Dyson CameraJet

Dyson has built a toothbrush with a camera in it. The camera is a 100,000 pixel macro lens, it looks at the gaps between your teeth while you brush, and a machine learning model decides where to aim a jet of water. The company calls the system Gap Optical Targeting. It went on sale on 1 September and it costs $499.

There is an obvious joke here and we are going to move past it quickly, because the engineering is not stupid. Plaque hardens first in the interdental gaps, those gaps are the part of your mouth you can least see, and flossing is the step almost everybody skips or does badly. A device that finds the gap and fires at it is a reasonable answer to a real problem. Dyson has spent thirty years finding a household chore people perform incompetently, applying a motor and a sensor to it, and charging four times the going rate.

The going rate here is about $50 for an excellent electric toothbrush, which makes the CameraJet roughly a ten times premium on a product category where the marginal benefit of the tenth dollar is already hard to find. What Dyson is actually selling is the Dyson Dental System, which is the brush, a dock, a travel case, Dyson Toothpaste and Dyson Mouthrinse, all engineered to work together. A toothbrush is a durable good you buy once a decade. Toothpaste is a consumable you buy forever.

It comes in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink, because a $499 toothbrush is a thing you leave out on the counter.