Why The $400 Juicero Juice Machine Has People Up In Arms

Your own two hands are as useful as this $400 machine

Well-to-do juice fans—and those who subscribe to the Gwyneth Paltrow style of life—shelled out as much as $700 for a juicer called Juicero, only to find out this week that all you need to make juice is your two hands.

The wireless-connected device, which now retails for $400, promises to press packets of fruits and vegetables into a glass of raw juice that can be sipped early in the morning or on the go.

Venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and the investment wing of Google poured $120 million into the company, and people in the tech world started to refer to the appliance as the "Keurig for juice."

A Bloomberg reporter decided to test her hands against the machine that applies four tons of pressure to those packets. The results? Pretty much the same thing.

Clearly, the Internet has thoughts about this:

The company's CEO, Jeff Dunn, however, says "the value of Juicero is more than a glass of cold-pressed juice. Much more." He gives two examples: the dad who doesn't have time to make something for himself, so he pops a bag into the machine and—presto—has juice, and the "the busy professional who needs more greens in her life" and "gets App reminders to press Produce Packs before they expire, so she doesn't waste the hard-earned money she spent on them."

The Internet isn't having that either, especially since it took the Bloomberg team only 90 seconds to press a packet.

Oh, and when all else fails, there's always this solution: