When someone says "x is more expensive than y", yeah, it's relative. When someone says "x is expensive", it's asserting that the item is a costly example of it

When someone says "x is more expensive than y", yeah, it's relative. When someone says "x is expensive", it's asserting that the item is a costly example of its genre. Given that drip coffee machines run from about $40 to hundreds and hundreds, it still seems disingenuous to say that Chemex is expensive. Can you do pourover cheaper? Sure. But the good news is that in this area of coffeemaking, even the higher-end, beautiful option (the OG Chemex is literally in design museums) is pretty damn cheap.