No it's extremely low effort, low quality content. Conveys nothing of value, distracts from interesting discussion, and is a habit that once adopted absolutely won't happen just "once in a while". Evidence? See reddit.
There are a million places online for low quality content, let's keep HN as one of the few exceptions.
I read HN for technical content so humor is fine as long as it doesn't distract from the content much. It's like a work meeting, humor is good but not of it distracts from what the actual point is
I doubt folks are too "wound up" over it. It's more an understanding that HN is as successful as it is because the community actively discourages low-effort content. It's unfortunate that some people think that quality discussion communities just happen, as if Internet message boards were the one place in the universe that defied the forces of entropy.
It's less distracting than having 20 comments at the bottom of the thread to something that's been flagkilled and having to read the replies and trying to guess what got flagkilled, though.
You can use the show dead feature... if you really want to know what got killed. And there's something to be said for the occasional inconvenience of flag killed comments for keeping a site from degenerating.
Thank you so much for this - I've always wondered what that meant, and knowing now I can read all of the normal HN comments _and_ the jokes has made my HN experience 2x better!
That is the only reason I am reading your comment. I have spent decades honing my bullshit filter. I would have folded a pun thread up. I might have accidentally read some posts and had a chuckle first. Now I am reading about something entirely different than an overpriced juicer.
I personally like the more serious tone here. I get enough of the memes on reddit (and slack) so it's nice to have a place that actually generally has serious discussion. Also if you want less serious discussions there are already tons of places that have that so it's not like you can't get programming puns if you want them
> The vast majority of the complexity of the Press is driven by one simple problem inherent in the machine’s design: the massive force required to press the packs across the entire surface at once. The machine must apply equal pressure to ~64 square inches of surface area at once, meaning the drivetrain must be able to apply thousands of pounds of force to squish all that produce.
> On the contrary, when a human hand squeezes the same pack, we naturally use a very different technique [fingers create large amounts of pressure over much smaller surface area]
> I have to believe the engineers that built this product looked at other ways of pressing the juice, but if the primary mechanism could apply force in a more focused way it could easily save hundreds of dollars off the shelf price of the product.
He also did a DRM bypass, by which I mean he hooked a power supply up to the motor and ran it manually.
It really is the most ridiculous product. Even if it were engineered properly to a reasonable price point the entire product is unnecessary and wasteful. The difference between selling bags of juice vs. bags of mostly juiced pulp that you have to finish yourself is definitely not worth $800 or whatever they were trying to charge. On top of that they added DRM, some goddamn subscription thing, required internet connectivity, and every other annoyance you can get in a modern product.
To be fair, the founder was much more into stuff like kale juice and beet juice than orange juice. Stuff that isn't particularly nutritious when eaten raw and unprocessed.
Yes, because you're crushing up the cells and releasing the stuff our puny human guts can digest. Raw kale is mostly undigestible by humans unless you're willing to sit and chew on every leaf for a few minutes like a cow.
Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding the sources on this. All of this breathless superfood wankery is really polluting the search results.
Of particular note in that video is that there's more to the cost than the press. The build quality of the machine is way above and beyond what's necessary. I mean, that's a good thing, but you have to stop before your consumer-grade juicer costs $400 (was it really $700? Dang).
To be fair, people have hurled similar criticisms at Many Apple Products over the years (and more prominently, NEXT), and we do complain about poor build quality of its competitors.
Like AvE says, it's really not. Elegant engineering is exactly meeting your design requirements (assuming your design requirements are good). It's far far easier to overengineer everything. It's also wasteful, since all that extra capacity won't be utilized.
>Elegant engineering is exactly meeting your design requirements
Sure, if you selling juicers to businesses. Juicero is selling a lifestyle, not a product. Nice design is then a part of engineering.
Fruit juicers have existed since I can remember. The real selling point here is the juice packs. The nice machine is so that people don't realize what they're doing, which is basically buying pulped juice then letting the machine pour it into a glass for them.
Thank you -- watching it now. Best quote so far: "...the local black bear...hasn't had it so good since my daughter was in diapers" (after he sliced open the juice-pulp bag).
I just can't stand this guys mannerisms, and constantly goofing of words. Every single word, is some kooky variant. I respect that he's clearly an intelligent guy, and knows what he's talking about. It's just like listening to your annoying uncle, trying to constantly make a stupid joke.
I understand that, I work with Canadians in every one of their provinces daily. They definitely do not talk as backwoods as this guy. His shtick is just to be obnoxious, and it's distracting from the otherwise great tear downs he does.
I'm quite the opposite; the shtick is addictive, and actually seems to help me retain the info. I remember points he makes and moments in his videos better because of the off-the-wall comments. I even end up talking a bit the same way after I binge on his videos.
I can't believe the amount of engineering that has gone into making juicing a little bit more convenient. I imagine a teardown of a proper Breville juicer would reveal a much simpler machine - it's just a high powered motor that hooks on to a blade. You turn it on and off. No gears, no PCB, nothing. And the juice is leagues above this stuff. All because people can't be fucked to pick up some vegetables at the grocery store. Hilarious.
Sure, that's the ultimate goal as that's how money will be made. But you need to make people buy the machine in the first place, and convenience was one of the selling points.
Pressed juice is superior in quality, taste & nutrition than juice harvested via a centrifugal juicer that uses blades. That said, your point stands, if you use a masticating cold press juicer which you can get for $300 or less routinely. The main difference is the high speed centrifugal juicers oxidize the juice, heat it up and make it really foamy as opposed to the masticating method which is essential a large gear that the fruit is slowly pushed/crushed through.
> "high speed centrifugal juicers oxidize the juice"
Source? I've seen no empirical evidence to support this notion.
> "heat it up"
No they don't, not even close. My Green Star twin-gear and my Omega 8001 auger juicers both heat up juice WAY more than my Omega centrifugals. My centrifugal juicers also don't produce foam in any meaningful quantity.
These are very different juicers, meant for different tasks. My Green Star is the only juicer that I can use for leafy greens and sprouts, and it's brilliant at those, but it's useless for bulky things like apple, carrots, and beets.
My Omega centrifugal juicers, on the other hand, can't do greens worth a shit, but they'll suck nearly every drop from apples/carrots/beets, leaving just a slightly moist pulp behind.
Can you link me to your Omega Centrifugal? I have one of the Omega Vert units and it gets the pulp extremely dry from apples, oranges, greens etc. I previously had a Breville centrifugal unit that foamed and heated the juice up a lot and that's what I read a lot about and saw in the extensive YouTube reviews and comparisons. For what it's worth the hardcore juicers I've talked to say you can't store juice from a centrifugal unit for more than a day due to the oxidization which causes the juice to spoil faster. This is admittedly anecdotal and not based on peer reviewed trials.
I have a couple of Omega 1000's. Basically just a big motor attached directly to a strainer basket, simple as they come. I have no experience with any other centrifugal juicers. There is a technique; alternate hard and soft fruits, leave apples more for the last since apple fiber is best at clogging the strainer. I never save juice; I drink everything as soon as I make it. It's totally plausible to me that juice degrades over the course of hours. Over the course of the minutes it takes me to juice and drink... I'm less concerned.
Your Vert juicer is interesting. Can you really do both apples and greens? Can you juice really dry shit like kale and wheatgrass?
>Your Vert juicer is interesting. Can you really do both apples and greens? Can you juice really dry shit like kale and wheatgrass?
Oh yeah it does it all. It's a fantastic unit. Picked it up on a 50% off sale for like $150.00.
One of my favorite mixed juices to make with it is: kale, green apple, lemon, habanero, cilantro, ginger. It's like drinking fire but it's invigorating and has a great flavor.
There's also AvE's teardown, which in addition highlights the multiple WTFs in the construction. I.e. this wasn't overengineered by experienced people, like a Leica or a Hilti, it was overengineered by a bunch of freshly graduated mech.eng.'s.
Is that surprising though? I doubt mech engs graduate with enough (any?) experience with manufacturability [1].
Seems the lesson learned here is that unlike software, physical goods require an experienced up-front design that can't be haphazardly iterated on by new-grads to be fixed later.
Eh, most of the software skills you bring from university need plenty of tweaking before it is useful in a real world environment. The academic goals are severely misaligned with the real world programming usage.
> Seems the lesson learned here is that unlike software, physical goods require an experienced up-front design that can't be haphazardly iterated on by new-grads to be fixed later.
I'm not so sure software is any different. I think a large part of software's reputation for low quality and buggy software is due to this.
Watching AvE's teardown, it seems to me that the team behind the external industrial design was highly experienced. Very big, nice injection molded parts and over molding. Would not surprise me to see it was, e.g. ideo behind that.
By contrast, the mechanical internals and motor controller are simultaneously over engineered, and in some places poorly engineered. It feels like a young team trying hard.
