My coffee maker just makes coffee
bt.ht
bt.ht
Not to get defensive — I am a designer — but there are two things missing from the conversation when you lay blame at the feet of designers.
First, you bought that over-complicated appliance for the same reason everyone else does: it has more features, and you like features. Everyone wants features. If you want to sell an appliance today, you have to cram in more features, and do it more cheaply than the competition.
If you want companies to produce simpler, higher-quality products, then search out and buy those products. Vote with your feet, and your wallet. Companies build what sells.
Second, that designer likely has as much real agency as the engineers building the firmware for the control board. Corporate mandated 12 months ago, “A coffee maker with features A, B, and C and price point P and trim level T.” The designer likely has no place to argue with any of that. A product marketing executive made these decisions, and for one reason — to build what sells.
The author is totally right that companies often ship software that’s too complex, or solves too many problems and does so poorly. This is mostly because the design/engineering team (a) takes directions from Corporate rather than from users, (b) Corporate wants more features so the product stacks up vs. the competition.
Sure, how do I cast my vote for a non-smart TV? Where do I go to watch my shows via DRM free downloads? How can I find a washing machine that will last for 20 years?
Beyond that, how do I even compare products and find what I want to "vote" for when everything is named something like Sony XP-3000-ZXS Pro that is exactly like the XP-300ZXS Pro+ except one has a water-proof coating and the other comes with patented GB-Free technology (you guess which is which). And to make it harder to compare, the models are subtly different between countries (Oh, you are in Israel? You only get the XP-300ZXS-B Pro+ which is different from the regular Pro+ but we won't tell you how, better look for some local reviews to be sure).
It is obvious that most companies go out of their way to frustrate the customer's attempts to "vote with their wallet". It must be cheaper to just drill a brand name into their heads via ad spending then to actually produce a good product (definitely more scalable if you already have the money to spend on ads...).
...
Apologies, rant over.
[1] https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U557CV-UMRB-55-4K-UHD-T... [2] https://www.mieleusa.com/e/washing-machines-1015696-c
If their machines really would last that long, they would market the hell out of it !explicitly! and offer you that assurance to get your money. Now they are just cruising by on their reputation they built last millenium
The good days are over sadly.
That's not how it works. If a product on average lasts 20 years, you can't give a 20-year warranty because life expectancy has a highly skewed distribution. If one out of three machines live for 40 years and two out of three machines live for 10 years, that is 20 years on average, yet you will make a loss on 2/3 of the machines.
> I consider the machine to be on a 5-10 year lifecycle, like most appliances today. The good days are over sadly.
In reality, it's just a rationalization for buying cheap crap: you just assume that all products are equally bad, and then you just buy the cheapest stuff you can find. That's how we ended up where we are now.
Let's just say you get what you pay for. If you're concerned about screen quality, you should probably look elsewhere.
I do love how dumb it is, though!
I've heard of Sceptre via HN (and as a sibling comment points out, their quality is not great), but they aren't available for purchase in my country. In fact, from a quick search of the local aggregator there isn't a single 4k non-smart TV for sale in the country. I've sort of voted with my wallet here and am just using a large computer monitor for now, but I'm not sure there'll be anything available if I ever want to get some of those sweet OLEDs or some HDR.
Another sibling comment also said that recently Miele has started coasting based on their name brand and are no longer producing long-lasting machines, but even if they aren't I won't be able to tell that the next time I find myself in need of a washing machine, which is part of the problem.
As another commter pointed out they are sold as commercial displays and digital signage, but that is a different price range.
> Another sibling comment also said that recently Miele has started coasting
People have always said that. It's an easy excuse to buy the cheapest stuff they can find, but in reality you'll always find products made for commercial customers. An appliance that lasts a dozen years in a hotel, restaurant or airport will last practically forever in a home.
Regardless, they don't appear to retail out of the US, so it's hardly a good option for most people.
What’s your evidence for Miele’s durability? Is it just their “pro at home” line, or all of them?
The options may be greater for you, but they're limited for most of us.
This drives me crazy. I don’t get how companies get this so wrong. I just spent hours looking for a tumble dryer and they’re all like that.
Who are the people at these companies who think it’s a good idea to name your product a completely opaque alphanumeric jumble?
It’s because they have slightly different models names for differ markets, and they figured out that using their internal code names was easier than paying someone to come up with easy, memorable names. So the model sold in Delaware is the UX-7200-D, and the one sold in The Netherlands is exactly the same item with a different power cord and instruction booklet. But it’s called NT-376xd because the Netherlands branch is actually a different company that was bought 2 years ago and they are still using their old system which has different codes for products.
Seems to me, Motorola's phone names in USA went off the deep end sometime after the Moto G7, while international versions of many of the same phones retained their nice simple sequential numbering scheme.
[1] Don't get me started on people who produce n versions of something then decide to name the next version "One" (or similar) "because its the only One you need, the best One; it's The One!" (when they really mean, "Weird, people can't figure out why they should upgrade when we didn't change anything much!")…which of course just screws them when they next try to get people to upgrade. …Oh, seems I got very thoroughly started. :faceplant:
[2] Ignoring Sharp models for their phones and tablets, which can have name elements where a descending sequence in part of the name and an ascending sequence in another part of the same name identify whether this is a higher or lower model. And ignoring Apple, which decades ago decided reusing model IDs over and over is FineTM, forcing horrible things like "Well, it's a late 2015 iBook 15-inch with the <special feature that means you have a different case/keboard/camera/…> and the <special upgrade that means you have a different motherboard>".
Try:
site:reddit.com inurl:BuyItForLife "washing machine"
Don't buy one. There are plenty of other options. Computer monitors, for example, can double for a display and TV. This one is excellent (had mine for about a year without any problems):
In all seriousness, check second hand sites like Facebook Marketplace.
The price of an item new in the shops often has low correlation with its quality, but second-hand markets are ridiculously frugal and rational.
Even if you don't want to buy used goods, the fact that an item which cost $499 ten years ago still sells for $300 used is a real testament to the quality of the brand.
Low quality crap will usually lose at least 50% of its value once you've opened the box, and another 50% yet again after just a couple of years' use.
I know this one! You buy one build in the 70's maybe 80's chose the ones with crazy rpm
Vote with your feet becomes a bit more interesting here since the legal options are limited.
This is the defeatist attitude that largely explains why we're stuck in this race to the bottom.
A lot of the mass produced stuff we surround and find ourselves surrounded with has gotten worse. This is not because people want worse things. It is because of hidden and opaque incentive structures that are completely misdirected. By leaving it to the market with such a pithy attitude, we divest collective responsibility and instead assign it to some mystical process.
