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.
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.
> 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...
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.)
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).
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.
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 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?
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.
This was great reading, I really enjoy this style of content: someone with expertise tearing down electrical and mechanical equipment and commenting on which parts are well done or poorly done.
I'll definitely be on the lookout for other write ups from Ben Einstein. To anyone wanting more content like this, I also recommend the "Bored of Lame Tool Reviews?" (BOLTR) series of videos from YouTuber AvE:
You might like the EEVblog teardown videos. There is indeed something strangely compelling about a knowledgeable person providing an unbiased running commentary on somebody else's work.
I just watched that man thread a potato into a potato. He's full of the dad jokes -- really entertaining. Not sure I can handle more than one in a row!
Part of the problem is that the cold-pressed juice fad is not really rational to begin with. Somehow customers are convinced that the method of juice extraction is extremely important to the juice's health benefits, to the point that it's worth spending 3x comparable juices. It's great marketing on the verge of fraud. In order to capitalize on the fad the startup probably thought they needed a really fancy, distinctive press since the press has become of mythical importance in the customers' mind. And since cold-pressed customers have already proven to be cost insensitive they figured price is no object, so let engineering go wild!
Gramophone records. Audiophile speaker cables. Many (if not most) branded luxury goods ($2145 IKEA shopping bag, anyone?) [1][2].
These products are not made to be functional, any functionality they have is secondary to their prime purpose: to be used as props in a ritual. What ritual they serve varies, from the mundane 'I can afford to spend a lot of money on non-essential goods' affluence signalling (most branded luxury goods fit in this category) to something resembling the Japanese tea ceremony in the sense that they turn a common event into a highly ritualised happening (I'd fit gramophone records in here). Some are just ways for unscrupulous actors to extract the maximum amount of money from an easily duped audience ($21.000 for a 3m short speaker cable [3], anyone? Don't forget to buy that $11.000 mains cable [4] while you're at it, you would not want your $144,481.80 turntable [5] to be without it).
Cold pressed juice itself is probably partly ceremonial, partly affluence signalling. Where overpriced, waste-generating Rube Goldberg juice delivery devices with vendor lock-in fit in I'll leave for you to decide.
To me, cold pressed orange juice I buy tastes 3X better than any other orange juice I've tried at the store. To me, that's worth 3X more. Some people value taste more than others, to each his own.
That's a cute piece of mechanism. I can see how they got into that overdesign. There must have been insistence that the pack must be crushed between two flat plates. Once you insist on that, it gets complicated.
I once got a chance to look closely at the mechanism of SF's JCDecaux overpriced automatic street toilets in SF. Those cost about $150K each. The mechanism is all Telemecanique industrial control components. If you built a washing machine that way, which you could, it would cost $5000-$10000.
The two strangest parts of this are probably the door locking mechanism and the DC motor supply. The door locking was pretty well explained, but I was really surprised at the DC motor. From previous pictures I had assumed it was a 170VDC motor (using just a rectifier + filters for noise) but according to this it's actually a 330V active power correction boost converter. I guess that gets you 100-240V range support, but it seems horribly expensive for driving a motor. Even 170VDC permanent magnet motors are pretty uncommon - they fill an awkward middle ground where the motor is too big to reasonably use a low voltage DC one (due to power supply costs), but too small to use a universal AC motor directly off line power. The only tools AvE has reviewed of this design are the Kitchenaid mixer and Drill Doctor, for reference.
Also, I don't believe "330V 15A" for a second. Maybe 2A...
Just do the math. You get about 13a tops on a 115v plug before any household circuit will trip. That is over twice that. Same with those '5hp' power tools.
The 330V is for sure a misprint. It doesn't look like they have the insulation for a high voltage motor, so my guess would be 30/33V @15A. Reading the linked spec sheet confirms it's in the range. That would put it much closer to a cordless drill motor. (450W, not 5kW, which is obviously impossible on 120VAC/15A)
Wow, that is amazing. I've seen less engineered products never make it to production.
I would quibble about the custom power supply though, they are not as difficult as they were in the past. Much of the 'magic' of building good SMPS supplies has been encapsulated into very clever chips and certification bodies have seen enough of them now that the checklists are pretty straight forward.
Wow, this is an amazing teardown of the machine. Re the "apply force to the whole thing equally at once" problem mentioned at the end, I wonder if you could do something more like a roller on one side and a plate or another roller on the other, that rolls down from the top of the pack to the bottom.
