Objects that illustrate the proverb about fools and their money...

The funders are Silicon Valley types who don’t work with their hands, can afford to pay people to cook and make them smoothies (or grew up with their moms taking care of them hand and foot for things like this) and/or repulsed by the idea of chopping food and cleaning out a blender.

There are aftermarket baskets for Keurigs that you can pack with your own coffee, even. Every attempt to lock in customers ends up hacked eventually.

No, they were saying they wished their good expensive clothes didn’t need to be professionally cleaned as often, if only there were some cheaper way to keep them from getting all stinky and rotted with sweat, mucus, etc...

But cameras had been around for decades. They made it convenient and affordable, lowering the bar to entry for what was already a popular high-tech hobby.

Before Keurig, there were several attempts at making coffee-to-go packets that would be as convenient as teabags. All Keurig did was come up with a standardized form factor and delivery mechanism.

Funny, soap has been around for thousands of years, and the same is true of perfume. Shakespeare has jokes about bad breath and reeking armpits. No ad agency convinced humanity that it was better to be clean or at least not completely stinky, all those centuries ago.

And Blu-Rays answer the complaint of why are DVDs so disappointingly flat compared to a properly projected cinema screen. And movies are just an efficient version of live stage performances, which have been in demand for literally thousands of years!

And people had dreamed of flying machines for thousands of years. The Wright brothers didn’t invent Icarus. Or birds...

And before that we walked around with an album in our pocket, on a tape or a CD in our Walkman, and the other few hundred songs in a binder or a box in our backpack.

We wanted portable phones that weren’t the size of a cinderblock, or a half-brick, that had good reception; we wanted Dick Tracy’s two-way TV radio watch; we wanted portable game devices that worked well, and ways to carry the book we were reading around and not set it down somewhere and forget it; we wanted a Walkman…

People don’t like being stinky, or appearing to be one of the vulgar herd. You could run around wrapped in a burlap bag, if your only concern is avoiding illegality, but who wants to do that? Being clean, pleasant-smelling and at the height of fashion are all things that humans have aspired to as soon as they can…

Ford didn’t invent the automobile. He came up with a cheaper & more efficient way of producing them, decades after they’d been invented.

Shakespeare has bad breath jokes.

But we were already carrying around hundreds of songs, awkwardly in small boxes and later binders, to play them on our Walkman cassette and CD players. MP3 players - which Jobs didn’t invent, there were others well before the iPod’s combination of support, cachet and form factor - were meeting a very well established…