Coffee makers are the least of it. Our material surroundings absolutely suck. Like, in america, it's absolutely degrading how the wealthiest society ever on this planet is basically made real in plastic, disposable, malfunctioning shit. For my own sanity, I have to reject that this state of affairs is the expression of our collective wishes through the workings of the market.
> Like, in america, it's absolutely degrading how the wealthiest society ever on this planet is basically made real in plastic, disposable, malfunctioning shit. For my own sanity, I have to reject that this state of affairs is the expression of our collective wishes through the workings of the market.
I agree with you. People in this society are making the best choices they can from a selection of poor or harmful options. We're programmed from birth to place value on things that have no inherent value. Our society in the USA is rich but ungenerous, which is awfully strange. The country as a whole generates vastly more resources than necessary to keep everyone in it safe, healthy, and fed, and yet we allocate those resources towards other things (e.g., entertainment, over-consumption, concentration of resources in the hands of a few).
That's all a much bigger problem than coffee makers, but they're inextricably tied. Personally I don't think we can solve the coffee maker problem without solving the legalized political bribery / "campaign finance" problem first; that blocks progress on many obviously humane ideas.
It's good advice. But imho it doesn't scale in the way it should, in the way the "invisible hand" should work.
The main thing is that imho consumers have too little leverage to really make meaningful impact.
e.g. I have a microwave form '82 that still works flawlessly. That was a bargain model at the time. More recent "luxury" appliances have broken within 10 years of ownership on me. How can a consumer, today, possibly be certain they're getting the high quality thing that will last decades? It's absolutely impossible, standing in a store, choosing a thing based on price/feature-set to get the durable vs disposable. That trade-off just cannot be made for the majority of material things in stores.
The same with feature-less vs feature-full. Once you go feature-less, options completely dwindle. That's the curse. If the market does work, it flattens everything not to best-of-breed or bang-for-buck but instead to lowest-common-denominator, sub-optimal.
> Our society in the USA is rich but ungenerous, which is awfully strange.
100%
> I don't think we can solve the coffee maker problem without solving the legalized political bribery
also, 100%
While this is true, the parent is still true too. The issue is that companies make these cheap, easily broken devices and consumers keep buying them because the alternative is living with the inconvenience of not having that class of product. It's not a defeatist attitude, it's the truth. Unless people stop buying Keurig coffee-makers with dual functions, the data these companies are using for marketing and development show that that's what people buy.
The choice here is: If I don't want to support these cheap Keurig junk machines, do I just buy another cheap junk machine from someone else or do I buy a French Press and make my coffee the old-fashioned way in the morning? I'm trading convenience for quality. Despite what you think, that's still a choice that consumers make that fuels the race to the bottom.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
They don't prefer cheaper, they can't afford not cheaper
"They don't make it like they used to" is like a society wide exclamation that you can't buy high quality stuff anymore because nobody can afford to buy high quality stuff so nobody can afford to make high quality stuff.
This lower basket of income also means americans can't afford to pay the going rates for labor to fix their stuff, meaning something being repairable isn't useful or beneficial in any way, so everything becomes disposable.
Small towns used to have niche repair businesses, but who can afford to spend $100 on getting a boot repaired, especially when a new boot is $80 at walmart. So now the cobbler has to shutter his business and he can't afford good stuff anymore either, so now if you DO buy the expensive boots and need them repaired to make them worth their price, you have to seek out a much more expensive specialist or do it yourself which most people cannot do. Money was basically shipped out of local economies into giant megacorps.
A lot of stuff isn't even significantly less repairable then it used to be. Flatscreen TVs are super reliable now that they are solid state, with the one exception of the AC power circuitry. Anyone with $20 and a multimeter and youtube and a little confidence can watch tutorials to debug and fix a blown cap on the power supply, but nobody could really run a business on charging $100 to repair $200 flat panel TVs because people can't afford that.
Meanwhile "Electronics repair" used to be a common small town business.
I think of it the other way around. If you do not vote with your wallet/feet, then you are avoiding taking responsibility for your personal decisions. The act of purchasing something creates a very small signal, but a signal all the same. It's not unlike civic duty and how a single vote is virtually meaningless but in aggregate is powerful.
I agree with that certainly. Change starts individually. It really does, I mean that genuinely. As persons, as actual men and women in this world, we need to internalize the values we like to see flourish in the world. We just must. It would not be honorable if we did not.
> but in aggregate is powerful
The sleight of hand though is that this individual action, in and of itself, can always bring about meaningful change in every situation. It cannot. This disconnect between individual action and aggregate outcome is the main characteristic of a tragedy of the commons. To go back to the coffee maker example, the fact that our world is, well, quite literally, trash is such a tragedy. These traps never resolve solely bottom-up, without coordination.
> It's not unlike civic duty and how a single vote
Voting is a good example really. A vote is the lowest, least effective way to perform our civic duty. To see the change we like to see in the world, to do our civic duty, we must advocate, picket, canvas, stand on soapboxes, fraternize, run for office, assemble, cajole, badger, pick up arms, ... That is what it means to participate in civic society. A vote, that single small signal, means nothing, if we do not actively shape what we vote for.
fwiw - I really don't think we disagree. Just wanted to expand on that train of thought a little.
Well no. I bought it because I didn't have a choice. (Literal coffee makers are actually an exception here). I bought the featurefull version because i wanted a specific feature and my options were basic with 7 features I don't need, pro with 19 features I don't need and ultra with 200 features i don't need and the 1 i do need.
Or maybe some obscure other brand has exactly what i need but discovering it is impossible because all 10^9 drop shippers sell only the basic and pro model above, and the rest of the brands are just white label rebrands of the above with slightly different plastic molding and some of the features disabled.
Companies create the problems the features purport to solve, not the market. Yadda yadda faster horse quote, but it's true: people don't ask for (or need) much … so where does the divergence come from?
To designers: Why do we allow such rubbish to be created? We know we can't put up too much fuss or we'll be worked around or replaced … by another designer who will willingly turn the crank for the biscuit. How do we not have more to push back with?
They created a problem people didn't realize they had, drove demand for a solution no one asked for, and charge a premium so you can create more waste per cup.
But, it's cheaper then stopping at Starbucks...
This ignores the fact that Dyson invented the modern bagless cyclonic upright vacuum design that was subsequently adopted by the whole industry. Without that improved design, I suspect that Dyson would have had a harder time displacing Hoover in the UK, where "hoovering" was (and is?) a generic term for "vacuuming." (Though I suppose Xerox and Kleenex have been somewhat displaced in the US in spite of their history as generic terms for photocopying and tissues, and Apple discontinued the iPod even though "podcast" had become a generic term. Etc..)
(Apple is also frequently criticized as an overpriced, marketing-driven company; in my opinion this ignores Apple's troubles before products such as the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch transformed their respective categories.)
