This week I bought a Nespresso coffee machine. It is an espresso machine that makes a coffee as good as the espresso one can get in a French restaurant. It has 19 bars of pressure, which is key for making a good espresso. The coffee comes in individual little aluminum capsules, which makes the whole process of making the coffee very quick and clean.

I got a Krups XN2005, which costs only 180 Euros, and I had a mail-in rebate of 100 Euros. For 80 Euros it’s really a good deal. Only Nespresso capsules fit in the machine, so one is a bit locked in and if you drink really a lot of coffee it might get expensive in the long term. But otherwise, it gives you easily a great coffee.
The capsules can be ordered on the Nespresso web site, they are not available in supermarkets or so. But they have some Nespresso shops, and I went to the one in Nice this afternoon. It’s a very nice shop, great design. You can see the machine, try the coffee and buy the coffee capsules. There was a little waiting to buy the coffee, so they were offering you a coffee.

The interesting thing is that they aren’t making a lot of publicity for these machines. They work a lot on word-to-mouth, and it seems to work great. Last year the machine started at 300 Euros, but now they have two models at 180 Euros (and rebate coupns of 80 Euros can be found online) and I’m sure this will get many more people to consider it. I think the Nespresso success is trying to be copied by some other brands, like the Philips Senseo. This last one is a real rip-of, as it just makes a normal coffee (it only has 1.5 bars). But the machine costs more than a normal coffee machine and limits you to the more expensive Senseo coffee capsules. The TV publicity for the Senseo says it makes a real espresso, I think they should be condemned for lying.

Actually if you replace in what I just wrote the word Nespresso by Apple it very much works too: nice looking, simple to use, shops that are very design… Even the cheaper models aspect is there, as the cheapest iBook are comparing very well with Windows, laptops even in term of price.

Does it tell us something about Apple future? I think it means Apple should just keep doing what they are doing well now: Computers that are simple to use and beautiful. They have the experience, people and technology to keep doing that and if they execute and keep prices affordable, it will pay off. They are going to win slowly customer after customer by word or mouth.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 20th, 2004 at 11:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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