to the power point and I vaguely remember someone saying little ovens pull a lot of juice. Would it trip the switch if I ran it while the kettle was going, or is that not how it works? Also is cleaning them a nightmare with all the baked-on stuff on the door glass, or about the same as a normal oven but smaller?

To answer the power point question, it depends what else is on that circuit. A little oven on its own is usally fine, but kettle plus oven plus toaster on the same loop can trip the breaker. Try running the oven alone first and you'll know pretty quick. Cleaning wise, mine's way less painful than a full oven since the door comes off or opens flat on most of them. One tip, wipe the glass while it's still slightly warm, comes off in seconds then.

One thing I'd do before ordering anything is measure the internal cavity against the dishes you alredy own, because the listed dimensions are always the outside of the unit and the usable space inside is meaningfully smaller once you account for the elements and the door swing. My standard lasagna dish cleared the shelf in mine by about a centimetre, which I only discovered after unpacking it, a pedantic lesson I now pass on. Also worth keeping an oven thermometer inside for the first few bakes, since the dial on smaller units can run a fair bit off the set temperture and you adjust your habits accordingly.