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Have their vacuum models improved? When I was in the market about an year ago, it seemed that Chinese robot vacuums were light years ahead. I have a few iRobot

Have their vacuum models improved? When I was in the market about an year ago, it seemed that Chinese robot vacuums were light years ahead. I have a few iRobot vacuums that are several years old and never get used due to ineffectiveness. It is easier to spend 5 minutes manually vacuuming vs letting the iRobot wander around randomly for an hour and still not clean well.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>it seemed that Chinese robot vacuums were light years ahead. They are. Xiaomi owned Roborock is years ahead of the big western competition (iRobot and Neato) in terms of cleaning chops and value for money. Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, but there's also no guarantee yet that the lesser western brands will pinky promise to keep your data private and not sell it to advertisers for money or leave it in some insecure S3 bucket for hackers to steal because they outsourced the SW dev work to the cheapest body shop, which is the norm in SW development for consumer electronics. At least on most Roborock models you can root them and run them locally via Valetudo insted of their proprietary cloud, so you get the best of all worlds: cleaning, value, privacy.
- guepe 3y ago
  I have two (vacuum and mop) and I’m happy with them. Slow ? Yes. Who cares it gets done in the day while I work ! Effective: yes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  iRobot is catching up to their Chinese competitors in many ways, including privacy concerns. Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom. In iRobot's (IMO weak) defense, the woman or someone in her household had opted into third party data sharing In practice, how is it to actually run Valetudo on a Roborock? I have one of the supported models but quickly noped out when I skimmed through the "short these jumpers on the PCB" part of the installation instructions
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  What is the threat from someone having an approximate floor plan of where you live?
  - michaelt 3y ago
    https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuum-beta-product-testers-consent-agreement-misled/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-i... > Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook [...] Robot would share test users’ data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices’ front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. [...] These workers then shared at least 15 images—including shots of a minor and of a woman sitting on the toilet—to social media groups where they gathered to talk shop. To be fair, when the photo of a woman taking a shit was shared on facebook, her face was blurred. Once something is online there's also the (less important but perhaps more likely) risk they'll send software updates that remove features, add adverts, force you to set up an account, and other nonsense like that.
  - InitialLastName 3y ago
    See comment above: > Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom. It's not just a floor plan, it's a video overview of everything in your living space.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >It's not just a floor plan, it's a video overview of everything in your living space. Most robo-vacs don't have cameras, but lidar/IR sensors so all they get is a 2D map of your floorplan, not video footage.
      - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
        Yea mine is just LIDAR. What feature would it need video for?
- Aissen 3y ago
  > Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, One of the reason I never connected my Neato is that I had no interest in having a map of my flat uploaded to the company's servers.
- nacho2sweet 3y ago
  Do we think an amazon owned iRobot wasn't going to use the computer vision to catalogue all the shit I owned in my house and suggest things I am missing lol...
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked Privacy is why I would never own a vacuum (or most any other device) that requires an internet connection. For me, the only benchmark required is "does it have to connect to a server somewhere to work?"
- marcinzm 3y ago
  > Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, The newest Roborock vacuums don’t even have cameras. On purpose. Unlike iRobot. So it seems China is actually ahead in privacy. Which is sad.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Privacy is not a cameras or no-cameras dependent binary. You still need to use their apps to control the robots, and the apps send the commands to the robot only through their proprietary clouds instead of directly. You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      > Privacy is not a cameras or no-cameras dependent binary. If it has no camera and no microphone, the worst case leak is way better than what iRobot has already been caught doing: (The toilette videos) https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuums-artificial-intelligence-training-data-privacy/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Sure, but that's like saying being punched in the face is better than being punched in the nuts.
        marcinzm 3y ago
        You have yet to say why. Making random hyperboles and sounding angry isn't an argument, it's a tantrum.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Just saying one is way worse than the other, even though they're both still bad, what more do you want? It's obvious to everyone.
- izacus 3y ago
  I had Roborock with a camera and it had more privacy protections that I've seen in Roomba - the camera remote access was locked out, when cameras was on it had a loud "recording" warning, the API worked locally from app to the vac (which is not the case for iRobot), the map was stored on the robot itself, etc. Kind of surprising, but it also got me thinking about how many of those options aren't available in western products.
bearjaws 3y ago
Yeah, iRobot seems to have entered mega-corp death spiral, terrible year on year "improvements". Looking at their $1400 option it appears about on par with $900 Roborock. My Roborock S7 is light years ahead of my girlfriends iRobot, which just drives around running into everything, gets stuck pretty much every time it runs. Meanwhile the Roborock maps my whole home and plans a route. I trust it enough to have it set to run every week automatically without intervention. The only work I do is to empty it and add water to the mop tank.
- sircastor 3y ago
  I wonder if any of this is related to iRobot spinning out of MIT Robotics. If the people running the show were spending too much time and energy on robots and research, and not enough on the economics of manufacturing the product and managing their market.
dgacmu 3y ago
I haven't personally owned the other brands, but I bought a refurbished j7+ (not the mopping kind) for about $300 a few months ago and it has been a spectacular improvement on their earlier models - I've owned about five thus far over a long time. Roughly the same vacuuming performance (it uses the same rollers and filter as the e5 that it replaced) but the mapping and obstacle avoidance are a really big improvement and I can use it in my kid and cable-messed environment. I was pretty close to giving up on iRobot too.
- Clent 3y ago
  Interesting that you're being down voted for answering the question while all the ditto comments are not. I have had the same experience with an i3+, which is just a vacuum but with a self-empty base. This i3+ originally didn't have room mapping but they added it after I purchased it. It goes home to charge and empty itself and cleans in a reasonable pattern. I've previously owned the 350 series and some other similar one and they were more toy than utility.
  - dgacmu 3y ago
    I found that kind of funny too. Beats me. :) This is my first one with a self-empty base and I'm surprised how much I like it. I don't think the pre-mapping self-empty units would have worked very well for me because they would usually get stuck, but I've been quite impressed at how well the j7 manages to avoid that. It does have an annoying quirk that it won't run if it's too dark, so I have to schedule it a little carefully or leave the lights on and schedule them to turn off. But I'm really happy with it overall.
bilsbie 3y ago
For me it’s the robot vs never vacuuming.
_ea1k 3y ago
That's the crazy thing about this ruling. It looks like the company is likely to enter a similar death spiral, similar to what happened to Neato Robotics. A stale product line with a trimmed down staff to maximize profitability based on their name and reputation while their products are steadily supplanted by stronger competitors. Maybe someone else will buy them to extract the last few $$s before turning out the lights. sigh

