This thing is built like a fucking tank, it will never ever ever fail.
Compare that to the same model sold outside of Japan, and it's most likely made in Indonesia and the quality is nowhere near.
Except being built like a tank, Japan made one also vibrates less and more comfortable to use.
( And somehow he is Canadian but speaks a little Cantonese )
He's a private dude, but I think his wife is french-canadian and he's at least bilingual. And from what I've gathered he has to have done some kind of mechanical engineering for a LONG time. Dude knows his stuff about anything mechanical.
His teardown of the Juicero is pure gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
It's an amazing insight into a startup with endless amounts of money, bunch of really smart people, but no real business model. =)
Except that there isn't a good way to distinguish between something that is expensive because it has quality construction and something that is expensive because it is a brand name.
Searching for information online is nigh-useless due to aggressive SEO on the part of advertisers. Sometimes I can get lucky and find an enthusiast forum, but those are harder and harder to find.
Online reviews in general are effectively anonymous. Amazon reviews might not even be the same manufacturer, let alone the same product. Newegg lists different firmware versions under the same product ID, so compatibility reviews are useless.
The best thing I've found is to reach out to a group of friends and hope that one of them did the research previously, or can at least steer you towards/away a brand. This doesn't scale, and any approach that does scale is at risk of being overwhelmed by advertisers and other bad actors.