Let me preface this with a well-known fact: I LOVE LOVE LOVE my Keurig. With that said, my current Keurig could be my last one, since Green Mountain is souring my morning cup with a little Digital Rights Management in their Keurig 2.0 machine coming this fall. This idea is so bad that I will NOT be buying it.
What does this mean? This means that you can ONLY buy coffee that has been directly made by or blessed by Green Mountain through licensing. That means no more using the Cafe Cup for brewing your favorite local roaster coffee in your Keurig. It’s rather unfortunate that they are going this route, as the 2.0 Keurig delivers the best of both worlds. You can brew one cup or you can buy the special carafe packs and brew a whole pot, which sounds great when you have guests or for particularly bad mornings. I will never know how nice this will be, as I am NOT going to buy the new device if I can’t go buy a pound of Kaldi’s Blend, one of my favorites from my local roaster Stauf’s, and brew it in my Keurig. Very bad move, Keurig; that’s very unfriendly to the consumer.
My suggestion for Green Mountain? Learn a little from Krups, and make it so you can have ANY coffee in your machine. This works wonderfully for the traditional K-cup machine with a Café Cup. Even though I brew my own using Cafe Cups occasionally, I still buy standard K-cups for the sheer convenience. I really feel that there’s no need to introduce DRM to the Keurig 2.0!
Well at least there are other coffee makers that use the K-Cup system so could easily switch to one of those for the convenience (and probably will when/if my current Keurig dies). I read the blurbs about this for the new Keurigs and felt the same way – there’s no point if I can’t use my own coffee. K-cups are convenient, but using my own coffee drives the price per cup much lower than the average 40-60 cents for a K-cup. I can’t think what revolutionary features would be added to make the DRM tolerable.
I haven’t been paying much attention but I thought this was aimed at other disposable k-cup makers, not refillable ones. Presumably if you use a Keurig-approved refillable cup you’re ok.
The way I’ve read it is that anything not approved by Keurig won’t work. I’ve used their refillable solution and it’s passable but there are better ones on the market. I don’t know much about how they intend to enforce this but the little I’ve seen is enough to make me want to look elsewhere for my next single-serve maker.
So coming out with a new system last year because their original patents ran out and they wanted to sell a new design for the cups wasn’t enough? This takes me as nothing more than a simple money grab and they are going to be the ones to pay the price in the long run. They have a great product but if they stick to this they’re going to be their own end.
Totally agree Dan. I know that the K-cups aren’t the best but it’s acceptable for standard drip coffee. The best part is I can go get some beans from my local roaster and use it with a Cafe Cup and have even better coffee…but most days I am happy with my Daily Chef French Roast from Sam’s Club.
Are we 100% sure that people are just not misinterpreting things? Maybe they’re just saying that the enhanced features will not work without licensed kcups, but that current key rig functionality will still work as it does now.
Maybe let’s not get all worked up over something until it actually happens?