BTW, not throwing rocks. I'm sure I would have done many of the same mistakes years ago.
Something like those two rollers on the top of old soviet washing machine: http://www.automaticwasher.info/TD/AWJPEG/VINTAGE/2013/mecha...
I have tried to google for the English name of that mechanism, without much luck. I guess it was not so common in the West.
I bet the mechanical engineers and designers had a field day designing that. When price is no object, it is really fun to make things.
I was in a similarly fated startup. It was super cool to design stuff with no regard to usability or cost, but the gravy train ends at some point, when you realize you've been making something nobody wants.
The fastest path to validating the business plan is usually the right one.
Random tidbit, Xerox PARC had something of a reputation for designing impossible to manufacture systems. Stories like this remind me to always pair designers with 'just get it done' people so that they can balance out each other.
It really feels as if the marketing side had more pull in the design than engineering. I wonder if they had a bunch of mock ups of what it could look like and simply picked what they thought was the best minimalist design and then passed if off to the people who had to make it work.
i never understood what I was supposed to get from one of these over traditional methods or even regular juice. Oh I get the concept of just now squeezed but part of these sales rely on being competitive in pricing and it never felt that they were even trying
>The company was founded by Doug Evans, who has said his plan was to do for juicing what Steve Jobs did for computers. Dunn's letter noted that Evans was stepping back from daily operations but would remain a board member.
Probably because he realized that trying to be the Steve Jobs of juicing wasn't going to be as fruitful (heh) as initially thought, but still wants to be a part of any potential exit.
Oh my god why can I only upvote you once. You win the thread. And it's so sad (yet true) we lost him (earlier, at least) over something so stupid. Love him or hate him, the man had great ideas and created so much (not alone, but you get my point).
If you flip that around it's more clear: If you don't have excess funding, whether it's a VC funded startup or an internal project at an established company, you don't have the resource to epicly over engineer solutions; ergo it's only the ones with massive funding that do so.
IMHO, the juicer wasn't over-engineered, it was under designed. Whomever designed it wasn't given or didn't pay attention to cost constraints and didn't think hard enough about how to solve the problem in the most efficient manner.
A well designed machine would probably be more like a roller on a worm drive mounted on some stamped sheet metal. It would look totally chintzy but get the job done and cost a fraction of what the Juicero cost. It would still be a stupid product that would probably fail, but at least the hardware wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.
It could be that by doing a roller system, it wouldn't be able to be sold at a premium and generate the funding they have.
Some of this all works together, would they have been here with a workable, reasonable product? Probably not, they would have been just an appliance.
But with a completely unreasonable product, they get to flaunt it's ridiculous merits as value. You could even imagine marketing around the full press having some bs nutritional value versus not.
Freshly pressed juice is sold at a pretty high markup and little stands and shops seem to make a hefty margin. They charge like $10 for 12oz. of freshly pressed fruit and veggies. So, there's a ton of upside in selling packets and I can see how they made believers out of early investors.
But wow did they go about it wrong, charging $699 for a machine that does a worse job than your bare hands!? Was there not one investor who did a technical due diligence? I'm so surprised.
Investors put close to thirty million into a wireless charging company in four rounds completely disregarding it's impossible to create what they want according to the law of physics.
Her core hypothesis that experts can often get stuck "inside the box" is certainly valid, but on the other hand "I sat down and solved complex engineering problems in a few minutes with pencil and paper" (almost an exact quote from the talk) is just plain dumb. Not to mention the not subtle implication that good engineers are all socially retarded...
Especially when you can just buy a $299 masticating juicer where you can use any DRM-free fruits and vegetables. Like you, I'm flabbergasted about the amount of funding they received, not only because it's bad economically, but also ecologically. And the target demographic is likely going to be more sensitive to the amount of garbage a Keurig-ified juicer will produce over its lifetime.
So I got on Linkedin and checked out some of the profiles of people working there. Some of them have MBAs from MIT Sloan and Harvard. Not saying I'm not susceptible to this, but group think / drinking your own Kool-Aid is something to be careful about as we engineers hop and skip through the startup minefield.
They got paid a steady paycheck. They produced the product the founder wanted. I wouldn't hold it against the engineers and developers.
We can rag on the guy who engineered the juice pressing bit, but it very much looks like a junior guy right out of school who didn't have an adult in the room telling him that his $800 first effort was beautiful but needed to be redesigned to be under $50 in parts. Everybody needs that experience to understand how stuff works in the real world.
