Great for the price
4/5
I was in the market for a mid-range food processor and this is what I went for. I've used it to crush some biscuits, make some hummus and grate cucumber for tzatziki and so far it's met my expectations.
Kitchenaid are a brand I associate with high quality, well-built kitchenware. If you buy this expecting something on a par with their all-metal construction artisan mixer though, you'll be disappointed. The base is made of plastic and generally it doesn't give the impression of the same level of "finesse" i'd usually expect of the brand. Despite that, it say it strikes a good balance for the price: i've certainly seen far worse construction. The plastics appear to be good quality, although the bowl has started to go cloudy after just a few runs through the dishwasher. I accidentally put the pusher in the wrong way round and forced it quite hard. It got stuck and I was worried I'd have cracked the plastic, but in fact nothing broke.
The motor seems to have some kind of overload protection: after a few minutes, it will cut out. I assume this is to protect the motor from overheating. I guess this is one of the places they've cut corners to get the price down: put in a less powerful motor and over-stressed it, then included a protection to prevent it from failing. A very sensible choice. Lesser quality design would just put the overstressed motor in with no protection and expect you to just buy another when you leave it on for too long and burn it out.
One annoyance is that, while it's described as suitable for dishwasher, you need to make sure you put the bowl in the right way round: it has a hole in the base which allows water to drain out when it's inverted. So it has to be tilted to allow water to flow out. If you put it in the wrong way round, the base fills up with a load of dishwasher water!
AO's guidelines say that you should "avoid" mentioning price in your review. I'm not sure exactly what that means, when price is part of the overall experience. Inevitably the price paid is going to colour your review: if I'd paid double the price I'd have higher expectations, and correspondingly write a less positive review. So I think I should specify that I bought this mixer on sale at £83 and that's what my expectations were based on. At the full RRP, it's probably not terrible value but I'd probably look into alternatives before buying.