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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but it seems like a roller would be able to provide a more efficient and focused method of squeezing than a press they're using now.

What we see in most products is a result of the accountants saying "no" to too much. Cheap parts, assembled cheaply, pennies saved per part. What we see here is the exact opposite: the accountants didn't say "no" nearly often enough. Apple manufactures custom everything because they can, and because they sell at massive scales. Juicero wanted to be Apple quality without selling at Apple quantity.

I fully believe you get a better cup of juice squeezing with their massive press rather than by hand because it can press over a bigger surface. I also believe it doesn't matter a bit, because this is a worthless piece of equipment. Beautiful engineering, though.

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I am a mechanical engineer (a machine design engineer in fact) and this press looks like would happen if you hired 30 of 23-year-old me fresh out of college, gave them an effectively unlimited budget and said "make me the swankiest press you can imaging". Lots of clever ideas and fancy machined parts with no thought for cost savings or whether there's an easier way to do something.

15A 330V DC motor? To squish a bag of pulp?

The best things I've gotten career and skill wise from more senior engineers has been the feedback where they looked at a design and said "looks fancy, but what were you thinking?".

This machine looks like it needed some more grizzled manufacturing veterans to inject some sense into the design process.

How would you, given what you know now, do this better? Not saying you can't, just curious what your experience has taught you to do differently.

How about gear it further down behind a smaller motor for starters? It's not like you're about to start wood turning, there is already a gearbox in there, with the right ratio a much smaller motor likely would suffice.

That thing is so over-engineered it is almost as if it was a joke.

Apparently the press already takes ~2.5min to make a glass of juice. A smaller motor would probably take even longer

The competition (hand press, bottles) and so on are way ahead of them then.

Maybe we can out-do them and build a hydraulic version: "Now with 50 tons of pressure". I have a hydro pack lying around here somewhere with a really neat 3" puck piston. I'm sure that would do the job just fine and maybe even a little bit quicker.

With a 15A, 330V motor. That's almost 5KW, or 6.6 HP, for those of you who don't use SI units.

Which is more power than my lawn mower, which makes comparable outputs as what is inside those juice packets.

I suspect the majority of the power is already burned in the gears.

Two teslas is 40000 newtons. If we assume the press moves 5cm in 2.5 minutes:

40000 * (0.05/150) = 13 watts.

I wonder if, with the right set of gears, someone could make a zero-emission, disaster-ready and eco-friendly version that says "please insert the pouch, step on the juicer and gently hop on it until the juice is ready."

Hey if any VC is listening I'm willing to sell this idea. Only asking $10M.

Toddler powered FTW.

> That thing is so over-engineered it is almost as if it was a joke.

Maybe different people use that term differently but I wouldn't call that 'over-engineered'. I'd just call it 'poorly engineered'. Mismatched components doing a poor job despite being far more expensive than necessary. If they'd put a well designed hydraulic press in there, I'd call it over-engineered. :)

Ironically I literally can't view the page on my iPad.

There's somehow too much happening for this 2013 device to handle.

I can't go past this comment without mentioning that I'm currently using a ThinkPad T43 while my i3 box is on indefinite loan to a friend... and despite being 11 years old the T43 loads the site just fine. The video's a bit much (youtube-dl for that) but yeah.

FWIW, easily 85-90% of what I try and open on my old Kindle (the super-basic version from a few years ago) makes the browser - and sometimes the whole UI - completely seize up. I'm guessing (based on how everything gets super sluggish) they didn't enable swapping - which does make total sense, but then the device only has 256MB(?) of RAM......

Now I'm curious what the iPad's virtual memory settings are like. And whether swap on Flash (of the caliber that goes in an iPad) is a good idea!

Just to be clear, I don't want to claim expertise I don't have: I'm only just a bit past that stage in my career and have had a lot to learn in the past few years.

Just a stream of consciousness set of notes from my reading of the article though:

* The design of the interior machined parts looks like a classic case of why machinists make fun of / mildly dislike engineers. "As long as I can make it in a 3D model we can make it out of metal, right?" They're beautiful, but if a part is going to be hidden from your end user, maybe think about how much manufacturing time those artistic rounded fillets are going to take up and design something that can be run on a 3 axis machine instead of a five axis machine.

* That injection molding. Wow. I'm kind of in two minds about that, because I can at least get behind the idea of spending time and money on the part of a machine your customers will be touching and seeing every day but good lord is it expensive, especially for low volume boutique products.

