A slip-ring connection is basically what it sounds like - a wire enters one side and is attached to one side of a (usually brass) circular contact. The other side of that #contact is then pressed against another contact which might be a ring or can be just a loop or straight springy one, and the wire continues from that second contact.
There is nothing connecting one ring contact to the other - they're just held in place on a common axis and pressed together with a spring, so there is one contact that just slides around the surface of the ring contact as the joint is rotated. There's usually a bit of conductive lubricant in there to keep it from wearing down too fast.
But wear down they do. Slip rings are not terribly reliable. Either the designer didn't know this (because they have no experience in this class of consumer goods), or they knew it was unreliable but figured it didn't matter because you only use it 20 minutes a day or something like that.
I'm pretty sure the designer was incompetent, because this Thing uses a fair bit of power. Hundreds of watts. And that is definitely not suited to a slip-ring.
So the power cord is fixed, but I'm certain that at some point not that far down the road, that slip ring connection is going to become an intermittent connection as well. If they bring it back, I'll cut the whole slip ring assembly out of it and connect the cord directly, and it will be like it should have been in the first place.
3/x