Apple's Patent-Pending Pizza Box

Moving on from horrible food-related design jokes, here's a food-related design win: Apple put their world-class design chops into something that isn't several hundred dollars' worth of electronics! Behold, Apple's pizza box, US Patent application #20120024859. It aspires to be the platonic ideal of pizza boxes: no assembly required, stackable, manufacturable from a variety of materials, efficiently round like a certain corporate campus, ridges to elevate the pizza above its own grease puddle, and holes for ventilation to prevent sogginess. Apple: come for the iPhones, stay for the efficiently-contained personal pizzas! (And because you're locked into their ecosystem.)
[via Engadget & Wired]

A Frorking Joke

That misshapen red lump is McDonalds' Frork, which uses french fries as the tines of a "fork" (quotes, I believe, are necessary). It's a corporate/PR joke, and I want to write a blistering rant on it, but I absolutely can't do better than Kat Bauman's at Core77 - so read that instead. Frork you indeed, McDonald's.

Juicero, the poster child of over-engineering...

By now you may have heard of Juicero, the $400 (originally $700!) home juicing machine whose job can be done, and faster, with your own two hands. It's a story of excess, ego, and rampant over-engineering. Bolt's Ben Einstein did a thorough teardown of this beast, identifying a slew of unnecessary custom parts and expensive manufacturing processes. So, how did it happen? Some possibilities:

• Improperly specified requirements. Does it really take "four tons of force" to squeeze out all the juice? If so, the Bloomberg reporter who did it by hand is quite the hulk.
• Bad engineering. Over-engineering is just as bad as under-engineering, it just results in runaway costs instead of functional failures.
• Hype. With $120M in funding, I'm sure the pressure was on to deliver the greatest juicer of all tiiiiiime! With that kind of cash and even a little ego, more is always better - and the CEO even bragged about all the "custom components" and other over-engineered elements in the machine. Dude, that's not a good thing.

Let's all learn this lesson from Juicero, so that we need not learn it from ourselves.

[via Core77]