Same as juicero, many people bash the product but the engineering is world class.
Most impressive to me is when every unnecessary component has been removed, and every remaining component is as simple as possible. (The example that sticks in my mind is the humble $5 drip coffee pot. No moving parts except the switch to turn it on!)
Where I'm coming from: I'm picky about coffee making and am not interested in the espresso investment for home. So I made delicious Chemex and Hario pourovers for myself, family, and friends for 15 years because I never thought I'd enjoy the compromises of a drip coffee maker. I was wrong. The Moccamaster makes an excellent half or full carafe, consistently, every time. And I don't suffer Pourover Interruptus on busy mornings. The thermal carafe version was my choice. No regrets.
Glad to hear you e got such great use out of it!
So we got a Krups grind and brew unit, though the exact model we have isn't available anymore, it's been going strong for maybe 7 years without any issues. It has a hopper you can just fill with beans and it grinds an approximation of the right amount for home much coffee you want (and you can put water in the night before and set it to have coffee brewed when you get up). My only complaint for our particular model is the burr is really loud, but I don't recall if it's always been that loud or it's just beginning to get old.
[edit: this is an addendum because I saw u/emptybits suggestion and just wanted to acknowledge that it's a nicer brewer but I'm a pleb and here's the reasoning I have for preferring my lazy-omatic brewer (maybe I should trademark the name?) :D] It's not as expensive (or as nice looking) as the Technivorm that u/emptybits recommends, and I would absolutely expect better extraction from the technivorm as well (at least vs our model, which has the very old school single drip point), but the convenience of a single appliance is honestly more important to me than the price difference. I think there's also an element of how much the ritual of coffee making matters to you? I don't care at all, so it's just an appliance in the corner, and there's the other extreme where people have millions of gadgets and/or siphon brewers (which I admit do look super fun, but they also apparently don't even produce good coffee?).
One thing I do wish is there was a thermal carafe option for our unit, even though it does keep the element going to keep the coffee warm I do think that even I can taste some harshness after it's been sitting on the warmer for a while, and then when the warmer does disengage it becomes cold very quickly.
If you want something to produce a vat of coffee in the morning on a timer, which is totally understandable, there are some good options. Buy whatever James likes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8eYs2vxT-8 (I watched the video 2 years ago and forget ;)
The problem I have is keeping coffee fresh for how little I drink. I ended up switching over to a subscription service that just sends me frozen single-cup pods of coffee. It's pretty good and very easy to make; just add to hot water. It's like $70 for 32 pods, though, so not particularly economical if you drink a lot of coffee. But it is easy and the coffee is fine.
My favourite methods to date are Moka pot, and French press. So I reckon the vat of coffee approach is probably they way. I reckon my favourite from the hoff video is the Technoworm.
Absolutely not. Juicero was absolutely terrible engineering. Any mechanical engineering intern can whip up a big chonking hunk of a juicer or any other kind of product in SolidWorks.
Filleting every edge does not mean "engineering".
The vast majority of the work and difficulty in engineering is NOT getting something to work, but doing so while also working within constraints. There were no constraints in the Juicero. It was impressively manufactured. But terribly engineered. Which is why the entire thing went down despite an absurd level of fundraising.
The ballsy thing about Juicero was that they didn't give away the razor. It was priced at something like $400. They were awfully high on their own supply.
Initially $700!! They dropped the price to $400 after poor sales.
Though I get the impression they put most of their real engineering effort into their obnoxious juice drm scam, and everything else was just overbuilt to make it feel premium.