Nobody buys Roombas because everything else is way better with way more features. They don't even come up in discussions any more, because they can not compete with Dreame, Roborock or any other vacuum with lidar, step up ability, mopping, and now robotic hands.
My first roomba was 2017 and I subsequently got 2 more with more supposed sensors and recognition abilities 2020-2023 and they are just awful.
Just the basics of starting, cleaning, and returning to base to charge are handled worse than my 2017 model.
After twenty years of owning robot vacuums, this is the worst one yet.
I switched to a Roborock a few months ago, and so far, this is genuinely the first robot vacuum I've owned that works 99% of the time. It barely ever gets stuck on things and requires very little maintenance. The maintenance it does require is easy to do and clearly explained.
Perhaps it'll start to break down in a year or so, but so far, so good.
Unfortunately I've read the later models are harder to repair, and I would like to upgrade for the better mopping and self emptying.
I have a Roomba that used to be able to detect cords and roll over them, but at some point it ceased to do that -- and jobs would consistent failed due to it getting stuck.
I'm too lazy to tidy up my cords just for a robot vacuum to run. Would be great if there was one that was intelligent enough to simply avoid cords and other hazards.
But I have a hairdryer that's attached to a wall and whose cord dangles down, and it does sometimes run into that one.
Same with the big German car brands. They put MBAs at the helm in the 90's who outsourced all their tech innovation development to suppliers to lower costs thinking their history, prestige and brand names alone will carry them into the future, and now the Chinese are out-innovating them.
Similar with Intel. When you reach that point it's often too late to turn it round as you're now a sclerotic bloated organization, full off people who coasted and failed upwards for decades and made sure to hire other people just like them.
You can see right through my 97 4runner from all the rust and it's running and working fine. Does not drink oil. I neglect the piss out of it. I haven't changed the oil filter in probably 3 years, just add a new quart once or twice a year, probably 5 to 10k miles. It has needed repairs. I put a new starter in a few years ago. Pulled the injectors and had them rebuilt a couple years ago (basically they just clean them and put new screens and o-rings on them). couple hundred bucks each time.
Anecdata, sure. All anyone has is their own experiance.
I think VW are unreliable and expensive to repair and nice looking.
I prefer such things so I am not damning them for this, it just is the unfortunate reality. It's a trade-off.
A simple example is adding a turbo increases both power and efficiency, at the cost of more parts, shorter mtbf, and less robustness. Ie aside from just more parts to wear out sooner, the system is less rugged even when new and perfect, more easily incapacitated by a spec of dust, in a machine that doesn't live in a chip fab clean room.
(Lately, I saw on the internet this video about cars and their suspension in comparison. And it felt like a throwback to the 2000. The one car that goes over the rails like its flying. Been there, done that. Did not go into the mass market for reasons. But reminds me, how good competition is, maybe old ideas will be tried again and this time the ppl want it.)
But most of the vacuums want internet access for setup, but then work completely fine being blocked from the internet after.
The Roomba has physical buttons on it, which allow you to set a cleaning schedule if you so choose. There's also a small LED display, and a speaker that "says" what's wrong.
The Braava, by contrast, is a dumb-as-bricks device with two buttons - "mop" (which uses mop-like motions) and "sweep" (which uses broom-like motions).
Do they bump into stuff? Yep. Do I call them "dumbass" as I watch them clean? Sure do. But they're otherwise perfectly capable little single-function devices that don't try to do anything more than they really need to do.
Without rewriting the storage in the robot itself, which would be hard for most people.
I cannot comprehend these valuations, US$1 billion is a lot of revenue but just because it's an appliance with a bit of technology/software in the products it pushes to P/E > 100, and a P/E of 100 is seen as a "low"? For an appliances company?
The financial markets are extremely broken, anything that peddles being "tech of <placeholder>" becomes an absurdity. A P/E of 30-40 for an appliances maker would be very, very good.
Anyhow, I don't think its wrong to say (as the article does) that iRobot failed to focus on its core market, but it's also really unfair to iRobot to say should not have attempted to compete in the new product categories (...you just need to look at the product websites for the competitors cited in the article to see that iRobot isn't alone in trying).
Fundamentally, iRobot is competing in a commodity market. That's what home automation/electronics will be. I think you hit it right on the head - this is just another form of appliance.
Thank you, I should have checked it myself instead of just trusting the article... Doh moment.
We were looking to replace the poor thing in 2017 or so, and found iRobot wanted WiFi connection to upload our floor plans to the cloud. No way, was our reaction, so we bought some aftermarket parts and revived it. I do wonder how well its scratched surface still detects walls.
/me goes off to buy a bunch of spares from irobot whilst I can
Also vacuuming and mopping are the quickest and easiest parts of the whole house cleaning process so it is not like it is saving yourself so much time anyway.
In the last 5-10 years it looks to me like they had two competing teams internally producing different models. The I,J series compared to the S series, are very different. The mops scooba vs braava. I really like their designs and repairability but if I had to update I would probably try one of the roborocks they seem to be a lot better.
Typo in the article? A company worth $100 billion must be doing something right I'd say
"A company worth $100 billion must be doing something right I'd say" I'd say you're wrong.
Glad we have wifi-as-a sensor to help fill the gap and help "advertisers" get an accurate picture of our 3d spaces and what's within. What a future.
Didn't know about the plumbed water lines, that's interesting. Do most hook into drainage as well so the unit can flush itself periodically? (I found one that seems to but don't know if this is common https://us.narwal.com/pages/automatically-water-exchange-sys...)
There's no problems explaining stuff if English isn't your first language, but you don't get to be snarky because of your mistakes.
Two completely different things.
Before criticizing other people grammar, i'll suggest you to invest some effort in practicing reading comprehension. It will greatly help you to keep conversation topical
Nobody makes robot vacuums that hook up to your car or TV either. You are free to buy a hand vac or stick vac for the few places in your home the bot can't reach because it does not make sense to have a bigger vacuum anymore.
Also are you a troll account? The LLM summarized your first three pages of posts
Looking at their writing style, there are several characteristics that stand out:
Occasional missing articles ("a", "the") Some subject-verb agreement issues Certain sentence structure patterns that differ from native English Specific vocabulary choices and phrasing
Their comments about Ukraine suggest some familiarity with the region, particularly in how they discuss specific Ukrainian military events with detail. There's also a comment mentioning Israeli press and Israeli IRS, suggesting possible familiarity with Israel. While I can't definitively determine their native language, their writing patterns could be consistent with a Slavic language background like Russian or possibly Hebrew. The way they structure some sentences and occasional grammar patterns align with these language families.
Your answer was on the other side completely wrong. and now , you just double down on it instead of admitting that you failed to read and understand question .
Robot was not in a particularly financial good shape beforehand, but at least had models that could compete against the Chinese competitors. Because it was running out of cash, it tried to get acquired by Amazon for $1.4B. This was, by no means, an ideal deal, but it would have put the company on stable financial footing, and let it continue as a brand (similar to Alexa or Ring).
However, European and FTC regulators prevented the deal, saying that this was an invasion of home privacy by the big-bad Amazon. Fast forwards three years and today, all of the robot vacuums you buy today are Chinese-made and iRobot is about to declare bankruptcy. We traded off home privacy from Amazon to an upstart Chinese company and lost a leading $1.4B company. Great. I don't know about you, but I trust Amazon more with my data than a Chinese company.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-irobot-abandon-... https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23379036/amazon-irobot-ro...
And you can choose to not trust Amazon as well as $random$ Chinese company to your data. It's still possible to get an upright vacuum or broom.
We would actually be better off if Ring had died as a company instead of being sold to Amazon.