I bought a refurbished Dyson DC07 vacuum years ago that I'm still using; besides its performance I like the way the parts snap together and the associated labeling/diagrams.
It is made of plastic though, and I could imagine parts becoming brittle and eventually breaking. Electrolux canister vacuums from the 1930s still work and you can get bags for them, but they lose suction as the bags fill up, and you have to buy bags periodically.
Keurigs make horrendous coffee and create orders of magnitude more waste. I'm not sure how they're the same.
Try a Miele next time, that's a genuine high quality vacuum cleaner that will last you a lifetime.
Rather than take a chance buying somebody else’s cracked case, I’m probably going to replace it. When I do, I’m going to spend less money next time understanding that I’ll have to replace it after 5-10 years.
Frankly, "Make product X do more stuff" is a legitimate way for them to accomplish their goals. But I tend to think if your primary market is sufficiently large, it's better to go deep on solving a specific problem better than anyone else. That said it sure seems like a lot (most?) of the biggest successes in software, from Windows and Office to WeChat, bundle in everything but the kitchen sink.
If your functions are a subset of everyone else, and your only benefit is “it works better”, it’s a tough sell. And in a lot of cases people don’t care - eg if your appliance product lasts 5 years compared to 3 years, but studies show on average consumers will upgrade every 2 years (maybe they receive one as a gift), then you don’t stand out at all.
It’s just basic product/marketing that if you can say “hey ours has a timer and no one else does” you can draw a lot of customers. It’s your foot in the door, but you should also strive to compete in the fundamentals
> The only advice I can give to designers is this: try not to add to the problem. I'm not asking you to move mountains, but maybe consider working somewhere else if your career exists solely to add more bloat to the world. (Easier said than done, I know). Or keep doing what you're doing. What do I know - I'm just some guy who rambles on the web.
Designers in graphic and physical design, with regard to over-complexity and physical waste, which the OP was talking about with the coffee maker -- have been talking about this, and about what the designer's ethical responsibility is in an environment where the business constraints/pressures may be to create things that don't make things better for people... for 50 years now.
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/why-ken-garlands-first-things-f...
Is this true for all appliances?
The toaster and the refrigerator seem functionally complete to me.
More features = more problems = I don't want them for my toaster.
And yet fridges are the first product in the kitchen to receive a 24-inch monitor from Samsung :P :P
https://www.ifixit.com/News/41709/welcome-to-drm-water-ges-i...
All I could find for toasters was short fiction... for now
I'm in retail (e-commerce, selling retro video games), and this is 100% my experience.
There is a certain type of customer who is prepared to pay extra for quality and durability, but they are swamped by the overwhelming majority of the market who try to optimise for features and price.
It's reached the stage now where we no longer even bother bundling official accessories with many consoles we sell, as the overwhelming majority of people will not just prefer but pay extra to get bigger bundles containing multiple third-party controllers, ludicrously large Alibaba memory cards and "free" copies of FIFA/Assassin's Creed (which are otherwise so low-value we actually gut them to re-use the case).
The same market will also pay an extra $40 or so to get a 1TB HDD installed in their PS3s, even though the average person probably only uses 10-20GB (it reached the point where we always upgrade anything smaller than 500GB as it doesn't make economic sense to do otherwise).
It really is understated how badly people want features, even ones they'll never use or get in the way of their enjoyment of the product.
If you're buying a PS3 bundle you probably don't already own a PS3. So you probably don't know what storage you will actually need.
The games may be worthless to you, but if you wanted to actually buy it, it's going to cost something even if it's to cover the postage.
3rd party controllers. If you know they're going to be used regularly then 1st party is the way to go, but a second controller for me has always been a little used just in case thing.
And this is all assuming it isn't a parent buying it for child, that has no idea what they're after, and a buying a bundle so they know it will all work together.
I think you're also underestimating the value add. If I buy an AliExpress memory card, I have to work out if it's going to work as advertised etc, if it doesn't I then have the pain of getting my money back and waiting for a replacement. If I buy from you as part of a bigger purchase I have an expectation that you've found a card that works, and presumably don't want to torpedo a $100+ sale over a $2 memory card.
If I were to buy a PS3 now, I would need at least a subset of these things, I would have to work out compatibility, wait for everything to arrive, and if it doesn't all work, I have to work out what the issue is an sort a replacement. All in all, if you sell me all the elements, if it doesn't work, I get some come back, even that copy of assassin's creed. I may never play it, but if it doesn't work, it stops me being in a situation where game seller says the games are ok, you need to clean the optical drive, and the console seller saying the games are scratched.
The problem with this is that it is an ambiguous signal. If a product is best on 3/4 features that I care about, buying it doesn’t mean that I don’t care about that fourth feature. Likewise, not buying it would suggest that I don’t care about those other three features, which isn’t the case.
Voting with your feet only makes sense when there is one feature you care about. For example for insurance with a minimum amount of coverage, the only factor I care about is price.
But what sells is only that which is for sale.
How do I vote with my wallet for products that companies refuse to build?
In nearly every market category, I want products which are extremely simple, easy to maintain, difficult to break (due to simplicity) and built to the highest possible standard of craftsmanship. Turns out that in nearly every market category, such products don't exist.
> you bought that over-complicated appliance for the same reason everyone else does: it has more features, and you like features. Everyone wants features.
I don't think this is accurate for a substantial part of the population. A novel-length feature list is a guaranteed way to ensure that no one really understands what your product does. A product I worked on had the usual hundreds of features and novel-length user guide, and probably one of the most common questions our support team would ingest was "can product X do thing Y?" which was even just a quick online search away.
Featureful updates I think look better for the people investing in the product, not the ones selling/buying it. It justifies expenditures, can be correlated to growth/progress, etc. For specialized products, e.g., coffee makers, I have personal doubts that a substantial amount of buyers care much more than reading a few reviews to confirm that the product "makes good coffee" or " is easy to clean".
> Second, that designer likely has as much real agency as the engineers building the firmware for the control board. Corporate mandated 12 months ago, “A coffee maker with features A, B, and C and price point P and trim level T.” The designer likely has no place to argue with any of that. A product marketing executive made these decisions, and for one reason — to build what sells.
This one I agree with mostly, except for the "build what sells" part. What sells is what the company effectively SEO spams and price-points well within the market. Let's not forget Juicero's history and how well it sold until someone did the groundbreaking journalism of actually using the device and showing how ridiculous it was. I think it helps support the idea that enough moxy/aggressive marketing, you can get just about anything to fly for awhile to turn a profit. And Juicero is just one example of many such things; I doubt that the executive guidance on Juicero was anything more than "Make it squish these bags, read our juice DRM, and set up a subscription service to buy more juice bags."
The answer to this is pretty complex I guess, as voting with our wallets is historically pretty ineffective at enacting change. There are a lot of tricks that can be used to make hot garbage a top seller; Amazon is raking in billions doing just this and has been for years, despite constant outrage articles and proof of the garbage-ness of the services.
