Jophiel wrote:
Rather than exploring efforts to hack my coffee maker and disable its DRM, I think I'll stick with my trusty Mr. Coffee.
More or less this (although when my Mr. Coffee finally died, I splurged the extra $20 for a Delonghi with the slide out top thingie that allows you to fill both the coffee and the water without having to move the whole unit). I personally don't get the whole single cup brew pod systems. It just seems amazingly wasteful. And I almost laugh out loud at the commercials about how you can save so much money buying their reusable pods. Um... Isn't the whole point about paying more per cup for the convenience of *not* having to clean and manually fill something with beans? Why not just get a normal coffee machine at that point and save yourself even more money?
Having said that, I know people who love them. So I guess if they get value out of it, that's good for them.
My work provides free coffee, tea, soda, water bottles, etc. They always had free coffee from basic machines in the break rooms. Sodas used to be charged, but it was cheap (like a quarter). But they also would put bowls with ice and a variety of bottles of water and soda in conference rooms for meetings. So people would basically forage for free drinks out of the conference rooms. They realized that the bowls weren't big enough (cause folks were constantly taking them), so to reduce the need for clerks to constantly have to refill them, they installed mini fridges in the conference rooms and just stocked them with sodas and water. Of course, now there really was no reason to spend a quarter on a drink from a machine, when you could just find an empty conference room and get one for free, so they changed the vending machines to vend drinks for free.
Eventually, that morphed into just having "soda machines" that were more or less just fridges with shelves designed for dispensing soda, and you just open the door and take what you want. Seems silly to pay money for a vending machine to do what a basic fridge can do, right?
They also keep changing the coffee machine. They still have some of the old fashioned brewed pot machines, but have shifted to a couple different varieties of fancy dispensing machines that make your coffee (or a variety of drinks) on the fly. Ridiculous waste of money IMO, but someone must have thought it was a great idea.