Also, as overwrought and unnecessary as the Juicero product is, I can't agree with the "it's useless because you can do it by hand" argument. I could probably hand wash my clothes as well as the washing machine does in the same amount of time, but it's hardly useless. While the Juicero is pressing your juice you can be making your lunch or something.
Who knows why the CEO's response skipped straight past "having the machine do it saves you time" to "it can automatically lock you out if your pack expired."
I wonder if the upcoming season of Silicon Valley will feature a startup called "Juicaneros" which features a technology that tests blood collected by pricking a single finger, and then squeezing all of the blood out of an arm through the new pricked hole by putting the arm into a 4-ton press.
They could have (and seems should have) created an elegant manual press, maybe with a crank mechanism of some kind. Would have arguably taken about the same amount of counter space and I still think that something beautiful yet manual would have played with the demo. Think pour over coffee crowd... a bit of easy manual work makes you feel like an artisan. Still would have packet subscription, still would have app potential for expiry notices and subscription management.
I think the machine is fine and I don't feel like $400 is very much for a well built appliance. What kills me about this thing is the fact that they take so many steps to lock you in to their juice packs, which are priced so high that a regular user will have spent more on juice in the first month than the entire machine. Couple that with requiring a nanny QR scan to make sure you can't press "expired" packs as if we are unable to simply read an expiration date and it gets ridiculous. By the way, has anyone mentioned that the expiration on the packs is 8 days after the date of manufacture? Subtract shipping time and you literally have 4 days to use your packs before you shiny new machine says "gotta buy more!" What if I'm ok with a 9 day old pack? Too bad. I think that's what will kill the Juicero. It makes customers feel like they're being hustled.
The $400 is fine. I got a factory refurb model but Vitamixes are in that sort of range. However Vitamixes can just use random fruit and vegetables including prepared versions from the produce department and freezer section of the grocery store.
I agree that it's the $400 + juice packs + nanny scans. Making smoothies isn't a big deal. And if you're willing to trade off a few $$ for a little prep effort savings there are tons of options--including ingredient subscription services.
Beauriful but over engineered for its niche and utterly useless.
700bucks for abag squeezer? Something went terribly wrong.
It feels like they aimed to produce some advanced robotics and built the wrong product. Could turn this into a limb for amputees, makes more sense and actually good use of the resources.
I have to say I do find it disheartening that everything is aiming for a subscription model. Software, food, etc. I know that it is a very profitable business model but it does make me wonder if I really want to live in a world where everything is by subscription.
These subscription models, or even machines that require only a certain type of consumable, are effectively leases. Sure you may buy a piece of hardware, but it is only useful for as long as you buy and use the required consumable.
I am comfortable in renting a place to live - especially since I have moved about every 2-3 years in recent memory - and I am comfortable paying a subscription fee for some software and services. But I am not that comfortable when I have to subscribe to food or clothing for example.
This could become a collectible piece of hardware. A sort of beautiful tech historical folly. Might be worth the actual price over a 50 to 60 year timeline.
Using all those CNC milled parts is simply crazy. CNC is for prototypes, small runs, super specialised load characteristics or runs of parts that are practically impossible to make otherwise. This use does not tick any of those boxes.
the whole thing is crazy. this is a slap in the face of anyone who has taken an engineering course, let alone anyone who was able to grow up with common sense
I bought a $300 juice 15 years ago and it's a simple design and can juice anything. It's basically a giant motor with a plastic assembly attached to the front to hold the food.
If you are serious about juicing you can find cheaper products that don't require packets. This is a convenience item for people with a lot of money. There is no way this company will be worth $120MM unless they design a low cost model.
$400 for a juice machine is not crazy; if you spend that much on an ordinary juicer you can make gallons of carrot juice for a very low price. (It saves money, it doesn't cost money)
You do have to clean up a mess, but if your time is that valuable you can hire a maid to do it for about that $5-$8 price point of the packs.
[+] [-] freehunter|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quasse|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] awalton|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] jasode|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] apendleton|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fooey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beloch|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spilk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrophane|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlaramburu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsmithatx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mohn|9 years ago|reply
I'll definitely be on the lookout for other write ups from Ben Einstein. To anyone wanting more content like this, I also recommend the "Bored of Lame Tool Reviews?" (BOLTR) series of videos from YouTuber AvE:
https://www.youtube.com/user/arduinoversusevil
[+] [-] tacostakohashi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 52-6F-62|9 years ago|reply
Thanks for that.
