AvE tore one of their machines down awhile back[0]. It's so over engineered, I was wondering how they'd ever make money back with their business model.
> This is what you get with no constraints. Building something that lasts and doesn't break the bank is what's hard. This thing will last forever, but it's a machine to squeeze pre-masticated fruit in a plastic bag that costs $400.
I've watched this before and just skipped through to find that bit, but I'm fairly certain he also mentions at one point how they're almost certainly selling the juicer itself at a loss, which makes the whole thing that much more absurd.
Actually I want more than one (I want the motor...)
Anyone have the specs on the motor specifically (and please ignore my naivete): max RPM vs power consumption -- what about the power of these motors would be preferable to those on a boosted board (or reverse)?
Yes, absolutely, but it can be gutted for parts or rewired to bypass the API. The latter is not straightforward but someone did so in a video posted in these comments.
I love how Bolt.io tore down a pair of Beats headphones and came to the opposite conclusion -- that they were a ripoff and that the components inside in no way justified the pricetag.
But, take a look at the quality of the internals of Juicero vs. Beats headphones and realize that one of the companies is worth $1.5B while the other is shutting down.
That "Beats" teardown was with a counterfeit pair of headphones.
Even so, I don't think a large difference between the BOM and the price the consumer pays is necessarily a ripoff. There's more to a product than simply how much it costs to manufacture.
> Even so, I don't think a large difference between the BOM and the price the consumer pays is necessarily a ripoff.
Actually, in some jurisdictions, if that difference goes over 12.5% of the paid price, and the customer is not specifically informed about this (and about potential cheaper competitors), the contract is not valid.
Germany used to have laws similar to this for centuries (also in terms of a limit of how high interest could be, and a general profit limit, see "Wucher"), but many parts of these rules have been removed over the decades and centuries.
The counterfeit pair probably had a more reasonable frequency response than the genuine product it was trying to imitate, so much for Beat's famous distorted bass.
Holy crap. That's the kind of thing I expect from undergrads who don't know what COTS stands for.
Like how do you convince yourself that this is a sane design for something more than a prototype? Using more off the shelf stuff might result a little more weight and a higher overall part count but the cost savings would be huge.
As I kept watching the video I thought the word "overengineered" was the completely wrong word, and AvE himself addresses it perfectly in the end: It's "underengineered", "underdesigned" but "overbuilt".
I always assumed that the revenue was going to come from selling the bags of fruit. The machine is easily and cheaply cloned, but a network for distributing prepackaged produce would be much harder to copy and provide the recurring revenue that really matters.
I've wondered if some of the problem here is how many people involved are so well off, the VCs especially, that they've forgotten what $40/week is to the vast bulk of people in the world, or even in the industrialized countries. That's on the order of 5% of the median total income and a great deal more than 5% of the median disposable income in the US. I wonder how many people just forgot how expensive that is and how small the market is for that level of extravagance.
[0] https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