At a certain point, change does need to come from within the company rather than external pressures; the market gets fooled really easily by fancy enough presentations and rich enough people talking about a failed product for 30 seconds.
I think that's why the author made the call-out; I read it as fairly tongue in cheek, but it has an element of truth that the pushback likely needs to come internally; I think the author though, and many people, realize this is not as simple of a situation as that though for the points you mentioned about executive decisions. I don't think designers should completely abandon their agency though on products; saving money is pretty persuasive to the decision makers, and probably _that_ is the best way to influence products via a wallet. Just it's the company's wallet, not the consumers.
That's a very biased way of looking at it. Just because some customers were confused by the feature list doesn't mean most customers were. You just never hear from people who don't have questions.
> It justifies expenditures, can be correlated to growth/progress, etc. For specialized products, e.g., coffee makers, I have personal doubts that a substantial amount of buyers care much more than reading a few reviews to confirm that the product "makes good coffee" or " is easy to clean".
The claim that feature lists can correlate with growth, but also that customers are not interested in feature lists, sounds like a contradiction to me. If customers are not interested in feature lists, then there should be no correlation.
> What sells is what the company effectively SEO spams and price-points well within the market. Let's not forget Juicero's history and how well it sold until someone did the groundbreaking journalism of actually using the device and showing how ridiculous it was.
Doesn't Juicero actually show the exact opposite? Despite all the advertising and multiple price reductions, Juicero was an absolute slow seller.
> There are a lot of tricks that can be used to make hot garbage a top seller; Amazon is raking in billions doing just this and has been for years, despite constant outrage articles and proof of the garbage-ness of the services.
There are few online stores with such a wide range of products and such fast delivery as Amazon. Garbage-ness is relative when everyone else is garbage-er.
To me the "build what sells" theory sounds much more convincing than the "it's all about advertising" theory.
Yes, I agree, and I think this is a large part of the problem. If I get my neighbor John the blacksmith to make me a plow and it doesn't work quite right, I'm sure he'll fix it for me. That's a very short and direct economic chain, and it's based on personal relationships and geography, two things that humans do very well.
If I buy an over-featured electronic piece of crap from Alibaba, from the merchant who'll sell it for $1 less than the competition -- I don't think I can model or count the economy of that purchase.
And I think that the lack of personal relationships does more of a zap on our heads than we realize. We've not evolved to exist in a pathological environment, where a huge amount of the communication we receive is designed to manipulate us, and to our detriment. We yearn for real relationships we can trust, and over-index on signs of trust in vendors, like star ratings on Amazon. Amazon, who literally employs an army of people to game this as much as possible. It's an awfully asymmetric relationship.
If you want a coffee machine and don't want to spend a lot, I implore you buy something made for making great coffee like an Aeropress[1]. You can also do worse than say a chemex[2] or a French press/cafetiere[3]. Then when you can afford it buy a nice grinder[4]. Aeropress in particular is really cheap to buy, really easy to make coffee and clean afterwards and makes fantastic coffee.
[2] or other drip maker but chemex is a classic. https://www.chemexcoffeemaker.com/
[3] I don't know what brand mine is because it was a gift but it's weirdly blue with white spots. Basically everyone in France is issued a Bodum by (I think) the government or something to the extent that they don't call them a cafetiere even though that's the French word, they call them a Bodum. https://www.bodum.com
[4] Mine is a mahlkoenig which is expensive but it was a gift from my wife (similar to when Homer buys Marge a bowling ball with his name on it) so I would make her nice coffee https://www.mahlkoenig.com/
It does make pretty bad coffee, but hey, it's better than not having coffee an all...sometimes. Buying it for home is another story.
Aeropress is a great travel coffee maker. Still need to clean it, grind beans, but managable.
Chemex... Have to buy filters (aeropress you can buy reusable metal filter that is better than paper ones), takes a while to make. We actually had an issue with new company management because of how much time people spent making coffee with chemex (fuck em, but still)
Frenchpress are great. A bit annoying to clean, but nice coffee.
All of them require you to grind your own coffee. That means easier cheap manual grinder or somewhat expensive electronic grinder (because cheap electronic grinders are trash).
None of them work well in places that any pod-based coffee maker works well: self-serving waiting rooms.
I'm not sure if this is one of those weird only-in-America things, but in every European country I've ever visited, you can buy pre-ground coffee in supermarkets, and specialty coffee suppliers will grind the beans for you at the point of purchase. Sure, it might not taste quite as good as if you grind the beans yourself every time, but I wouldn't say all the methods above require you to grind your own coffee.
IIRC ground coffee is still "fresh" even by snob standards for a day or three before it goes stale.
You can buy pre-ground coffee and grind it in-store in many supermarkets in America, it's just if you like coffee - you don't buy your beans at the supermarket.
https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/coffee-tea/products/tit...
And this is the upgrade pick. Expensive until you consider how much you save by making coffee at home.
https://www.espro.com/collections/french-press/products/coff...
They are called "hanging ear coffee filters" - it's just a disposable paper filter with two arms on it. You can get a box of 100 for about 10 cents each.
Filter attaches to your mug, coffee goes in filter, pour boiling water into the top. The process is almost exactly what a Keurig would do. Makes a single-serve coffee in your mug with no cleanup.
It's cheaper and better and more environmental, and you can use whatever coffee you want.
The only way this is true is if the filter dissolves into the coffee and you consume it.
But it’s not, there’s still a thing you have to throw away. You can mishandle that waste and accidentally spill the grounds everywhere. If you drink enough cups you have to take out the trash.
Given your familiarity with the product, I consider your statement as pretty much lying, and it’s driving me (and probably others) to distrust your more. In the best case someone is gonna try it and realize, oh, there is non-zero cleanup
Hopefully the clarifying edit resolves your concerns.
It is a bit time consuming (10-15minutes) so it may not be great for making a quick cup before leaving the house in the morning though.
I enjoy a nice cup of coffee, but I'll drink trash to get me going in the morning.
And all I needed was a caffeine boost before going to the gym. So all the things just aligned for me to use both the machine and the (frankly terrible) coffee it made.
Can't beat free. Even if it is terrible quality. But in the future, I would probably just go with a 150mg caffeine pill, simply because it produces less plastic waste (I hope?)
Same. While I do enjoy the occasional good cup of coffee, I just need some black liquid with caffeine in my usual mornings. Full stop.
So for the cost of one overpriced toy the Keurigs lets you play at being an coffee snob without really having to learn anything about coffee or how to use an grinder or buy an electric kettle and that speaks to a lot of people.
