Nearly-instant coffee that's consistent, exactly to your liking, and without any work or fuss.
Positive Product Points
A great machine that truly frees you from all manual labor. Coffee production is 100% consistent and easily adjusted to your liking. The various digital and manual adjustments for coffee grind & amount, amount of water, temperature, etc. really let you fine-tune your coffee to your liking.
Negative Product Points
While the design is attractive and overall quite solid, there are a couple of dumb little things that bug me like the flimsy latch on the front cover, and the fact that the front cover doesn't easily clear the drip tray without a little fiddling. Little things, but in a $1000 machine they should pay attention to these details.
Detailed Commentary
The positive points above really describe the machine well. You simply get what every coffee lover wants; consistently good coffee made exactly as you like it. The various settings combine to give you various options every time you make coffee. For example, sometimes I want a long coffee mixed with a single shot. My girlfriend prefers a long with a double shot. With this machine she can just press the long shot button, then twice on the shot button, and in less than a minute she's got exactly what she wants.
On the other hand, there's no more cleanup fuss. Our old espresso machine got little use due to the cleaning/grinding/measuring/tamping annoyance. Last thing you want to deal with while caffeinne-deprived early in the morning. Every few days our machine asks us to empty the old grounds, add beans, or add water, but that's it. And each of those steps is quick and painless.
A grand is a bunch of money for coffee. Then again, it's one of life's pleasures and this machine should easily last many years. I think it's worth it, and we would not hesitate to spend the money again if given the choice.
Buying Experience
I picked it up at the local Starbucks, so not much to say here. It was amusing in that they don't sell many of these, and she commented that I was spending more on that one purchase than their entire income for the day.
Three Month Followup
Many products look great when you first get them out of the box, but lose their lustre or fail to perform in the long run. Well, after three months of using this machine several times a day, we are actually more pleased with it than ever! We've never had an issue, and it simply performs better than expected every single time we press the button. We think it was well worth the expense.
One Year Followup
Our machine died at around 10 months old. Starbucks no longer carries it, so they simply gave us a refund. Impressive service! They just gave us back $1k over the counter, no issues at all.
