We’ve had a Keurig for the past three years, and it was quite handy to have around. It was received as a gift, and came with a few packs of the flavor cups (which we still haven’t used). As @Les mentioned, it has a cup that you can put your own coffee grounds in, so that you don’t need to buy the individual cups, ever. The little cups seem like a huge waste of money. I’m not a big fan of coffee, but since you can take out the filter, you could use it to get a quick piping hot cup of tea, or hot chocolate.
Our Keurig has slowed it’s coffee making speed to that of a standard brewer, since we failed to notice the manual mentioning that it needed to be flushed out with vinegar every six months or so, and hadn’t done it ever for those three years. We tried flushing it with a full tank of vinegar twice, with no signs of improvement. Too little, too late.
@worriedguy It doesn’t need the little wasteful cups to be used, standard canned coffee worked fine for us. I personally don’t care, since I don’t drink coffee at all, let alone these new, caramel whipped cream chocolate mousse hazelnut varieties that seem more like a dessert than a morning pick me up. But, assuming that someone who happens to use one thinks it makes the best coffee ever seems a little rude. Adding that they’ll buy the next years model as though they’re some Keurig fan boy/girl is a bit unnecessary as well.
I don’t assume every person I see with an iPhone or iPod it going to buy the next model, although I dread it sometimes when that seems that it may be the case
I also don’t know which model your neighbor had, but if you or your neighbor took that long to make a single cup of coffee with it, I honestly don’t think it was the brewer’s fault (just saying).
Overall, @jca, it’s a personal call. It is handy, but I don’t think it’s really worth the money when a twenty dollar brewer will do the same job, while costing a fraction of the price.