And we should not forget that if your only experience with manual coffee makers and grinders is watching some internet coffee snob use massively overprized equipment and obsess over every little detail the process of making coffee the old fashined way might seem overwhelming.
I initially bought it as backup for my Aeropress, but eventually switched to using it full time and keeping the Aeropress as backup instead. I use a French press while camping.
They don't seem to sell the model I have anymore, so perhaps all the models available today are garbage, but the one I have is notably not.
The one thing I like about kcups is how stupid simple the whole thing is while I’m in the middle of something like work. So this machine lets me be a caffeinated monkey during work things and I can also brew regular coffee when I’m okay with a slight distraction.
It’s been working a whole lot better than the cheap-o keurig I initially bought which comes with a tiny water reservoir enough for one cup of coffee only. Most stupid thing I’ve ever seen. Why am I going for convenience but I also have to refill the water reservoir every time I want coffee?!
I like the idea of adding water every time I want to make a cup of coffee. It’s what I do with my French press or aeropress after all. I have the possibly-mistaken impression that machines with larger reservoirs need to be cleaned more often, to avoid bacteria in the reservoir.
Everything else had negligible benefit for me. I tried the French press and Aeropress thing a while but it's way too labor intensive for how much I drink (one "10" cup drip pot per day).
There are things you can do to improve it massively, even with a $20 brand-less drip machine from walmart: 1) Make sure your coffee maker is free of old, dry, rancid coffee or coffee oils, and not clogged with scale 2) Use really good water. 3) Grind your own coffee 4) Buy coffee you enjoy, which might be a national, name brand, cheap bag of beans, but there's significant flavor and style differences in these different brands! Try several different ones. Some lean acidic, some lean earthy and bitter, find your personal preference
Now we get to the "over fussy" stuff depending on how lucky you are 4) Use a concical bur grinder instead of a blade grinder for more consistent grind and extraction 5) Play with your coffee to water ratio. Everyone has different preferences here 6) Rinse the paper filter for your machine before use, or replace with a reusable mesh of some sort if you like your coffee more "sludgy" like cold brew or french press 7) "Pre heat" the water. Lots of drip machines don't heat the water very well in the beginning. My machine has a feature where if I keep the top open, the water recycles back into the tank so I can let it run and heat itself up. Alternatively heat up your water before brewing. 8) Let the grounds degass: remove the carafe or otherwise block the basket output, let hot water drip into the grounds until they are mostly submerged, and stop water from going into the basket. Let the grounds steep in the hot water for like a minute, then continue the brew as normal. I find this helps reduce acidity personally 9) Put a pinch of salt into the pot of coffee. Salt has a bitterness blocking effect that you might enjoy 10) check the output spout of your brewer into the basket. It can help to add some sort of "diffuse" so all the water doesn't just dig itself a hole into the grounds. When you go to empty the basket, it should look like a very even bed of grounds that got even water mostly all over
Check out James Hoffman on youtube for more information.
The real crime is most people make drip coffee too weak or with bad beans (or badly-ground beans).
Downside to metal mesh filter: it doesn't pull out all of the oily residue that a paper filter would. It doesn't bother us, but you might be more picky.
[0] https://aeropress.com/products/micro-filters
[1] https://aeropress.com/products/aeropress-stainless-steel-reu...
The problem really is that brands like Keurig are packaging these same $12 machines for $100-150, and add useless half-baked features to justify the price. Same can be said for plenty of other companies that built a reputation for quality 20+ years ago and are now trading that for a quick buck by cutting costs and sacrificing product quality. It's ultimately up to the consumer to be diligent and do their research before buying. Plenty of companies are making solid coffee machines today – Breville, Bonavita, Baratza, Gaggia, La Marzocco, Ninja, Bialetti, OXO.
I'm nearing a decade into my $15 Mr. Coffee and the little guy is still trucking along just fine.
Simplicity isn't a measure of quality, but the more complex a thing is, the greater the number of parts that can fail, so it's easier to make a robust simple thing than a robust complex thing.
It's probably my highest consumption of plastics per day based on it's "boil water in a cheap plastic container" design but it turns out if you buy simple things and use them simply they do tend to work for quite a while. I love my Roborock but I'm not going to freak out when it bites the dust in a couple years +/-
Sorry, but just had to chuckle to myself a little...
Pro would probably start at 5k (Ascaso Baby T Plus). Commercial, that's 10k (La Marzocco Linea 2 Group EE ). Buf if we are talking about actually coffee shop, that's 20k at least.
I have a Rancilio Silvia that was I think £400 (so, uh, about $400..) and it's a good thing I don't run an espresso bar. The queue out of the door would only ever shrink by people giving up and leaving.
For me, it's great, but a machine that needs to make however many shots an hour all day, and peak at say 10x that, is just in a different class. Not even necessarily 'better', it just has different/extra problems to solve which would be engineering gone to waste at home; tank capacity never used, reliability never called upon.
On the other hand - if you visit a serious place in Europe (recommend Italy, or France), for example, try a true expresso, made with a true machine, with proper grains ground to the proper size and all other necessary conditions (water, temperature, etc.), then you'd ask yourself how you could have ever considered coffee anything else than a worthy experience, like the French cuisine. Then you save and invest into a proper machine and grinder, and forget the Mr. Coffee monstrosity having ever inflicted your senses.
Even without the investment in a high end machine, an expresso setup in the price ranges above, with Yirgacheffe grains freshly ground, brings the joy of a coffee to a "place" that a morning with such gives the rest of the day another level of "joie de vivre"
Same with "complex" software ...
This is a tangent from OPs point, but I would push back on this idea slightly. To be clear, there is absolutely a large number of people in the US who use coffee as a tool more than an experience and treat it as such. A frightening majority will shell out a few bucks on the daily for coffee from gas stations or chain restaurants, all of which will serve you the sort of over sweetened, watered-down coffee experience you'd expect in the US.
However, I'm of the belief that there are undercurrents of a strong coffee culture in the states as long as you're willing to look for it. I recently took a trip along the east coast and, while searching for souvenirs, found a bag of locally roasted beans that I decided to take home. They weren't necessarily my favorite roast that I've tried, but the fact of the matter was that I was able to taste a local cultural staple and identify what made it unique for relatively low effort. Likewise, there are a growing number of locally owned and run coffee shops popping up across the country using machines similar to those you described above (my local favorite uses a Slayer [1]). The Starbucks-ification of coffee and inflation have unfortunately normalized $5 16oz house blends at many of these places, but the experience is still far more authentic and feels like a deliberate choice rather than a passive act.
I apologize in advance for taking a "not all Americans" stance on this, but coffee is something that I'm genuinely passionate about despite living somewhere that tries not to be. I want other people who care to share these experiences too, but many just assume that every stateside coffee shop is the same. Hopefully this will help illuminate some other options.
