Thanks for all the responses. My inlaws like a nice coffee at my place, but they are not into coffee as such like we are. It needs to be simple, easy to use/understand. A manual machine would just become the next kitchen paperweight. I like the idea of pods because I thought they would just be insert pod, push a button. AM freaked me out a bit because I didn't really think about the milk side (if required) and the hassles of cleaning afterwards. HN have one of those coffee pods things coming up so I'm going to pop in and play and have a taste for myself. The cost isn't that bad really I don't think, 50c per pod. Not the best/freshest coffee in the world, but hopefully an improvement from a coffee bag and similar to buying a bag of year old beans from the stupidomarket. This probably needs it's own thread, but I really don't understand why everyone is freaking about about 50c per pod. I've assumed 20g shot (includes a little bit of wastage), and I only drink a 40-50ml shot from my machine. Green 1kg green beans say $12, so that's $3 per 250gm bag. You have to roast it, so factor in time and power to roast (lucky for me I'm carbon neutral in that dept 8) ), and say roughly 20gm per shot, so that's 25c per shot. Brown If you buy roasted say $12 for 250gm and a 20gm shot your talking around $1 for a shot. So really in my eyes a pod at 50c isn't the worst value in the world is it? I haven't ever tasted coffee from a pod but I intend too. I doubt you'll see my lever in the FS section after tasting one, but would it be good enough for 2 pensioners drinking the occasional coffee? Probably.
