I wrote a reaction piece about this device but I seems to not have posted. Have to open the shop and go to my daughter's birthday party or I would write it again. Seems like an expensive thing that doesn't really need to be that expensive.
Considering A) It doesn't control temperature B) It doesn't multitask C) It do anything but add carefully metered water to pre-measured coffee grounds It's insanely expensive. This is a Jobo ATL-3. You can't buy them anymore because nobody processes color film anymore, but when you could buy it, it was $4k worth of film developing lab that would control six different baths at temperatures precise to a tenth of a degree and move camera film in total darkness, completely automated, between all of them at times precise to a tenth of a second. Even accounting for inflation, you could have bought two ATL-3s new for the equivalent price of the magic whirligig thing. And then you would have needed the water heater. This is a Bernina 880. It's about $12,000, which is kind of mind-boggling for a sewing machine. However, the "how-to" video for threading the fucker is 12 minutes long (and fucking mesmerizing, I might add) and not only will it embroider multicolor patterns uploaded over USB, but will also: - cut appliques - hand-dye - fuckin' bedazzle ...a bunch of patterns that you upload on proprietary software. So yeah. It's expensive. Made in the USA, hipster approved, but mind-bogglingly expensive.
So this thing is supposed to be a pourover machine. To make a good snobby pourover you are supposed to prewet the grounds for about 30 seconds and let them gass out. I'm guessing this doesn't do that because they didn't show it. After prewet you are supposed to pour a thin stream of water as continuously as possible for two and one half minutes. Constant stream of water is supposed to maintain the correct temperature over the duration of the pour and keep all the grounds submerged for the duration of the extraction. This contraption only has one spout for five cups. Looks like it just pisses water in a hefty stream and moves on to the next cup, no constant temp varying water quantity. Might not matter all that much that it doesn't use good form. I don't think a pourover suffers all that much from being made with bad form. It does seem like you could put 5 nozzles on the thing, a thinner stream of water and make it pour according to the prevailing dogma at it's price point. A modern high tech extractor for air pots pours the water over the grounds with a prewet. It doesn't use a single thin stream, instead it has a kinda shower head pour out. I think the only reason for a thin stream is that it mimics a person holding a tea pot and that shower head might be just as good a model for a pourover machine. I wonder if you shrunk a Fetco down to a single cup extractor what the resulting coffee would be like. I'm guessing it would be a hell of a lot like a decent pourover, if you fiddled around with the brew basket and pour speed. A modern Fetco extractor runs about $1400-1800 I'm sure they could get a single cup 5 barrel out for $3k and it's temperature, speed of water flow, and duration of the flow are all programmable. I'm sure that this device is going to do well and that competitors to it will emerge with a much better product. I don't think such a device should cost more than 5k and it should work better than this thing appears to. A really nice espresso machine costs about 10k, just as a reference point.
It won't work without an Ecosmart PB10. No temp control at all - it takes the water at whatever temp you get it and sprays it around.
Embroidery machines aren't that expensive though. I bought my grandmother one for ~$500 in the mid 2000s, which was on the high end of consumer machines but I could get docs out of the manufacturer and give her a program that didn't suck at turning photos into patterns along with it, and the software the shipped with the things all sucked at doing that if they tried at all. She would have made enough throw pillows with cats, birds, long-demolished buildings and relatives on them to smother the world if she didn't keep running out of stuffing. She definitely got more than $500 and a week of hacking worth of use out of it. Bet you could assemble a collection of devices that could do most of the things that thing can for less than $12,000. I say "most" only because I kind of doubt the market is flooded with bedazzling machines. Also I have just admitted to more knowledge of embroidery than I ever intended to admit to publicly.
We were evaluating whether to get my wife's '75 Elna Super SU rebuilt (the buttonhole cam blew) or buy something new. This was when I discovered that the only Swiss left in the business were Bernina, they only had one mechanical, that mechanical wasn't as feature-rich as the Super SU and holy shit the high end on sewing machines had gone batshit. You're right - embroiderers aren't expensive. Really, they're a bunch of stepper motors and an ASIC controller. But we're talkin' the cadillac envy machine of all sewing machines and it still costs less than the coffeepisser once you add in, you know, a water heater.