* The gear system. I'm surprised to see a set of spur gears in there vs a planetary gear set. Planetary gears are quiet and space efficient while also being able to transmit large loads. I'm surprised there actually wasn't a gearbox manufacturer from the cordless drill industry (another high input speed -> high output torque device) that they could tap to get a already designed and mass produced gear-train for much less money.

That's about what I thought. That recessed fillet makes me think someone clicked "fillet" in Autodesk Inventor, not realizing what it does to the machining time. The machined parts seem to have machined features on all sides. I wonder how many setups that takes. If they'd designed it out of thick flat plates, the plates could be cut on a water jet or plasma cutter, or machined with one setup on a 3-axis mill.

I haven't done injection molding, but I know that making the molds is the expensive part. Once you've made the molds, making parts is cheap. If there was an overoptimistic market projection, the mold cost per part would seem low.

There's a fairly common arrangement for presses where a motor drives a worm gear which drives a ring gear with a threaded or ball screw hole. Here's a consumer-appliance grade version from China, used in an oil press, pasta extruder, or juicer.[1][2] $2 in quantity 500. The first thing to do in mechanical design is to find out what you can buy.

[1] https://honestmotor.en.alibaba.com/product/1971456634-222573... [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/220v-dc-worm-gear-mot...

Fancy molds with high tolerances require multiple iterations of making molds then destroying them. You can also find that parts are not able to be shot, usually before, but sometimes after making the mold. The texturing and cuts are expensive and difficult as well.

If they were going for Apple-level tolerances, they're walking into a minefield.

I think you've also just well described so much of startup software development as well. Great ideas, a grand pool of undiluted computer science theory, nobody going "why do you need 120 servers to run a webpage?"

> Great ideas, a grand pool of undiluted computer science theory, nobody going "why do you need 120 servers to run a webpage?"

I actually untangled a mess like that (only it was some 200+ VMs on 20 fancy HP blades + SAN to serve 5000 users daily), don't even joke about it.

If you arrived with something the size of a semi-trailer to squeeze some juice people would likely ask you if you're all ok in the upper department but if you do the same in computer land they call you 'architect' and promote you. So much of that complexity is hidden and your average business owners have no clue what is required and what is overkill.

The great sadness to me is that incentives in architecture almost encourage this... Hardware is cheap and good designers are few. So when guys like you can come in and squash down the complexity,, company thinks it won twice (first time for delivery.. Wow look how fast it is!; second time for efficiency)

I strongly suspect there was more at play there (huge kickback to one of the people ordering the hardware). And no, the customer didn't think they won twice, the first time almost killed them. For all those goodies it still did not perform. You really wonder how they managed to burn all those cycles.

So why is it then that 23 year old engineers are building everything in SV? It certainly explains a lot about what I see happening there.

They have less to loose (already broke), are not accustomed to nice things (never experienced a real salary), and are enthralled by startup culture (so they'll accept shit equity and work all night).

There's also a bias in which ones we read about. Nobody puts the age of a 40 year old founder in a headline.

I think PG wrote an essay on why ycombinator started out primarily accepting new graduates, but I can't find it right now. Clearly he had a different take.

Hiring ten 23 year olds and paying for 20 servers is cheaper than hiring five 40 year olds and paying for 3 servers.

It only becomes a problem when you need to stop burning money, because you can't easily reduce the hardware cost.

Also have to take into account that hardware is ridiculously cheap nowadays. You can rent quite a lot of raw computing power with the salary of one engineer.

Not to mention one engineer can spin up and operate a big horizontally scaling cluster.

23yo engineers are often also willing to bunk up with three friends in a two bedroom apartment, which makes living in SF/SV more feasible. Once you have a family (generally, older engineers) you generally dont want to be sharing an apartment, so your minimum salary requirements go up.

I love how everyone always words this like it's perfectly reasonable to expact a salary that has you living like a college student and unreasonable to ask for a salary that lets you live like an actual grownup who worked hard and took some risks to get expertise.

Do you guys actually feel that way or is the startupspeak getting to us?

> I love how everyone always words this like it's perfectly reasonable to expact a salary that has you living like a college student and unreasonable to ask for a salary that lets you live like an actual grownup

If I interpret your parent post correctly, their opinion is than it's not at all reasonable to accept such low salaries.

It's just that there are apparently more than enough fools who do it anyway, until they learn that this is both unwise and unsustainable.

This is exactly what the parent poster (me) was suggesting!

It just comes down to the math of living in a high cost/high compensation area. Your standard of living is highly dependant on the ratio of high economic productivity earners in your unit.

