[rsynnott]

(a) Holmes seemed to be obsessed with this due to a personal phobia of venous blood draws (personal quirks are a surprisingly common driver of weird decisions in Silicon Valley-ish companies; the fact that small low capacity vehicles are used in Boring Company tunnels seems to be down to Musk's phobia of public transport, for instance).

(b) The original idea was that a patient would have one of these things _in their house_; a patient can't reasonably do a venous blood draw on themselves, but they can do a finger prick. There are some real working tests that work this way for this reason; HIV self-tests are normally finger-prick tests, say.

But by the time they'd repositioned as "the machines are in a pharmacy, or maybe a central lab", yeah, it made no sense anymore.