Exactly. If you've worked in any startup, I'd imagine you've had the same experience, I sure have.
When the founder wants something that doesn't make sense, you try to reason about it, you try to get other voices helping in a chorus that something doesn't work, but when the founder is the one with the money, the vision, and the ego, it can be impossible to move them off their idea regardless of the merits.
Exactly. He who has the gold makes the rules. I've seen this more times than I care to admit. It could be the silliest product in the world, with fatal flaws you can easily point to, doomed to failure, but he's the boss and you're not, and he doesn't want to hear "reasons". So, you go off and build it, keeping your resume up-to-date and ready...
I imagine they signed on to work at a well-funded company with a pedigreed CEO in advance of the Businessweek article. Totally logical decision, especially if they have loans to pay off.
Really, I'm getting older, but my teeth still work okay. I can still chew my fruits and vegetables without having a machine do it for me. Is this something that people are having difficulty with these days?
It's actually worse than you think. If you look at what is inside those Juicero packets, it's basically just "chewed" up fruit pulp. That's why you can squeeze it with your hands so effectively. If it was actually a masticating machine, it might be useful. But this is literally a $700 device, that squeezes juice out of a bag.
"Some held up the countertop appliance as a symbol of all that was wrong with Silicon Valley..."
Production of consumer luxury gadgets the masses can't afford is hardly limited to businesses in Silicon Valley.
Maybe I'm over-thinking it here. But humans have great capacity for later justifying an opinion about something based upon what turns out to be nonsense. I wish journalism today would be more understanding.
When I was a kid (in the 80s) I was home sick a lot and watched TV with my mom. It was full of kitchen gadget ads, and other home appliance type stuff we could never afford. The TV itself was a 10+ yr old hand me down (as an aside, I doubt the 1080p TV I bought in 2015 will last as long).
If it's a problem in SV, it's because SV has become infected by a greater issue overall.
Lower prices? While the article doesn't mention any specifics, juice that retails for $7 per serving and juice that retails for $5 per serving is still addressing the exact same market.
The cost structure of a subscription-based, home-delivered, fresh, semi-prepared food product is not going to, even at scale, be close to price-competitive with a juicer from Bed Bath & Beyond and some fresh fruit from Whole Foods. Juicero will, by its nature, always be a premium product situated well beyond any home juicing options.
I bought a morphy richards blender/juicer for £24.99, I
pick up a bag of fruit near the end of it's shelf life for 2-3 quid from the market on the way past.
Cost per serving about 20-25p.
Cleaning is taking the center out and running it under a tap, this was an insane product however you cut (or pulp) it.
well worse, on the idea where many companies are trying to be environmentally sensitive its clear these guys weren't even considering that aspect. this is even worse than a Keurig simply because the waste is far greater and packaging is as bad if not worse because they have to carry all the liquid with them.
I think a lot of the commentary on Juicero misses the real skeleton in the closet.
The product was designed to specifically to justify the business model of the DRM pulp packets and thus MRR for the purpose of revenue and growth. Everything about it looks like they designed the packets and juice pulp DRM features first, then backfilled the rest of the mechanical design to support the REAL features (keeping people buying your fruit packages) and not the FAKE features (juicing?).
Many people talk about the ring roller/ toothpaste squeezer method being easier. Of course! But how do you do DRM with that? It's trickier. How do you scan the barcode and also keep your customers from using off brand K-Cups, I'm sorry I mean, fruit pulp packets.
It's obvious for $800 they could have designed an amazing conventional juicer, which actually would be a better product. But how do you get monthly recurring revenue out of that and thus justification for raising millions in venture capitalist money?
Juicero is a great example of dark hardware design and a cautionary tail about the hubris of the "if you build it" risk management strategy.
Ya know, for $400, they probably could have built a product that's a vertical micro-farm that plants, grows, and harvests the fruits for you, chucks them into a press, and juices it. Then it can turn that leftover pulp into compost and replant the seeds.
127 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadCompanies like Juicero and Theranos really kind of ask for it.
No it's extremely low effort, low quality content. Conveys nothing of value, distracts from interesting discussion, and is a habit that once adopted absolutely won't happen just "once in a while". Evidence? See reddit.
There are a million places online for low quality content, let's keep HN as one of the few exceptions.
Good humor is much, much harder to produce than code. Pun threads in particular are lazy attempts at humor, which is worse.
