qupada

Unfortunately a great many of them use Sodastream’s gas cylinders - after their patent expired and anyone could build a compatible unit - so you might not be able to escape them getting your money when buying CO2 refills, if there isn’t another brand of gas cylinder available where you shop.

Sodastream have released a new cylinder design (with a bayonet rather than screw fitting), presumably to again attempt to kill off the market for home refilling from a larger CO2 cylinder, or use in other brands of machines.

All of that said, I do like my Aarke machine.

My last laptop (owned from 2013-2020) had an NFC reader under the touchpad.

I managed - exactly once - to get my phone to send a file to it using Beam. Did everything exactly as expected; initiated the transfer by NFC and sent the file over Bluetooth.

I could never repeat the experiment. Once, and only once.