[+] [-] guelo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yetanfou|9 years ago|reply
These products are not made to be functional, any functionality they have is secondary to their prime purpose: to be used as props in a ritual. What ritual they serve varies, from the mundane 'I can afford to spend a lot of money on non-essential goods' affluence signalling (most branded luxury goods fit in this category) to something resembling the Japanese tea ceremony in the sense that they turn a common event into a highly ritualised happening (I'd fit gramophone records in here). Some are just ways for unscrupulous actors to extract the maximum amount of money from an easily duped audience ($21.000 for a 3m short speaker cable [3], anyone? Don't forget to buy that $11.000 mains cable [4] while you're at it, you would not want your $144,481.80 turntable [5] to be without it).
Cold pressed juice itself is probably partly ceremonial, partly affluence signalling. Where overpriced, waste-generating Rube Goldberg juice delivery devices with vendor lock-in fit in I'll leave for you to decide.
[1] http://www.barneys.com/product/balenciaga-arena-extra-large-... [2] http://www.ikea.com/se/sv/catalog/products/17228340/ [3] http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2008/11/most-expensive-speaker-c... [4] http://www.analogueseduction.net/nordost-mains-cables/ndvali... [5] http://www.analogueseduction.net/clearaudio-turntables/clear...
[+] [-] nestlequ1k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
I once got a chance to look closely at the mechanism of SF's JCDecaux overpriced automatic street toilets in SF. Those cost about $150K each. The mechanism is all Telemecanique industrial control components. If you built a washing machine that way, which you could, it would cost $5000-$10000.
Compare the Portland Loo.[1]
[1] http://theloo.biz/
[+] [-] TD-Linux|9 years ago|reply
Also, I don't believe "330V 15A" for a second. Maybe 2A...
[+] [-] Neliquat|9 years ago|reply
Just do the math. You get about 13a tops on a 115v plug before any household circuit will trip. That is over twice that. Same with those '5hp' power tools.
[+] [-] kjdndisneinj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackguardx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
I would quibble about the custom power supply though, they are not as difficult as they were in the past. Much of the 'magic' of building good SMPS supplies has been encapsulated into very clever chips and certification bodies have seen enough of them now that the checklists are pretty straight forward.
I don't get the outrage though.
[+] [-] astrodust|9 years ago|reply
That's not a juicer. That's an inefficient, over-engineered sieve.
[+] [-] djrogers|9 years ago|reply
I'm. It sure it's outrage (for most) so much as a massive internet-wide SMH after Bloomberg reported that the $700 machine (now dropped in price) does nothing your bare hands can't do: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-v...
[+] [-] fudged71|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nition|9 years ago|reply
Also, as overwrought and unnecessary as the Juicero product is, I can't agree with the "it's useless because you can do it by hand" argument. I could probably hand wash my clothes as well as the washing machine does in the same amount of time, but it's hardly useless. While the Juicero is pressing your juice you can be making your lunch or something.
Who knows why the CEO's response skipped straight past "having the machine do it saves you time" to "it can automatically lock you out if your pack expired."
[+] [-] bane|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddmorey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idlewords|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CameronBanga|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
I agree that it's the $400 + juice packs + nanny scans. Making smoothies isn't a big deal. And if you're willing to trade off a few $$ for a little prep effort savings there are tons of options--including ingredient subscription services.
[+] [-] godmodus|9 years ago|reply
700bucks for abag squeezer? Something went terribly wrong.
It feels like they aimed to produce some advanced robotics and built the wrong product. Could turn this into a limb for amputees, makes more sense and actually good use of the resources.
[+] [-] daemin|9 years ago|reply
These subscription models, or even machines that require only a certain type of consumable, are effectively leases. Sure you may buy a piece of hardware, but it is only useful for as long as you buy and use the required consumable.
I am comfortable in renting a place to live - especially since I have moved about every 2-3 years in recent memory - and I am comfortable paying a subscription fee for some software and services. But I am not that comfortable when I have to subscribe to food or clothing for example.
[+] [-] Taniwha|9 years ago|reply
https://www.somethingawful.com/news/juicero-lobster-pouch/
[+] [-] scandox|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|9 years ago|reply
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chindōgu
[+] [-] testtesttest3|9 years ago|reply
http://imgur.com/gallery/WJsAZ
[+] [-] gyrgtyn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johansch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mianos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astronautjones|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TD-Linux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsmithatx|9 years ago|reply
If you are serious about juicing you can find cheaper products that don't require packets. This is a convenience item for people with a lot of money. There is no way this company will be worth $120MM unless they design a low cost model.
[+] [-] ironchief|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrodust|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|9 years ago|reply
You do have to clean up a mess, but if your time is that valuable you can hire a maid to do it for about that $5-$8 price point of the packs.