A few years ago, during my quest to lose weight, I started using blenders to make a morning protein shake. I didn’t know a lot about blenders, so I picked a target special. The blender worked well at first, and until I started it using daily, I never had any problems with it. But boy did that change. First, blending ice in a blender is hard to get right when making a smoothie: If you blend too much ice, you risk the blender slowing down to a crawl and overheating. Second, a target blender doesn’t blend all the ice uniformly, and not everything sinks back to the bottom, causing uneven blends. Third, since the base of the blender is so small, there’s no circulating motion, so the entire blending process is filled with shaking and repositioning the blender.