I know plenty of young engineers who are easily socking away 60 - 70% of their post tax income because they basically need a futon to sleep on and a macbook and don't really have many needs. After 5 years or so, they'll have half a million in the bank free and clear which is hard to do anywhere else in the country.

Now add it a spouse who works in non-profits or is a schoolteacher or any other job that's not tech. Now your expenses have risen 2x but your collective earnings has only risen 1.3x and now you're only saving 20% of your income.

Add in a kid and your expenses go up another 50% and your income rises not a jot and all of a sudden, you're in the hole and heading into debt.

Low cost/low compensation locations completely flip this equation around since there's no huge disparity in earnings and large families are less of a relative strain.

Neither is intrinsically better or worse than the other, they simply suit different lifestyles better.

Salary shouldn't be dependent on (desired) living conditions, but on experience and value added. Likewise, living conditions shouldn't depend on salary - as in, you should be able to afford a decent apartment on minimum income anywhere in the country.

> you should be able to afford a decent apartment on minimum income anywhere in the country.

I think most people would love to live in a world where that's true but it's pretty far from where we are.

> Salary shouldn't be dependent on (desired) living conditions, but on experience and value added

That's leaving out half of the equation: value added sets the upper bound for what a company can afford to pay you but they're going to negotiate down to make a profit. The seller has the same maximum cap but they're going to negotiate up and fixed costs are a key part of that – since in reality food, housing, education, etc. costs vary widely people who live somewhere like SF are going to factor that in because the alternative is moving somewhere less unbalanced.

Except in Juicero's case, the cause wasn't 23 year old engineers, but outsourcing to celebrity designers and engineering firms.

Because most of the time hardware is cheap and building it quickly but inefficiently is better for the business than hand-aligning your opcodes to use the fastest part of the drum memory.

I've worked professionally in both fields now, and luckily mechanical engineering seems to have a much less toxic attitude towards for older engineers. The amount of ways an experienced engineer will know not to do something is mind boggling and I am definitely still learning.

Yes, elec engs are essentially hobbyists until completing their second decade in industry. Then, watch out!

Most places I've been realize this, but a few, hint mainly sw shops, think 5 years exp suffices. And they suffer arching in pain. It hurts to watch.

There's a truth about this in software too. It's just not recognized.

I feel like I'm saying No all the time. A boss and a couple coworkers have commented on it over the last couple jobs. But how many times do you really want to relive the same predictable emergency?

Time to learn the magic of "yes, but...".

Not just startup development. The entire software industry, aside from a very select few, seems to me to be plagued with this sort of immaturity.

You can be immature going the other direction, too. "We need to squeeze every last cycle of performance out of this server before we buy another one."

Well, sometimes you do (when it's someone else's hardware, perhaps). But often, happiness is a middle ground.

Most hardware goes through phases, often planned far in advance: The expensive first version to get something out the door, then a series of cost reductions (bring many chips into a single custom chip, ditch unused features, get new vendors for subsystems) which improve profitability.

That juicer looks like it was designed to withstand a direct hit by a bunker buster. Nobody gave a damn about profit margins or ever making it cheaper, I think they just wanted to IPO or get bought.

Well sure immaturity exists in every axis. I've seen "performance zealots" seriously suggesting moving a perfectly functional internal flask based API into some obnoxious, bloated Java Spring something or other to squeeze performance out of it. The thing served approximately 1 (internal) user at a time at a rate of less than 1 request per minute on average and was a read-only API. Flask was just fine for the purpose.

I've also been guilty of this in my younger days, where I was very much "C++ all the things because performance." But that's kind of my point: it's immaturity at work, here.

Well, sure, that's because this industry has spent the last thirty years growing like gangbusters. Give it some time to settle down and you'll see the mix of newbies to veterans balance back out again.

Everywhere I look, engineers are over-engineering everything. I just don't get it.

There's a few reasons for that

* no one ever got hired for under-engineering

* a lot of people have died from under-engineering

* you never notice how much was engineered juuuuust right (tm). Because it was. Just. Right.

>> * no one ever got hired for under-engineering

I've bought plenty of low end products from China that I'm sure were intentionally designed as cheaply as possible with no regards to quality.

That's not the same as under-engineering. They simply engineered for a different target. The engineering of the product is only part of the issue. The bigger issue is engineering the entire production system. They may well have optimized for maximum return on investment in the factory, not maximum quality for your headphones.