Just about every US city I've been to is overflowing with 'serious' coffer places making 'true' espresso which can easily hold their own against every place I've been to in France and Italy.
Durability and excellence can often be orthogonal.
(Fellow coffe enthusiast and mechanical/product engineer here)
What makes you think you know this?
- fill and start kettle
- measure and grind beans
- clear and rinse coffee maker
- assemble coffee maker and invert
- collect grounds, funnel into coffee maker
- remove funnel, replace as stand for coffee maker
- check water temperature, heat or cool as necessary
- pour water into top of coffee maker, 2/3 full
- stir for 10 seconds
- allow to rest
- pour hot water into cup to warm it
- insert filter into holder and rinse it
- add remaining water to fill coffee maker
- attach filter cap
- dump water from cup
- invert coffee maker over cup
- press slowly to fill cup
Get it all right and it's probably the most satisfying non-espresso cup.
Also, I lost my t-handled stirrer and when inverted you can’t accidentally lift the filter with a spoon. By complete coincidence, I found that dang stirrer yesterday so I may give right-side-up another go.
Also, I like imagining the coffee maker is the Rocinante doing a flip ‘n’ burn ;)
Iirc it was one of the top recommendations from America's Test Kitchen for a while.
On the slim chance that someone else here from South Africa wants one, I bought mine from here: https://capecoffeebeans.co.za/products/technivorm-moccamaste...
(I am not affiliated)
- It has a 5 year warranty
- It's handmade in the Netherlands
- Replacement parts are available without too much effort
Oh, no, it's the coffee equivalent of the combo DVD-VCR.
...though if your D-VCR broke you would probably have had a harder time saving the D-VHS material than if it was still on VHS!
This worked great until it stopped working. We got a replacement.
We learned the hard way that Keurig has upgraded their "security" so those third party replacements no longer worked.
We've thrown out the Keurig and gone back to using a purely mechanical French Press. I happen to like https://www.amazon.com/Half-Dozen-Coffee-Du-Monde/dp/B000FV5.... And I don't need a fancy coffee maker with an electronic nanny built in telling me I can't have it because nobody paid a premium for the approved packaging.
I cleaned my french press by knocking out the grounds into the trash, quick rinse with water, then more water with a bit of dish soap and pump the plunger a bunch to froth the soap and clean the screen. Pour out, rinse until soap is gone, air dry. Every couple of weeks I'd do a deep clean by soaking the various parts in Cafiza and hot water. Not that bad imo.
But what's this super consistent 'basic cheap grinder' you have? The people buying expensive grinders know this too - that's why they're buying them, for their 'conical burrs' or 'ceramic' or some other promise of a great (consistent) grind.
I am but a poor man and an amateur coffee drinker, but for my money (and again - according to the sources who blind studied this stuff...) you can get a perfectly good cup of coffee from a $10 no-name grinder. Now, whether the expensive grinder will make you more attractive to your desired mate or make your enemies jealous compared to the cheap grinder - that's a whole other conversation.
I suspect regular hits of mildly acidic boiling water keeps the microbes at bay better than most other sanitation methods.
What? It’s probably the 2nd easiest to clean right after a chemex.
Mine is stainless steel. I think it might have glass inside the walls, but that would only affect the insulation properties and the noise ;)
I had this happen to me... Sugru ball works great as a replacement knob.
There are manual espresso machines like the Flair or the Cafelat Robot. But for many people, the moka pot is a no-fuss, close-enough alternative.
1: A Nespresso that uses the classic pods
2: A Breville Barista Express
I highly recommend the Breville if you can find it used or on discount. We got ours from a man who got extremely into espresso and upgraded 6 months later to a very high end machine. I've had it for 2 years and it's very nice. I use it to make cappuccinos, espressos, or just regular coffee with milk by adding hot water to espresso shots (Americano).
The Nespresso is the quick solution if you just want espresso or cappuccino fast. The pods are ubiquitous, and you can usually find them for cheap. I definitely do not recommend the Nespresso Vertuo machines since the pods are very expensive and hard to find. Vertuo machines make coffee sized drinks, but in reality it's just a massive amount of pure espresso and not traditional American coffee like Keurig does. If you're leaning towards coffee, then just do old school pour over with a filter. You'll get better quality coffee, more options in what flavors you like, and it's generally faster. Just make sure you have a fast kettle or hot water machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp9H0MO-qS8
Very fun video and I love the concept of using a piece of metal as a temperature-sensitive valve.
I agree with this a lot. But one difficulty in adhering to this lies in our ability to process the additional cost beyond initial implementation.
It seems easy, even to engineers and builders, to add something small. But as the author points out increased complexity leads to fragility.
It may be easier to convince product managers and designers of product minimalism when approaching from UX angle: keeping features as bare bones as possible makes it easier for people to figure out how to use the thing.
The features Tumblr eliminates are as important to the way it feels as those it adopts. Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, an early Tumblr investor who sits on its board, says that it is “normal behavior” for a founder to be excited about adding new bells and whistles, but Karp seems excited about doing the opposite: “He’ll tell us, ‘Hey, got a new version coming up — and I took four features out!’"
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/magazine/can-tumblrs-davi...
You can very easily get under <$50, it will last you a lifetime (longer than a drip coffee maker, I'd bet), and the quality of coffee is way better than a drip machine (and depending on your kettle, you don't need electricity).
Not quite as convenient, but great high-end kit for a low cost. Then later, if you want to upgrade, buy a good hand grinder ($100-$150).
- Heat up water
- If you are anal, rinse your paper filter (very optional, do you do this for drip? no :))
- Fill hario with water (yes, water first)
- Dump in coffee
- Stir, if you want, or don't
- Wait whatever. I don't time it. Can't really go too long if your grind is course enough. Go do whatever you do when your drip is brewing.
- Hit Button to dump coffee into cup
That's it. Basically the same as a drip machine honestly, and you'll get better results :)
The pot was made in 1947. It was my father's. Before that, it was my great aunt's.
These are not statements you could make of really any product made today.
I have the ten cup and put 67g of ground coffee into it every morning. Once fully brewed I reserve half of it into a Stanley thermos to have over the course of the day and then have my morning coffee. Always excellent and above all, consistent.
We have 3 ways to make coffee in our house. The first is a ~$7 5-cup coffee maker with no bells or whistles (like in the article) that I've used for 5+ years now. I'm fairly certain I've gotten my money's worth in that deal. I recently added a Zigbee on/off switch so I stop forgetting to turn it off. Second is a dead-simple ~$25 Kurig machine that you pour water in, pop in a pod, and punch the only button on the device to activate. It pumps out hot water and turns off. We've also had this for years with no issues. The third is a recent addition. It's a double walled glass vessel with a basket on top that holds grounds and you pour in boiling water. No electronics at all. I couple it with a simple electric kettle that's equally dead-simple (one button), but could be replaced with water boiled on the stove or a fire if need be. I fully expect these devices to last for many more years at this point.