I hope I never take myself so seriously as to get all wound up over a harmless set of _internet comments_.
I absolutely love HN but a shrine of immaculate content, it definitely is not.
https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensi...
> One Giant Misstep
> The vast majority of the complexity of the Press is driven by one simple problem inherent in the machine’s design: the massive force required to press the packs across the entire surface at once. The machine must apply equal pressure to ~64 square inches of surface area at once, meaning the drivetrain must be able to apply thousands of pounds of force to squish all that produce.
> On the contrary, when a human hand squeezes the same pack, we naturally use a very different technique [fingers create large amounts of pressure over much smaller surface area]
> I have to believe the engineers that built this product looked at other ways of pressing the juice, but if the primary mechanism could apply force in a more focused way it could easily save hundreds of dollars off the shelf price of the product.
That blog post is high art.
I've gotten used to AvE's unboxing by now and in fact look forward to it, but I remember it being jarring the first few times.
It really is the most ridiculous product. Even if it were engineered properly to a reasonable price point the entire product is unnecessary and wasteful. The difference between selling bags of juice vs. bags of mostly juiced pulp that you have to finish yourself is definitely not worth $800 or whatever they were trying to charge. On top of that they added DRM, some goddamn subscription thing, required internet connectivity, and every other annoyance you can get in a modern product.
The time spent setting up this machine, throwing away the bags, electricity used, resources used, etc VS peeling an orange seems comical and sad.
Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding the sources on this. All of this breathless superfood wankery is really polluting the search results.
http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/digestion-kale-11913.html
http://gi-north.com/kale-good-for-you-and-your-digestive-tra...
Like AvE says, it's really not. Elegant engineering is exactly meeting your design requirements (assuming your design requirements are good). It's far far easier to overengineer everything. It's also wasteful, since all that extra capacity won't be utilized.
Sure, if you selling juicers to businesses. Juicero is selling a lifestyle, not a product. Nice design is then a part of engineering.
Fruit juicers have existed since I can remember. The real selling point here is the juice packs. The nice machine is so that people don't realize what they're doing, which is basically buying pulped juice then letting the machine pour it into a glass for them.
You and I can disagree of course. I'm not finding issue with your opinion -- just offering mine.
I should also mention I'm Canadian and pretty much nobody talks the way AvE does. His accent and vocabulary are purposely exaggerated.
Source? I've seen no empirical evidence to support this notion.
> "heat it up"
No they don't, not even close. My Green Star twin-gear and my Omega 8001 auger juicers both heat up juice WAY more than my Omega centrifugals. My centrifugal juicers also don't produce foam in any meaningful quantity.
These are very different juicers, meant for different tasks. My Green Star is the only juicer that I can use for leafy greens and sprouts, and it's brilliant at those, but it's useless for bulky things like apple, carrots, and beets.
My Omega centrifugal juicers, on the other hand, can't do greens worth a shit, but they'll suck nearly every drop from apples/carrots/beets, leaving just a slightly moist pulp behind.
Your Vert juicer is interesting. Can you really do both apples and greens? Can you juice really dry shit like kale and wheatgrass?
Oh yeah it does it all. It's a fantastic unit. Picked it up on a 50% off sale for like $150.00.
One of my favorite mixed juices to make with it is: kale, green apple, lemon, habanero, cilantro, ginger. It's like drinking fire but it's invigorating and has a great flavor.
Seems the lesson learned here is that unlike software, physical goods require an experienced up-front design that can't be haphazardly iterated on by new-grads to be fixed later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_manufacturability
I'm not so sure software is any different. I think a large part of software's reputation for low quality and buggy software is due to this.
By contrast, the mechanical internals and motor controller are simultaneously over engineered, and in some places poorly engineered. It feels like a young team trying hard.
BTW, not throwing rocks. I'm sure I would have done many of the same mistakes years ago.
Also, AvE is great.
My first hunch would be to use rollers, like getting that last bit of toothpaste out; I can't believe that it operated as an actual press.
It really is beautifully designed though. I figure the engineers were either forced to make a 'juice press' for marketing, or took it too literally.
https://www.google.com/search?q=washing+machine+wringer&tbm=...
I was in a similarly fated startup. It was super cool to design stuff with no regard to usability or cost, but the gravy train ends at some point, when you realize you've been making something nobody wants.