This fact underpins so much inanity fundamental to modern life nowadays D:

There's a large social component, too: beyond simple resume-driven development engineers get social status by doing interesting technical challenges. You rarely see a project make the front page of HN, for example, because it has a really polished UI and great documentation.

Since that's what the community generally respects and focuses on, people seek out areas to add complexity – who wants to work on a boring “solved” problem? – and, especially younger engineers, often feel they have to do things the same way Google or Facebook does (it's web-scale!) even if they have 0.001% of the engineers and 0.000001% of the traffic. It's easy to miss that most people with similar problems have so much less volume that they aren't forced to do the really cool (i.e. expensive) engineering and, since they're using something stable, it's not considered interesting enough to talk about it.

"An Engineer can do for a dime what any fool could do for a dollar."

One of my favorite instructors from college.

Fresh out of college? Aren't dropouts all the rage nowadays? By graduation, you're ooooold, and old people only have stale ideas.

Yeah. Young people are just smarter.

Oh gosh. This is when Mark Zuckerberg sounded just like a more stupid and ageist version of Donald Trump.

This is probably the explanation - I have certainly seen the sort of software equivalents that several other posters have written about - but I am wondering if it might have come from a military-industrial / cost-plus contracting style of development.

> but it seems like a roller would be able to provide a more efficient and focused method of squeezing than a press they're using now.

Or maybe, just maybe, a screw-driven piston, like many actual juicers have...

But let's be completely honest - the machine was always meant to be an expensive countertop device. It looks expensive, it weighs a lot, people will think you spent a lot of money on it even if they don't know how much it'll cost... This is exactly why the engineering staff was told "go nuts" on the hardware design - the more expensive and custom, the better. It does the job of looking like a high-end appliance exactly and precisely, and really nothing more.

This company always intended to make its money back selling overpriced juice packs like Keurig, banking on people with more money than common sense buying and using the hell out of these devices for the $14 juice packs. Selling the machines near cost or even as a loss leader was perfectly acceptable, as long as customers had to come back to them for more juice month over month. It just turns out consumers were smart enough to see through the not-so-clever ruse of buying a $400 counterweight to squeeze a package of pre-squeezed juice out of a bag and into a cup...

Keurig is not that bad. The system is out of patent so you can get off-brand brewers and cartridges that aren't quite as good in quality but are unlikely to cause a terrible mess in a hotel room.

Keurig is great at one thing: making the worst coffee this world has to offer. That aside, I though they went to DRM enabled cups in the last few years in an attempt to block the aftermarket cup makers.

  Keurig is great at one thing: making the worst coffee this 
  world has to offer

The behemoth coffee machine in my office kitchen would like a word.

Yeah, if you want awful coffee, Keurig is here to service you! Otherwise, a simple hot pot can heat water and make you a good cup of drip coffee without grounds at a much lower price point, and it is compostable/yardwasteable, unlike those K-cups!

Guess people forget you can get pods that let you use your own coffee and it's reusable and you put the grounds in compost.

I've used those at past workplaces that had Keurig machines, while it works it is a mess to clean, and essentially requires a sink to clean. Comparatively, drip coffee grounds are self contained in a paper filter.

I've seen people use tiny paper filters in them. No idea if it's something you can buy though - I'm not really a coffee drinker.

...the worst coffee this world has to offer.

Having heard this from a number of coffee fans, I suspect you're not the market Keurig really targets. Rather I suspect we non-coffee-drinkers might be the primary buyers. We want something that will sit innocuously in the kitchen, looking good and doing nothing, on the off chance that we'll be expected to provide coffee for someone. We don't know how to buy coffee, we don't know how to prepare it, and we don't know how to clean up after preparing it. Also, we don't care to know any of those things. So, here's a something we made for you that came out of a fancy package. Now we're going to throw away this little plastic cup.

You can get Maxwell House instant coffee which is packaged in tea bags so making a cup of coffee is as easy as a cup of tea. And it's as good as Keurig coffee.

This is good advice!

So my wife and I use a French Press for coffee in the morning. I love a good cup of coffee and it really does not take that much time to make. Heck, I enjoy the process.

Now for espresso or the like, well that is a different story. We used to have an espresso machine but it was quite a pain (and took up space). For that the machines are great. We have the Nespresso machine with the milk attachment. Makes a pretty good cup. They provide mailing bags for you to send back the used cups? carts? (hum) for recycling.

