On top of that the article says it takes around a full five minutes from ordering to your burger being ready, and all those ingredients in tubes look pre-prepped to some extent. Plus it can't be easy to clean.

That one from the 60s actually looks more impressive, wow!

LOL. 5 minutes a burger, at $6/per. So this thing can sell $72 worth of burgers per hour. At that rate and price, there's no way this will ever be profitable. Even with add on sales of artisanal, hand shaved potato chips with bespoke cream soda bumping the cost up to $10 a customer, this is DOA. Interesting technology, but as a business, DOA.

Edit; I missed that he's paying his employees $16/hour (good for him). So if he has 2 employees fulltime, he's got $32/hour + payroll taxes/unemployment insurance etc to earn before he can pay off the R&D for this, his rent, his food cost, his utilities, his advertising, and then have an ROI for his investors.

And he has "experience" and a family in the business! Why they didn't talk him out of this is beyond me.

5 minutes to make a burger from start to finish isn't the same as making 12 burgers per hour - the machine can probably prepare multiple burgers at a time (just speculation from the video, of course).

It’s not clear how many can be in the pipeline.

Interestingly, to me at least, that machine from the 1960s seems better constructed than the machine in this article.

It seems apparent the Creator machine was designed with form over function in mind, to be seen and photographed and to visually communicate the concept of "automated food assembly" while looking aesthetically appealing.

...and likely easier to maintain/modify/extend too, since everything will be electromechanical and not controlled by a black-box computer.

Actually, exactly the opposite is more likely. All else being equal, the electromechanical assemblies are more likely to fail and are harder to change than the computer.