There's always a danger in over-complicating products. Simple is so often best. The apocryphal story of NASA spending millions crafting a space pen while Soviet cosmonauts used a pencil is often cited as a prime example, even if it's actually not true. Perhaps it's not surprising that Dyson has got into hot water trying to reinvent the electric toothbrush.
The Chinese invented the first bristle toothbrush during the Ming dynasty. That concept muddled along quite nicely until 1937, when Tomlinson Moseley filed a patent for the earliest electric toothbrush. After more than 400 years, the Motodent marked the beginning of an evolutionary shift from manual brushing to powered oral care.
Having had considerable success reimagining established product categories such as stick vacuums and premium hair dryers—though not so much air-purifying headphones—the company earlier this month, with great fanfare, unveiled the next leap forward for teeth: the $499 Dyson CameraJet with a tiny camera to aim streams of rinsing fluid into the gaps between your teeth.
Others, like the Waterpik Sonic-Fusion 2.0, have already been daring (or foolhardy) enough to combine brushing and water flossing. However, Dyson upped the ante further by adding a macro-lens camera, allowing its “Gap Optical Targeting system,” trained on 470,000 dental images, to identify within 100 milliseconds precisely where to squirt fluid from the 12.5 milliliters of mouth rinse stored in its on-board reservoir.
It's taken Dyson six years, 38 patents, and an awful lot of money to make this camera-squirt-brush doohickey work. However, something has gone badly wrong with the CameraJet. So wrong that despite James Dyson globally launching the product at a Paris event mere weeks ago, you can no longer, as far as WIRED can ascertain, buy the CameraJet anywhere.
The CameraJet launched in US stores on September 8. Just a day later, reports began outlining the first user complaints of water in the battery compartment and failures within 30 seconds of use. Consumer Reports' own review unit stopped working less than 24 hours after unboxing. On September 11, French outlet Numerama reported that the French Dyson site and stores had reportedly stopped selling the toothbrush. By September 15, stores in the US, UK, and Singapore, where Dyson's headquarters now reside, had followed suit.
Despite the product disappearing from shelves and online stores, Liv Thomas, the company's head of Beauty Communications, insists to WIRED that the CameraJet hasn't been recalled. Instead, the gadget is “experiencing strong demand globally” and “shortages of supply as we are in the process of scaling up production." Units will reappear supposedly in “the coming weeks.” But what about the multiple reports of breakages, leaking, and battery failures in multiple countries?
“We have identified a single component issue affecting a small number of early batches,” Thomas says. “We have isolated those batches and are supporting affected customers.”
Thomas confirmed that Dyson would not answer questions on where—if anywhere—the Dyson CameraJet was still on sale worldwide. Nor would Dyson confirm when it stopped shipments of the product. Thomas also confirmed that Dyson refuses to detail what the faulty “single component” is, what problem it's causing for the CameraJet, or how many units have been affected globally. Dyson also refused to comment on why it had not issued a formal recall of these faulty early batches of the $500 device.
Dyson Reddit forums have lit up, with names such as “ScameraJet” being bandied around, along with one disgruntled buyer commenting: “Bought two of these and both of them have stopped working. Since I bought it in the UK and wasn’t planning to return it and have thrown the packaging away, I can’t even return them. Disappointed that they scammed so good. Unbelievable that it lasted just two weeks.”
Kyle Wiens, CEO of the repair company iFixit, feels the problem may well be leaking.
“This sounds like a waterproofing issue. Making products at scale with the tolerances required to waterproof are hard,” he says. “My guess without getting a chance to look at a failed unit is that we either have a tolerance issue where some parts aren't mating perfectly, or a failure in the adhesive curing process, either during manufacturing or in shipping.”
Wiens says this adhesive-curing failure can happen in such a way that a product can pass factory testing fine, but then heat or humidity (or both) during shipping causes a problem.
Adam Toner, founder and technical director of Ripcord Designs, a UK-based electronic design consultancy that has worked with multinational companies including Formula One Management and Panasonic, also thinks water is the CameraJet's problem.
“On a product like this, there just should never be any water ingress into the internals,” he says. “I don't have one in front of me, but I've seen a few videos and people explaining how you change the battery. Once you pull the battery off—which is where people say they're seeing water—it looks like there is probably access from that battery compartment into all of the internals of the device.”
The CameraJet not charging, overheating, or failing to start—all of that can be explained by water getting into the device, Toner says. He suspects the problem could be as benign as a faulty gasket or O-ring.
If water getting in does turn out to be an issue for the CameraJet, as these experts suggest, this begs the obvious question: How on earth has Dyson managed to spend six years developing a teched-up toothbrush, designed to be dunked in water every use, and that carries liquid around in it, yet fail to make it waterproof?
Wiens believes the CameraJet chaos could force a well-overdue rethink for Dyson.
“Clearly they didn't plan for this to happen," he says. "They should take this opportunity to invest in repairability. Making products easier to fix also makes them easier to rework when manufacturing defects occur. Dyson is way behind the industry on making repair parts and information available for their products. This should be a wake-up call for them to step up.”
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