I've been using a tiny Krups Esprimo for over 10 years. One of the tubes popped off after a few years, but after taking the shell off and identifying the culprit, I just used a zip tie as a miniature hose clamp and have been going strong for a long time. The key with the hose was to clean the nozzle: it has a single port, so a clogged port is a single source of failure. But $90 for an 8-bar espresso machine is hard to beat. Not good for random joe, but fine for a hacker.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00007CWFE

Aeropress. Small, fun, easy to use and clean - and makes excellent coffee.

The french press is just the ultimate coffee making device. It's simple, it gives you a lot of control (via the amount, the grind, the water temperature and soak time) and it makes glorious, glorious coffee.

Expresso machines are complex and bulky, and they generally aren't worth it unless you can spend $600+ (and that plus goes WAY up). Nespresso isn't bad at all (we have one here at work), but even better is a Lavazza machine, which takes cartridges like the Nespresso, but the resulting espresso is an order of magnitude better, in my opinion.

What about the good old Italian stove top espresso pot?

I'm a tea drinker myself, but have one around to serve decent espresso to people that want it.

Seems like an expensive investment on the off-chance that you might have guests who really can't handle not having any coffee when they're visiting a non-coffee-drinking household. My solution is the small jar of instant coffee I periodically have to throw out because it's gone mouldy.

Speaking as such a guest, I look after my own needs in that regard. Expecting one's hosts to attend to one's vices is just tacky.

The issue I have is: when a host offers me coffee, what's the polite way to say "yes please, but not if it's instant"?

There is no polite way to say that.

The polite thing to do would be to accept the coffee or not, without placing conditions on the host, or implying that their hospitality is possibly beneath your standards.

I wish I could upvote you more than once.

Ha, there's not. Instant is better (just) than no coffee, even though I wouldn't touch the stuff at home...

It's like if someone offers you a beer. Bud Light or a strong IPA may not be to your taste, but saying "what do you have" sounds greedy unless they've offered a choice. A free beer is still a free beer. You either turn down the offer or you are grateful for the free beer. There are no other options.

"What kind is it? I don't want to deprive you of a beer if I won't enjoy it." There, done.

I had a colleague who'd ask: "What kind of beer? Heineken? That's no beer."

After a couple of those, everybody knows your taste :D

I swear I am not a coffee snob, but...

If all you have is instant, you're better off not offering anything. That stuff is generally terrible.

A much better device for that use case is a percolator though. They sell them at IKEA for like $10. Using one is as simple as putting in water, putting in ground coffee, and sticking it on a stove. Makes much better coffee than a keurig and takes up less space to boot.

Unfortunately no-one sells ground coffee in small quantities. I don't know about Keurig, but those Nespresso capsules come in small packages and they have a long shelf life.

I'd rather have a cup of Nespresso coffee than a fresh brewed cup of stale ground coffee.

Unfortunately no-one sells ground coffee in small quantities.

Many larger food stores and most specialty coffee shops sell coffee beans by weight and will grind them for you. So you can easily by just a small amount at a time if you want.

That's fine advice for anyone who wants to know or do anything about coffee. As indicated above, that ain't me. I'm not going to a weird store to talk to someone who operates weird equipment to buy some weird stuff that I don't consume. The reason I'd consider buying a Keurig is that then I wouldn't have to do any of that.

I mainly use two different sized old school Mokka Express aluminum cans from Bialetti. Super cheap (got both for less than 20$) and very small/easy to handle and clean. Plus: the coffee tastes great. I grind my own coffee (cheap used 20yrs old grinder, 4$), but there are sealed ground coffee packs containing only 60 grams (2oz). Coffee is not as instant as with a Keurig/Nespresso though.

> the worst coffee this world has to offer

I guess you've never had coffee out of a rarely serviced machine in the break room of a millwrighting shop.

Keurig coffee is the smoothest brew ever compared to some of the terrible coffee I've gladly drank over the years.

I've had the worst coffee this world has to offer. I got it at a truck stop somewhere off Interstate 40 in east Tennessee. Tasted like bile and acid, went through me like a dose of salts, and left desolation and sorrow in its wake. Had me in the bushes off the side of the road for the better part of an hour, and gave me a whole new respect for long-haul truckers - either they have the iron constitution to drink that shit and not mind it, or they keep in close enough touch that they've all warned each other off it. Either way, I'm impressed.

Keurigs do a perfectly fine job by comparison.

The juice packs are $5-$8.

All you're saying is true, but they still would have been much better off designing something that didn't cost them so much to produce. It would have looked, and weighed the same, but they would have made a lot more money.

It's interesting that an alternative machine called JUISIR on Kickstarter/Indiegogo also uses a full surface press instead of rollers. (If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration.)

