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]