Like generic K-cups? Get ready for pirated coffee!
Much like your inkjet printer, refills are the real money-maker of the Keurig platform. So to ensure consumers stick with its own K-Cups moving forward, Green Mountain is implementing the physical equivalent of a DRM system with Keurig 2.0 — which will start appearing on store shelves this year. Aside from offering a larger 28-ounce serving size, Keurig’s next line of brewers will contain “interactive technology” designed to lock out unlicensed K-Cups. On a recent earnings call, CEO Brian Kelley insisted the change is primarily meant to “ensure the system delivers on the promise of excellent quality beverages produced simply and consistently every time.”
Very weird. Actually, K-cups are weird anyway, since they’re an overly expensive way to make mediocre coffee, but this makes them weirder. They’re trying to lock out competitors when most coffee machine will take coffee beans from any source. You’d think they would just be destroying their own market, but I don’t really understand why people buy these machines anyway over normal ones.
Our office switched from brewed pots to these a little while back, and I’m not thrilled with 'em. While it’s nice to no longer go up to a pot and find it empty because the last person didn’t bother to refill it, the coffee itself is much weaker in caffeine strength with the K-cups, so I find myself using several. Sigh.
Yeah, my mom blows an unbelievable amount of money on these little cups. She loves lots of the third party brands, too, so even though her old Keurig is acting up most of the time now, I doubt she’ll upgrade to one of these DRMed models.
I loathe coffee, but my gf mows through bags of Seattle’s Best like nothing else. It’s such a better deal than K-Cups. I just don’t understand the mentality (or possess the income) behind using something as cost-inefficient as K-Cups, particularly if you’re a heavy drinker of coffee (3-4 cups/day for my mom during the week, as much as 6 on the weekend).
You’d think that instant coffee already filled the niche of iffy coffee that’s easy to make. Not that I have any experience with instant coffee - maybe they’re significantly better than that.
We have a Keurig at home. We only drink coffee occasionally, so an individual maker makes the most sense for us. My wife is a much bigger coffee drink than I am. She bought this little reusable K-Cup thing at Best Buy that lets you load up your favorite coffee and still use the K-Cup machine. I suspect that won’t work in a Keurig 2.0
Me, I’m more into the flavored coffees they have. Mochas, caramel capaccinos, etc. It’s much easier to brew those up in Keurig than to use a coffee machine and the other tools required to make them. Admittedly they aren’t close to as tasty as you’ll get from a Starbucks, but a 16 K-Cup caramel capaccino pack is around $7 - $8 from most grocery stores. The Kroger-brand version of the K-Cups has a little note on it that says it’s officially licensed, so I don’t see that being as big a deal as people thing it might be.
Curious how they are enforcing it. RFID in the k-cup? I wonder how long it will take someone to put out a LifeHack on how to strap an RFID inside the Keurig itself so that everything it brews it believes is licensed.
The article said it’s a “physical equivalent of DRM” so I don’t even think it will be that sophisticated. Besides, whatever they do, K-cups will still have to work with older model machines.
I understand their place in an office, but I never really understood the appeal of having one of these at home. For one, the at-home models that I’ve seen were a pain to refill and clean the water reservoir, so it seemed like it barely saved any hassle, all things considered. Maybe they’re better now.
When I read the headline, I assumed it would be something similar to the Xbox 360 power plug revisions, or the little plastic 3DS cart tab, basically just a little plastic bit that’s required to fit. I can’t imagine anything more complex than that would be cost-effective. I also assume that it will be trivial to over-come, but they’re banking on people not really wanting to bother.
I do wonder how many people will return the new machines or just stop using them when they realize that generic pods don’t work. Although, if they’re targeting offices / shared environments, maybe they don’t really care about that.
They are. K-cups are, like you said, mediocre coffee in expensive packaging. Instant coffee is offensively bad stuff, and I’d have to be pretty desperate to choose instant coffee over no coffee at all.
I will drink one or two cups of coffee at home each week, so a k-cup machine is great for my uses. I also don’t care a whole lot about how the coffee tastes as long as it’s not terrible. Instant coffee is terrible. K-cup coffee is fine for me.
Anyway, I have a Mr. Coffee K-cup machine. If I do have to start using Keurig brand coffee eventually with a new machine, so be it. A couple of bucks a week for two cups won’t bother me.
Not sure what you saw but with mine all I do is fill my coffee cup with water and then dump the water into the machine. I guess I could clean it but water’s all that’s ever been in the coffee maker. It’s very easy to use and there’s no mess. What I also like about it is that there’s no dirty coffee pot that needs cleaning. The whole unit is smaller and cleaner than a traditional home coffee maker.
You people are seriously overstating how “bad” the keurig’s coffee is.
I have one at home and and we have one at work too.
It is super quick and easy. You just keep it filled and clean out the water tank once a week.
At work i don’t need to worry about there being coffee left in the pot for months or it being empty, i just put in the little cup and in less than a minute i have whatever i have. Even better, everyone can have their own thing.
The only real negative is that they are kind of pricey, but not too bad if you only have one a day. If you’re the type that chugs mug after mug though, you’re better off with something else.
But don’t mind me, please continue talking about how you refuse to drink any coffee unless it is grown in Columbia, harvested by young virgins and brewed on the international space station.
Instant coffee is powered coffee that dissolves completely in hot water to create coffee. K-Cups, in their defense, is still ground coffee that is sealed until brewed. For that reason, they are no worse than any other pre-ground coffee (maybe even better since it stays sealed until the last possible moment), and I have been known to drink them in the past and I find them perfectly acceptable.
But as a coffee snob, I still laugh at quality of the coffee vs. the ridiculous premium that k-cups cost. I buy my organic/fair trade/freshly roasted by a local roaster I know by name coffee, and it costs about 1/3 what k-cups cost for the same number of cups of coffee.
Don’t know about Keurig, but Nespresso has become huge over here. I swear it is a license to print money. Nespresso has a store in the Perth CBD and you would be forgiven for thinking it was a jewellery store or some other boutique outlet if you just happened to walk by without taking a second glance.
We have a mid-range Nespresso machine ($300-400) in our office and it works admirably. Instant coffee does not come close. It is better than the coffee that comes out of our greater Serviced Office’s $5,000+ automated grinder/espresso machine. And it is better that more than a few of the coffee shops in my local area (mostly those shops that can’t be bothered sourcing decent coffee or properly training their baristas - but we have a lot of them).
Now I would not expect to take a Nespresso pod, put it in a much cheaper KMart compatible machine and expect the same outcome, a good coffee is a function of several factors. FWIW the Nespresso machine does a very good job of producing a consistent and decent coffee, so I assume it is a combination of a reasonable coffee product to begin with and a well built machine that consistently produces the desired temperature and pressure.
This is of course a privilege you pay a premium for, but a ~70c a pod, it is a damn site more economical than what our Serviced Office would charge for a coffee, as well as being simpler, faster and cleaner than the alternatives.
The question is, what are they feeding that machine? Because it’s not about the machine, it’s about the coffee, and particularly how fresh it is.
Not that everyone necessarily notices a difference. My wife doesn’t seem to taste what I taste in coffee that’s been roasted a few days ago, and she’s perfectly happy with her bags of Starbuck’s French Roast, which taste bland to me if I ignore the burned flavor. I bought some dark-roasted Ad Astra from PT’s for comparison, and even a dark roast has nuances if it’s fresh.
Funny. Someone finally managed to copy the HP printer-ink business model in a completely different sector. But what will they do when Green Mountain or someone like that offers a competing product with cheaper cups?