Scroll down half way to see the gif animation of the mechanism: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793272089/juisir-juici...

It would be interesting to see if their engineering choices resulted in a much less expensive machine to manufacturer.

Indiegogo page: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/juisir-zero-cleaning-maxi...

gif direct link: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/010/304/9b81fed3f5e8827...

> (If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration.)

It's just product differentiation. And remember, their target market are the kind of people who want to feel special by one-upping the other #rawvegan #fitspiration #healthnuts on social media.

> If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration.

My suspicion, if I put my engineering hat on and give them the benefit of the doubt, is it's an optimization for later.

Right now, the purchased packs you can buy are effectively already juice. Later, you may want to make them less juicy so you can spend less time manufacturing the packs, but people will scream if you make them buy a new machine. So, your first machine out the chute needs to be way overengineered.

Nevertheless, this machine design screams junior engineers.

Even Apple products might only have one or two custom-machine parts, and they're usually the enclosure, which the customer can see and maybe makes the prettiness matter to make the thing seem luxury. They don't have tons of internal separately machined components (it's all injection-molded, I think), and I'm sure they look for cost-cutting opportunities in internal components too (Tim Cook's background is in logistics, after all).

yep. saying this is well designed because they overcome all the hurdles with brute force is like showing how awesome is your webapp random-sort algo because you have one 24 core machine per user request. just look how expensive are all those servers! look! no cloud either! not even co-locating! isn't it awesome! (wasn't a question)!

saddest part is that we are getting cheap fly-by-night puffy pieces. HN used to only alow the expensive ones on wired to pass. This community is dying :(

And the trick with their custom-machined enclosures is they're also the internal structure. That saves on remaining internal parts.

Did you ever take apart their plastic macbooks? They were packed to the gills, with 3x as many screws and parts as any Dell.

That's why the aluminium unibody design has been the standard now.

Yeah, all it really needed to be is a modernized mangler: http://i.imgur.com/t3QRmgb.jpg

A roller is what I thought of while reading this too. It seems fairly obvious, but I would be surprised if there wasn't an even better design. Juicero's people must have thought of this and the superior alternatives in the very early stages and then decided to do it the way they did anyways.

I know nothing about Juicero, but it seems like there must be somebody who thought they were the second coming of Steve Jobs overriding both the engineers and accountants. That person's reality distortion field must have just popped rather loudly.

A roller also needs something to press the contents towards it without grip for traction of it's own, so I imagine you need two separate mechanisms.

Based on seeing what is inside the bags, most of the work is already done by the processing equipment at the factory, making the press the least important part of the process.

It's the most important part in terms of raising funding for this ridiculously stupid concept.

It would also be trivially easy to construct something that squeezes the juice packets between, say, two wooden cutting boards, that would apply uniform pressure over a large surface area in the same way that the juicero does. Then, what do you have left? A bunch of features that I doubt people really care about, such as automatic disabling of packs (seriously, just send me an email) and reorder reminders?

A $8 tortilla press can do the job as well or better than this over-engineered piece of junk.

A $15 pasta roller can probably come pretty close.

I don't think a roller would work. The solids in the bag would settle to one side of the bag and form a clump. You would either need a ton of torque to drive the roller and smash the clump or a slip-roller.

If this discussion goes on for much longer there will be something even more complex than the device shown.

A double-roller system will probably have that problem, but twisting the bag in on itself and just torquing it will probably work, the bag's pressing against itself in a fairly uniform manner.

I highly doubt you can apply that much pressure without wooden boards breaking or warping.

I think the main reason for the QR code is to discourage third-party juice packs.

Well that might be part of it, but the reason is because the juice had no preservatives so they will go bad. Honestly it would be a product failure if people were getting sick for using the bags after they've gone rotten

If only there were some simple way of indicating a date by which a food should be used. Maybe they could make it human-readable.

I wonder if you could get uniform pressure by putting the juice bag itself in some fluid, then pressurizing that? I mean obviously you could, but I don't know if you could get 15 bar or whatever they are going for using something relatively inexpensive.

(OTOH, it would be annoying if it exploded)

You would still likely need a large motor and drive even with a roller-type design. Gravity will cause the solids to settle at the bottom of the juice bag. The roller would presumably need to contend with this.

I came here to bring up the roller idea myself. They could make a quick cheap mechanical version and low price point. They might actually be able to deal in volume and recover from their first attempt.

So how do you keep the pulp in while letting the juice out, and not having the business end of the plastic package violently explode like a tube of toothpaste in a vise?

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