All of the above is my anecdotal contribution to the value of a machine or device that just does the core thing it was designed for in the simplest way possible.
However last year I got a Gaggia espresso machine, and espresso is a whole other world of complexity. My Gaggia only has the pressure mod, but I did plan to add a PID to it. It's still simple, turn on and let it get hot, then I usually do long pulls for like 40-50 seconds on a double shot portafilter. But there are other espresso machines with more electronics that feel desirable.
Of course I chose getting a Gaggia by going to Github and seeing which espresso machines are developer friendly. :)
https://github.com/Zer0-bit/gaggiuino
However I just make coffee for myself. Maybe a Keurig is easier if you have guests. It seems most of the people I know who have it, have it for that reason.
If things get real bad, the Wood stick camp stove that’s just folding metal plates.
Propane burners are just an annoying in between, but our outages are rarely long.
Edit: designed as an espresso alternative -> functions similarly to espresso
> he was designing a better way to do drip coffee for a single cup
Can you point to this interview? In https://archive.nytimes.com/tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010..., it mentions he actually started with an espresso machine before trying drip and French press. So, it'd be more accurate to say he was designing a better way to all 3 of those - not just drip, as you claim.
Some other references to espresso --
https://www.aeropress.co.uk/blogs/news/evolution-aeropress-h...
> AeroPress is inspired by technology found in espresso machines
https://aeropress.com/pages/how-it-works
In this page, each recommended option is an offshoot from espresso-based drinks.
https://aeropress.com/pages/faq
> Many people say that espresso must be made with 9 bars of pressure. If you use this definition then no, AeroPress coffee makers do not make espresso. But if you define espresso by the taste of the drink in the cup, certainly many people think AeroPress coffee makers can brew espresso. Since coffee brewed by AeroPress coffee makers can be made into lattes, cappuccinos, and other espresso based drinks, we feel it is important to use the term "espresso" when describing what AeroPress coffee makers brew so potential customers will understand how coffee brewed by AeroPress coffee makers can be enjoyed.
--
tldr; I've amended my previous comment but to act as if espresso is not a clear design/inspiration choice is wrong.
Until recently that's what I had too and I connected it to a Sonoff S31 (Tasmota) connected to Home Assistant which let me turn on the coffee maker with an automation and also measure when it's done brewing. One of the temp fuses blew recently and I haven't been able to get the parts I need to fix it. None of the thrift stores in the area have had a simple model like that for a while now. They're all "smart" with their timers and "brew strengths" and whatnot, very frustrating.
I buy coffee grinds (I no longer have a working grinder or I'd buy beans) - I buy several blends (decaf/light/dark) and freeze them in a ziploc.
I tend to just make it for myself in which case this simple filter coffee setup works great [1]. Alternatively a french press or pour-over style filter setup is just as convenient and may yield more coffee (if you're preparing for spouse/etc).
Taste is quite good, and the cleanup is very simple. No maintenance. Coffee tastes great and takes very little time/materials - just need a kettle or stove + kit + grinds/beans.
[1 ]https://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Steel-Coffee-Filter-Indian/...
They are simple, easy to repair, machines. While I spent ~$100 on mine, the longevity of it will likely make it cheaper than lower priced units that need to be replaced more frequently. It brews faster than a Keurig since the reservoir is always on. It's also about as good of a pour over as you can make given the constant stream of perfect temp water.
10/10 would recommend.
My only complaints:
1) No auto-shutoff on the hotplate, so if you forget you get a nice burned coffee smell to remind you.
2) Keeps a reservoir of hot water all the time which isn't very efficient. I plan to add a timer to only have it be hot in the mornings when I need it.
3) I miss the interrupting feature that my old coffee maker had where you could take the pot out from underneath while it was brewing and it would not drip all over. The Bunn brews fast so this isn't a huge problem, but sometimes as it's finishing and there's a few drips coming out you want to fill your cup and not have it drip on the hotplate.
It's not for everyone, but I'm happy with it and I'm confident this machine will last as long as I want it to.
Supposedly important: We use an electric kettle that allows us to specify the temperature, in this case 200°F / 93°C, not boiling.
Making coffee takes a few minutes of attention but it's a nice way to wake up in the morning — as the coffee is pouring through, I'll get the paper and start reading it, check emails, empty the dishwasher, etc.
Washing out the glassware each time with dish soap and a sponge wand, vice just rinsing: A habit ingrained from college-freshman chemistry class.
Chemex: https://a.co/d/8YfriZF (Amazon.com)
Bamboo stand: https://a.co/d/1n2zOet
Chemex filters (coffee people claim they're better): https://a.co/d/6vrexRH
For coffee: just get a French press. The taste is somewhere between Filter coffee and espresso. You can’t run out of filters, because you don’t need any. The only waste you produce is the coffee. And you can get them for as little as 10$. And you can let the dishwasher clean it.
For coffee, I love my Aeropress... it's a manual plastic coffee press that you can easily travel with.
There is a place in the suburbs of Chicago that rebuilds them for ~$500 with a turnaround time of a week or less. A lot of people aren't willing to spend that much to repair an "old" stove but in our case it saved us $10k because our stupid stove is a non-standard size that nobody but a few niche European manufacturers build any more.
If you buy already ground coffee you need to tell the shop to make it coarser, tell them you need it for the French press they will know. If you buy the coffee online, you can usually chose the grade of grinding in the online shop.
It’s the opposite for an espresso machine, there you need it extra-fine.
Pre-packaged powder from the supermarket usually tastes like mud, because it’s not freshly grinded.
But usually I run on green tea, which you can always do Chinese style, by just putting the leaves into a glass with hot water and wait until they reach the bottom of the glass.
It ain't cheap, but it's sturdy and dependable, and it makes a very good cup of coffee. It's already outlasted every other coffee machine I've ever had.
https://us.moccamaster.com/products/kbgv-select
Good coffee, compact, looks good, easily fixable if a piece breaks since the movable parts are all individually purchasable (e.g. carafe top). Definitely expensive though. The 8-cup OXO is another good option.
There's an appropriate level of complexity, and it's not a hard line. It's a balance between convenience and absurd complexity. Can I both achieve a simple task and a more complex task, with appropriate levels of effort for both tasks?
For example, I have a coffee machine that uses ground coffee to make just a single cup instead of a whole pot, like a Keurig, but without the wasteful pods. Is this over-engineered? Maybe compared to a Mr. Coffree, but I it fills my needs without added pods.
Not necessarily. It could be the product was designed around many different facets - user stories, bug reports, marketing requests, safety standards. Then there's the stuff you don't necessarily control, like cost controls and deadlines.