The fastest path to validating the business plan is usually the right one.
i never understood what I was supposed to get from one of these over traditional methods or even regular juice. Oh I get the concept of just now squeezed but part of these sales rely on being competitive in pricing and it never felt that they were even trying
Probably because he realized that trying to be the Steve Jobs of juicing wasn't going to be as fruitful (heh) as initially thought, but still wants to be a part of any potential exit.
If you flip that around it's more clear: If you don't have excess funding, whether it's a VC funded startup or an internal project at an established company, you don't have the resource to epicly over engineer solutions; ergo it's only the ones with massive funding that do so.
A well designed machine would probably be more like a roller on a worm drive mounted on some stamped sheet metal. It would look totally chintzy but get the job done and cost a fraction of what the Juicero cost. It would still be a stupid product that would probably fail, but at least the hardware wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.
Some of this all works together, would they have been here with a workable, reasonable product? Probably not, they would have been just an appliance.
But with a completely unreasonable product, they get to flaunt it's ridiculous merits as value. You could even imagine marketing around the full press having some bs nutritional value versus not.
*Whoever
(sorry)
But wow did they go about it wrong, charging $699 for a machine that does a worse job than your bare hands!? Was there not one investor who did a technical due diligence? I'm so surprised.
The actual technology works...just not well enough, and scaling it to be an order of magnitude more useful is probably physically impossible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852896
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8dqzVlhFkA
The talk by the uBeam CEO he links is also pretty infuriating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgnU2aXM2c
Her core hypothesis that experts can often get stuck "inside the box" is certainly valid, but on the other hand "I sat down and solved complex engineering problems in a few minutes with pencil and paper" (almost an exact quote from the talk) is just plain dumb. Not to mention the not subtle implication that good engineers are all socially retarded...
We can rag on the guy who engineered the juice pressing bit, but it very much looks like a junior guy right out of school who didn't have an adult in the room telling him that his $800 first effort was beautiful but needed to be redesigned to be under $50 in parts. Everybody needs that experience to understand how stuff works in the real world.
When the founder wants something that doesn't make sense, you try to reason about it, you try to get other voices helping in a chorus that something doesn't work, but when the founder is the one with the money, the vision, and the ego, it can be impossible to move them off their idea regardless of the merits.
You need some business expertise for start-ups, but too much would be a huge red flag for me personally.
Production of consumer luxury gadgets the masses can't afford is hardly limited to businesses in Silicon Valley.
Maybe I'm over-thinking it here. But humans have great capacity for later justifying an opinion about something based upon what turns out to be nonsense. I wish journalism today would be more understanding.
When I was a kid (in the 80s) I was home sick a lot and watched TV with my mom. It was full of kitchen gadget ads, and other home appliance type stuff we could never afford. The TV itself was a 10+ yr old hand me down (as an aside, I doubt the 1080p TV I bought in 2015 will last as long).
If it's a problem in SV, it's because SV has become infected by a greater issue overall.
The cost structure of a subscription-based, home-delivered, fresh, semi-prepared food product is not going to, even at scale, be close to price-competitive with a juicer from Bed Bath & Beyond and some fresh fruit from Whole Foods. Juicero will, by its nature, always be a premium product situated well beyond any home juicing options.
I bought a morphy richards blender/juicer for £24.99, I pick up a bag of fruit near the end of it's shelf life for 2-3 quid from the market on the way past.
Cost per serving about 20-25p.
Cleaning is taking the center out and running it under a tap, this was an insane product however you cut (or pulp) it.
The product was designed to specifically to justify the business model of the DRM pulp packets and thus MRR for the purpose of revenue and growth. Everything about it looks like they designed the packets and juice pulp DRM features first, then backfilled the rest of the mechanical design to support the REAL features (keeping people buying your fruit packages) and not the FAKE features (juicing?).
Many people talk about the ring roller/ toothpaste squeezer method being easier. Of course! But how do you do DRM with that? It's trickier. How do you scan the barcode and also keep your customers from using off brand K-Cups, I'm sorry I mean, fruit pulp packets.
It's obvious for $800 they could have designed an amazing conventional juicer, which actually would be a better product. But how do you get monthly recurring revenue out of that and thus justification for raising millions in venture capitalist money?
Juicero is a great example of dark hardware design and a cautionary tail about the hubris of the "if you build it" risk management strategy.
Instead they ended up with a costly dud.
That would actually be really cool and useful!
I don't own one, but I heard from early buyers that thing is expensively useless.
but somehow it receives less laugh and the company is still operating.
but of course, the nest company has an ambition in smart homes and iot also, not just making thermostats.