I hope they both crash & burn.
Disposables suck (the life out of all things)
Just noticed that if you scale it down far enough, that image of the Keurig resembles a Mexican wrestling mask.
(The rather obvious joke about the palatability of the fluids emitted by each item is left to every poor bastard that’s ever had to drink whatever came out of either item.)
To be fair, if I was making the kind of markup they do, I’d probably be willing to break some legs too.
Oh, wait, that’s not being fair at all.
I think Keurig absolutely has the right to make their new coffee machines incompatible with 3rd party cups. All that other shit though, no way.
Under what doctrine?
Ah but while they have the right to try and make their machines incompatible with 3rd party waste units,
do they have any recourse to stop anyone from making cups that are compatible with those machines?
I don’t think so.
Lock makers make products with specific keys, but anyone can make you a spare set of keys, or new keys for your lock.
So yeah, they can try, but talk about fruitless endeavours based on locking out choice for your customer.
Well, as far as the case law I’m aware of, no, they have no recourse to stop people from using their cracked DRM (presuming the cracked DRM was done in a legal manner, through reverse engineering as opposed to stealing trade secrets). But that doesn’t mean they can’t intorduce NEW units with NEW DRM to stop their competitors again.
Woah thank you, I had no idea this existed. Its like, the Kuerig flash-cart 
I’ll play devil’s advocate here, and argue that K-Cups (and similar products) don’t have to be so wasteful, depending on your usage habits.
For example, San Francisco Bay Coffee makes k-cup-compatible coffee pods that use a wax-paper lid and a small bio-plastic ring, rather than the petro-plastic cups and aluminum lids of Keurig-brand pods. The company is working on developing a 100% biodegradable pod (they’re only 97% biodegradable currently) so eventually you’ll be able to toss the entire pod in your compost bin.
(It’s also significantly cheaper than Keurig-brand pods, and pretty tasty.)
Now, if you have multiple coffee drinkers in your home who are on the same schedule, it would probably make more sense to just use a drip-coffee maker to brew a large pot in the morning. But if you only have one coffee drinker in the house — or multiple coffee drinkers who don’t drink coffee at the same time — it would be a huge waste of water and coffee to brew a pot that is only going to get half-finished.
And — let’s be honest here — the convenience of making just one cup of coffee in about 30 seconds whenever you have the urge is a big draw.
If you have one of the old non-drm ones, just use an refillable cup and use your own grounds. Pretty simple.
We still haven’t found a refillable (around here anyway) cup for the drm’d one. The old ones we have don’t work with it.
Meh, hardly matters anyway, we’ve started to use our +35 year old peculator.
You forget how good coffee can taste.
The first rule of the Coffee Club…
That’s pretty neat, but it completely erases the advantage of what a Keurig is supposed to be about, a fast cup of coffee. With this you have to grind, fill and clean. You might as well just use a Chemex and get a better cup of coffee in the process.
The same doctrine that allows me, as an independent auto maker, to produce cars that are incompatible with 3rd party tires and incompatible with 3rd party fuels.
Now, I can’t really do much to force consumers to my business model, but perhaps I can lean on the retailers…
Don’t forget the Third Rule of the Coffee Club:
##If this is your first cup, you must fight.
This is obviously going to head into coffee-snob territory. I don’t grind coffee every day. I don’t roast my own beans.
I try to buy fresh-roasted beans every few days, and either have it ground on site or do it all at once when I get home. I know I’m not getting the perfect cup of Joe every morning, but I get it fast and it’s good.
On days off, when I have time, I can snob about with a pour over or whatever, but on work days, I’m heading out the door quick with a fair trade off.
Do you think people who prefer Chianti over Thunderbird are snobs as well? 
Why do is there such a thing as K-cup technique, then? Keurig seems to market to those who want a guarantee of a fast, acceptable coffer with no mess.
You might as well use an aeropress. At least it’s easy to clean up.
I always find it interesting how many of these technologies don’t take off until after the patents expire and competitors bring the price down to a reasonable level. The 3D printer revolution we are in the middle of could have happened 10 years ago, except that the patent holders were completely uninterested in serving the broader market and instead focused entirely on high end niches instead.
Well, they certainly have the right to try, like they are (were?) doing with DRM
And those third party cup makers have every right to circumvent those measures to make their cups compatible with Keurig brewers.
