{"id":180401,"date":"2017-04-28T18:17:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-28T23:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/04\/28\/how-not-to-design-reasonably\/"},"modified":"2017-04-28T18:17:00","modified_gmt":"2017-04-28T23:17:00","slug":"how-not-to-design-reasonably","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/04\/28\/how-not-to-design-reasonably\/","title":{"rendered":"How Not to Design Reasonably"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the fails going around the internet is Juicero, which is selling a press to squeeze raw juices from its pouches into a cup.<\/p>\n<p>This press recently had its price reduced to &#8220;only&#8221; $400, for a juicer.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s more reporters at Bloomberg discovered that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/features\/2017-04-19\/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze\">you could get about the same amount of juice from the pouches using the Mark 1 human hand<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Not bad for a company that has raised $120 million in VC funding&nbsp; \u2026\u2026\u2026 For a juice squeezer.<\/p>\n<p>After all of this product designer Ben Einstein did a a disassembly and a deep dive, and&nbsp; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.bolt.io\/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensive-6add74594e50?gi=de3c9addddeb\">he found a ridiculously over-designed mess<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The short version is that there is a press using a custom motor and custom gear train, a half dozen machined aluminum parts which drives an aluminum plate against the pouch to uniformly apply pressure.<\/p>\n<p>Einstein inventoried the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>An extremely complex plastic molding, including co-molded parts.<\/li>\n<li>A heavy custom machined aluminum frame.<\/li>\n<li>A custom power supply.<\/li>\n<li>Massive custom hinges on the door.<\/li>\n<li>Custom sliders.<\/li>\n<li>A very robust custom gearbox.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Looking at this problem, I immediately have a better way of doing things.<\/p>\n<p>I could make a prototype using an off the shelf aquarium pump for less than $100 in in parts.&nbsp; (It would work like the so called &#8220;Neat Squeeze&#8221; toothpaste tube), or do something similar with a store bought pasta maker retailing for $29.99.<\/p>\n<p>That took me all of 15 minutes to think about it.<\/p>\n<p>This is all of Silicon Valley dysfunction in a squeezable pouch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the fails going around the internet is Juicero, which is selling a press to squeeze raw juices from its pouches into a cup. This press recently had its price reduced to &#8220;only&#8221; $400, for a juicer. What&#8217;s more reporters at Bloomberg discovered that you could get about the same amount of juice from &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,408,588,456,406,403],"class_list":["post-180401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-engineering","tag-fail","tag-finance","tag-stupid","tag-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180401"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}