Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.

The real problem for me has been that I want something to straighten out my living spaces, not to vacuum the floors. Vacuuming is quick and a good vacuum cleaner (old school bagged kind, not a silly filter one), will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways. But a robot capable of picking up the toys my kids like to leave out, or bringing abandoned coffee mugs to the sink (can you tell I live with multiple adults and children?) would be worth quite a bit to me. A robot capable of washing my dishes and putting away my laundry would be worth more. One capable of preparing meals would be worth more to me than a car.

Of course they would have to be 100% open source with easily replaceable and repairable components, which is where I think most of these types of projects go wrong. I remember seeing the Chefee demo and it was very cool but the main problem is that you aren’t buying a product, you are investing in the idea that the company behind it won’t go belly up in two years and brick your $60,000 chef/cabinet/fridge thing and that it won’t sell itself to e.g. Google which will cram it full of ads and spyware.

> Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganized company. The company’s common stock will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan.

Hopefully they keep the lights on.

It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily customize routes or focus on specific rooms; do a shockingly good job at self-emptying; and best of all you don't have to rescue them from the exact same sliding door track every single time you run them.

I have a 2-level house. Even after some house work, one room that probably still has too high a transition. A lot of different surfaces (And I'm not religious with cords and the like.) I'm guessing that my house is a lot more typical of a lot of houses of any size that would justify an iRobot type of device.

Decided a few years ago that a broom vac just made a lot more sense.

I never understood why the US objected to this. Amazon was not in that business.

But you see acquisitions like Paramount that will eventually turn US media into a near monopoly with probably 2 or 3 players. Now we have a fight over who will pick up WB, I am sure who ever wins the fight will have the merger approved. But Amazon, denied.

FWIW, I have no love for Amazon, but they were not trying to buy a company like Walmart which will be far worse then buying iRobot.

If you were happy with your Roomba you could keep it running for many many years. You only needed to buy a new Roomba if you wanted new features.

Reading the comments, I'm glad the industry is way ahead, and I was just confused. I think I'm gonna sell and get a better one.

I've had my Miele vacuum cleaner for 15 years now, and I bought it second hand. I can still buy bags and filters for it, and when the floor roller piece broke (something heavy fell on it) I was able to buy a replacement one for cheap. I see no reason why it can't go another 10 years.

It feels like a very low probability that a robo-cleaner I buy now will come from a company that (in 10+ years) will a) exist and b) support 10+ year old vacuum cleaners.

The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table? How much would Charmin pay to know I have two rooms with tiled floors?

What iRobot actually suggested was more mundane: that there could hypothetically exist a protocol for smart devices to share a spatial understanding of the home, and that their existing robot was in a favorable position to provide the map. The CEO talking about it like a business opportunity rather than a feature invited the negative reception.

It didn't help that a few years later, photos collected by development units in paid testers' homes for ML training purposes were leaked by Scale AI annotators (akin to Mechanical Turk workers). This again became "Roomba is filming you in the bathroom" in the mind of the public.

The privacy risk seemed entirely hypothetical—there was no actual consumer harm, only vague speculation about what the harm could be, and to my knowledge the relevant features never even existed. And yet the fear of Alexa having a floorplan of your home could have been great enough to play a role in torpedoing the Amazon acquisition.

This is called dumping. Long-term dumping but it is what it is.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too.

The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots already inside people's homes and offices.

More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.

---

[a] https://www.ft.com/content/239d4720-aee4-443d-a761-1bd8bb1a1...

iRobot was in a distressed state then, and immediately laid of 1/3 of staff when the deal fell through. I knew a survivor of that mess. Now this.

0: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-ac...

0: https://archive.is/rBn7z

This is a good article to describe the viewpoint of Chinese iRobot competitor https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...

As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.

I also agree it’d be worth more to me than my car, and I’d hope much like modern cars such an expensive consumer purchase will end up with similar warranty protections and eventually a third party market for replacement parts.

Much like cars, I’m guessing it’ll be a better idea to go with a large company that’ll be able to honor that warranty without being financially ruined. The first few generations will see lots of experimentation and thus be more risky for the consumer before the market settles out with a few big winners (as is often the case).

I think the lights have been off for some time already.

[1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

This cracked me up, as it implies the cat had thoroughly planned her skirmish :)

It's ultimately not very complicated - it's a laser rangefinder that you spin on a motor. It's such a simple - and old! - technology which would obviously get significantly cheaper with time, it was definitely the right horse to bet on. I never understood iRobot's vision strategy.

Absolutely no way I'm having something cloud-connected - with human-body level degrees of freedom and the actuator strength to pick up a knife and chop a carrot - or anything else it might want to chop - in the house.

Plus, anything that smart is connected by definition. It doesn't need wi-fi, it's got eyes. Open-source-ness is somewhat moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.

A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.

But I've bought parts from China, because my local dealer sells the parts at very high prices, if he ever has them in stock.

Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.

Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.

Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".

[1] https://github.com/koalazak/dorita980

That said, the performance of the robot certainly degraded over time, and I haven't identified the cause to my satisfaction. Obstacle avoidance needs work (especially for charging cables left dangling off the couch), and the map is frustrating to edit and seems to degenerate over a 6 month period.

As for the Chinese products - look at Valetudo. If you write about cloud and privacy considerations then you are already aware enough to just flash it and you have local, cloud-free, GREAT product.

Especially considering that story some year ago about photos taken by Roombas that had been uploaded to the cloud and leaked.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...