I don’t think $1000 for a kitchen appliance – even a small one – is evidence of having unimaginable wealth. The cost is less, for example, than the difference between a Honda Civic and Kia Forte. A really good, temperature-controlled teamaker wouldn’t be useful for me, but it might be for the right kind of foodie, even if they aren’t especially wealthy.
(Disclaimer: I have a commercial coffee machine in my kitchen. I also drive a 30-year-old car.)
I’m happy to hear they’ve opened up the machine by removing the DRM, that is indeed a good story, demonstrating some thought towards their customer(s).
But CONNECT YOUR TEAMAKER TO THE INTERNETS??? Why oh why does a teamaker have connectivity? Some days I just think I’m too old to understand what the kids are up to these days.
I think the questio is to have a thing in the kitchen that is costly because is madel for professionak kitchens, so a stainles steel construction, rugged pumps and maybe not made in China, and to have a plastic consumer grade things that tries to justify their cost with IoT and gimmicky similar extras.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91IWuBSXldS.pdf
By the way this is going at 200 EUR. More stilish model could cost more but this works.
You need something to dunk all those browser cookies in. 
Ah, so it was just a marketing problem then.
Does all the effort it took last century to get the first vending machines and coffee grinders onto the internet count for nothing then? Gaah!
Watched this yesterday and i found whomever this youtube guy to be rather unlikable and i did not buy his logic over using shitty green tea. He’s not comparing apples to apples since there’s a huge range on what green tea is or can be and seems like a pretty insincere video to make if he’s not going to do it right, basically click-baiting. Which is not surprising.
Considering that I can make quite a decent cup of tea in one of these $4 pots heated over a spirit lamp made of scavenged material, does that mean I saved $996 in order to use my favourite brand of tea, brew it to my taste, and have a kit that will work on a long backpacking trip and weighs less than any cooking outfit that I can buy?
The spirit lamp is made from the aluminium bottoms of three beverage cans, plus a drop of high-temperature epoxy. I suppose I should account for the $0.15 that I forewent by not returning the cans for deposit. And the $0.01 for the copper weight that serves as a pressure regulator. That part is even decorative: it has a portrait of Abraham Lincoln stamped into it. The whole kit weighs about 150 g and cooks all my meals when I’m Out There.
This photo album shows how I used it to steam-bake muffins. Yeah, I took those pictures on my porch at home, but it works the same way Out There, and I can testify that fresh muffins are a wonderful morale booster on a long segment. They definitely helped my spirits on the fourth day of a six-day carry, a couple of years ago.
Nothing like trekking to set you straight on the value of things - and the value of a kilogram is even more important than the value of a dollar. You have to let go of excess baggage, or you’ll be carrying the weight of it for the entire trip. (That last statement is both literal and metaphorical.)
the thing here is that, unlike coffee, people who are extreme tea-philes are more likely to think a purist only uses more basic methods, like putting leaves in water (maybe controlling the temperature and time of steeping). I think coffee people (at least those w/ the bucks for something like this) would be more likely to respond to techno-fab methods of extraction since that is a little inherent to the coffee process historically anyway.
Which is great for lots of people, but for those of us who are highly distract-able and don’t like stewed tea, something that keeps the tea warm without over brewing would be useful.
Are you related to Jerome K Jerome by any chance? Probably not - far too brief 
George said:
“You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”
George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.
How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha’pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with—oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all!—the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!
It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness—no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o’er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work. Time to drink in life’s sunshine—time to listen to the Æolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-strings around us—time to—
I beg your pardon, really. I quite forgot.
A tea cosy and drink it before it gets stewed.
You would have to hack the coffee machine so it actually boiled water. And introduce a warm the pot feature.
I own a drip coffee machine, which works by boiling the water in the reservoir chamber. I’ve used the reusable filter to put loose leaf tea in it before and it works adequately for certain teas, not great for others. I’ve found that it works best with a finely ground black loose leaf tea, the consistency is like a very coarsely ground coffee which i suspect is why it works great in my coffee maker. Fyi the tea is very very strong, more so than coffee. I end up having to add milk and sugar and i drink less of it than i would coffee otherwise the caffeine buzz in it makes me sick.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0008JIW8U/
https://www.amazon.com/Tapal-Danedar-Black-Economy-Pack/dp/B004KI797A
There is no art to their spin. They should have announced “It is with a renewed commitment to manufacturing the greatest tea brewing devices in history that we are announcing the release of all our code and former proprietary design art to the open source community. We’ll see you on GitHub!”
I bet their accountants could use a drink. Tea totallers.
I think the venture capitalist investors might think that was just taking the mickey.
It’s fair enough to pour the investment funds down the drain (or through the tea maker in this case) but don’t suggest that you never intended to make them $gazillions!!! or that you are not deeply, deeply sad that you spent all their money making a neat toy which no one wanted to buy.
If you do, you won’t be able to persuade them to give you more money for Internet-Tea Mk2.
Get a brew on, pet, you’ll soon feel better.
With my kind of luck, this gizmo would give me something that was almost entirely unlike tea.
I wanted to read (or in this case, watch) a non paid review from someone who actually knows how to make tea, and knows good tea (and isn’t paid by the company). But that stood out as clueless.
I think the best way to do the test in the video discussing the Teaforia appliance is to take the same exact tea that comes in their pods, throw it in a tea bag and steep it at the recommended temperature and time. And compare how that tea tastes when brewed with the appliance. Maybe brew the same tea using a few other common methods, and ideally you’d want to do a blind taste test. Then one is really comparing apples to apples.
Granted it’s likely overkill and would not expect this particular guy to do it that way but if you’re going to compare tea brewing methods make some sort of effort.