At the end of it there's quality control, and that's where these things usually fall down. You can make a super duper fancy coffee maker that won't die after 3 months. But you need the QC to ensure quality at scale. 90% of the defects might be easy to solve, but the last 10% might be too costly/time-consuming. If only 1 in 1000 will have a defect, it might be simpler/cheaper to replace the defective ones than do the QC to prevent it.
You don't have to have a simple design for reliability. But the more complex it is, the more quality control is necessary to make it reliable.
(I use an Aeropress, but that's because I only drink 1 cup... for more than 1, I'd probably go french press)
At the end of the day, it turns out I am drinking it for the effect, and quantity (as in volume of liquid, more is better). Although lately I've found some decafs that produce a rather pleasant brew. Filtered coffee from the 'right' (for me) ground coffees seem to hit right balance between ease of use, speed, and taste.
And then there are some studies indicating that filtered coffee might be a bit healthier[0] than other forms.
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-hea...
In-between is where all the bloated trash gets dumped.
Of course, now they have released the "Pro Studio Edition", which in addition to the above also sends you updates over WiFi. What could go wrong?
I agree with some other commenters, though, that this is ultimately driven by consumers. I'm sure "Corporate" would love to be able to sell us all on minimalism so they could charge more for less. But consumers love features and frankly most don't care about waste. I agree with the sentiments in the article but it is very much a minority view.
As an added benefit, I don’t have to spend my morning participating in technology and the occasional associated frustrations. I can save that for later in my day, after I’ve had my cup of coffee.
This design simplified things and allowed each button to serve a distinct purpose.
With the iPhone, the design philosophy carried. The iPhone could change itself via running different apps. To switch between features you had a single giant button at the bottom. But each app should do one thing. So it was either a phone, calculator, GPS, or Rolodex. But never all at the same time. And never more than one thing on screen at the same time.
They started to get away from this, such as using a volume button to take a picture. Or displaying a video inside a window. I would argue overall it makes things more complicated.
iPods were best used as music players but they were pretty much always multi-function devices. In a world where Apple didn’t follow it up with iPhones: music phones and camera phones were finally starting to converge in a way that would have eventually eaten the iPod’s and point-and-shoot camera market’s lunches.
On the Apple Watch they've taken this philosophy a little bit too far, in my opinion. In several cases you have apps that are conceptually very similar (such as the "Find Items" app and the "Find Devices" app) ... really these are so similar that they should be the same app, yet they are separate, which clutters up the app launcher with huge numbers of apps. And an over-cluttered app launcher is, by nature, more difficult and slower to use.
I have French press, Aeropress, Chemex, and Moka pot at home and am currently using them in descending frequency. I’m using the French press more now since I stayed at an AirBnB that had the Timemore Small U French Press [0] - it’s a really well-resolved bit of kit. I have a wooden stirring stick which was once a large rough chopstick, and I am enjoying feeling it acquire smoothness and patina over time.
[0] https://us.timemore.com/collections/other/products/timemore-...
It just makes damn good coffee. Don't expect it to break on my watch.
Delonghi charged £120 for the repair, including shipping both ways, which is about 1/4 of the new price. Came back fully cleaned, descaled, and serviced and has worked perfectly again ever since.
So hats off to Delonghi for designing repairable machines!
The buyer personally benefits from many features for cheap, and externalizes the environmental cost to society.
I say it is good design, from a business perspective.
Also, yet another instance of the Tragedy Of The Commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
https://www.gearpatrol.com/food/a42409254/fellow-opus-grinde...
Made out of extruded aluminium and a copper element, handbuilt in Netherlands, been making then for decades, spare parts available, makes good coffee.
Not going to change your life - but one less thing to worry about. Makes me 0.1% happier every morning.
Then I switched back to a drip coffee maker (Moccamaster in fact) - coffee is excellent. Same issue might apply to espresso machines.. not sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp9H0MO-qS8
i think it's actually amazing how much design went into these "dead simple" coffee machines!
While we (you, me, most of HN) see smart TVs as an anti-feature, most of the public sees them as a huge feature.
"I can't buy a TV that doesn't support Netflix, I want to watch Netflix!"
"yes but you can just get a AppleTV and watch Netflix with that"
"I don't like the Apple TV service, it doesn't have as many good shows as Netflix!"
Even if you can convince them that AppleTV can show them netflix you need to get past such insurmountable obstacles as "needing an HDMI cable" and "having two remotes" and "which input does the TV need to be on?" and "which remote do I use for the volume?"
And, yes, CEC fixes some of this and 80% of the time when it works it's fantastic.
I think we'll see TVs which have "swappable" OSes before we see smart-free TVs but I don't think either one is gonna happen in my lifetime.
I'm just resigned to buy the least-shitty smart TV experience I can and to neuter it as much as I can. Currently I have a nice LG C9 OLED which doesn't bother me at all. If this dies before me, or, I feel compelled for an 8K/UltraHDR upgrade, I think LG will continue to offer reasonably non-shitty experiences on their top of the line TVs which I can block from the internet still.
When they stop doing that I'll just buy a projector.
When projectors become infested with this nonsense I'll just move to the woods and become a hermit.
There's a lot of truth here but the manufacturers skimp so much on hardware that they're making that easier to understand. When you buy a brand new Samsung 4K TV and it can't play >1080p without stuttering the value of an Apple TV is a lot easier to understand.
> Even if you can convince them that AppleTV can show them netflix you need to get past such insurmountable obstacles as "needing an HDMI cable" and "having two remotes" and "which input does the TV need to be on?" and "which remote do I use for the volume?"
This is incorrect for the last 3 (you need something like 2000s-era hardware not to auto-detect inputs or allow the player's remote to control the volume) and the first one is true but also quite familiar to most people and it's hard to buy one without some kind of “do you already have a cable?” prompt since the vendors all want to sell you one.
There was already a thing doing it, didn't get popular.
But I'd definitely see the market for "just few HDMI inputs and a screen", especially for people that say already use Netflix from their PS5 or xbox
Customers care about price and features. A TV with "less" features has no market appeal, except to a very, very niche audience.
It also has far less power to collect user data, which means less profit as well.
I've been doing pour-overs for a couple years now. I am always amused when I get LinkedIn messages from coffee brewing startups looking for embedded firmware engineers!
>The machine houses numerous proprietary systems
Yuck.
So it's not just over-complexity, it's also terrible quality in a race for the bottom.
Maybe there's a different lesson to be learned here?
Customers want lots of features, and they want it at a cheap price. This has resulted in an arms race of every-more-poorly made devices that try to do more and more with less and less.
This is the problem. Demand. Not the designers. They're just working within the market that exists.
There is of course demand on the higher end price brackets as well, but that's a separate discussion. That makes up a minority of all sales in terms of volume.