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>it seemed that Chinese robot vacuums were light years ahead. They are. Xiaomi owned Roborock is years ahead of the big western competition (iRobot and Neato) in terms of cleaning chops and value for money. Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, but there's also no guarantee yet that the lesser western brands will pinky promise to keep your data private and not sell it to advertisers for money or leave it in some insecure S3 bucket for hackers to steal because they outsourced the SW dev work to the cheapest body shop, which is the norm in SW development for consumer electronics. At least on most Roborock models you can root them and run them locally via Valetudo insted of their proprietary cloud, so you get the best of all worlds: cleaning, value, privacy.

guepe 3y ago
I have two (vacuum and mop) and I’m happy with them. Slow ? Yes. Who cares it gets done in the day while I work ! Effective: yes.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Rebelgecko 3y ago
iRobot is catching up to their Chinese competitors in many ways, including privacy concerns. Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom. In iRobot's (IMO weak) defense, the woman or someone in her household had opted into third party data sharing In practice, how is it to actually run Valetudo on a Roborock? I have one of the supported models but quickly noped out when I skimmed through the "short these jumpers on the PCB" part of the installation instructions
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
What is the threat from someone having an approximate floor plan of where you live?
- michaelt 3y ago
  https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuum-beta-product-testers-consent-agreement-misled/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-i... > Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook [...] Robot would share test users’ data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices’ front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. [...] These workers then shared at least 15 images—including shots of a minor and of a woman sitting on the toilet—to social media groups where they gathered to talk shop. To be fair, when the photo of a woman taking a shit was shared on facebook, her face was blurred. Once something is online there's also the (less important but perhaps more likely) risk they'll send software updates that remove features, add adverts, force you to set up an account, and other nonsense like that.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  See comment above: > Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom. It's not just a floor plan, it's a video overview of everything in your living space.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >It's not just a floor plan, it's a video overview of everything in your living space. Most robo-vacs don't have cameras, but lidar/IR sensors so all they get is a 2D map of your floorplan, not video footage.
    - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
      Yea mine is just LIDAR. What feature would it need video for?
Aissen 3y ago
> Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, One of the reason I never connected my Neato is that I had no interest in having a map of my flat uploaded to the company's servers.
nacho2sweet 3y ago
Do we think an amazon owned iRobot wasn't going to use the computer vision to catalogue all the shit I owned in my house and suggest things I am missing lol...
JohnFen 3y ago
> Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked Privacy is why I would never own a vacuum (or most any other device) that requires an internet connection. For me, the only benchmark required is "does it have to connect to a server somewhere to work?"
marcinzm 3y ago
> Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, The newest Roborock vacuums don’t even have cameras. On purpose. Unlike iRobot. So it seems China is actually ahead in privacy. Which is sad.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Privacy is not a cameras or no-cameras dependent binary. You still need to use their apps to control the robots, and the apps send the commands to the robot only through their proprietary clouds instead of directly. You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    > Privacy is not a cameras or no-cameras dependent binary. If it has no camera and no microphone, the worst case leak is way better than what iRobot has already been caught doing: (The toilette videos) https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuums-artificial-intelligence-training-data-privacy/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Sure, but that's like saying being punched in the face is better than being punched in the nuts.
      - marcinzm 3y ago
        You have yet to say why. Making random hyperboles and sounding angry isn't an argument, it's a tantrum.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Just saying one is way worse than the other, even though they're both still bad, what more do you want? It's obvious to everyone.
izacus 3y ago
I had Roborock with a camera and it had more privacy protections that I've seen in Roomba - the camera remote access was locked out, when cameras was on it had a loud "recording" warning, the API worked locally from app to the vac (which is not the case for iRobot), the map was stored on the robot itself, etc. Kind of surprising, but it also got me thinking about how many of those options aren't available in western products.

bearjaws 3y ago

Yeah, iRobot seems to have entered mega-corp death spiral, terrible year on year "improvements". Looking at their $1400 option it appears about on par with $900 Roborock. My Roborock S7 is light years ahead of my girlfriends iRobot, which just drives around running into everything, gets stuck pretty much every time it runs. Meanwhile the Roborock maps my whole home and plans a route. I trust it enough to have it set to run every week automatically without intervention. The only work I do is to empty it and add water to the mop tank.

sircastor 3y ago
I wonder if any of this is related to iRobot spinning out of MIT Robotics. If the people running the show were spending too much time and energy on robots and research, and not enough on the economics of manufacturing the product and managing their market.

dgacmu 3y ago

I haven't personally owned the other brands, but I bought a refurbished j7+ (not the mopping kind) for about $300 a few months ago and it has been a spectacular improvement on their earlier models - I've owned about five thus far over a long time. Roughly the same vacuuming performance (it uses the same rollers and filter as the e5 that it replaced) but the mapping and obstacle avoidance are a really big improvement and I can use it in my kid and cable-messed environment. I was pretty close to giving up on iRobot too.

Clent 3y ago
Interesting that you're being down voted for answering the question while all the ditto comments are not. I have had the same experience with an i3+, which is just a vacuum but with a self-empty base. This i3+ originally didn't have room mapping but they added it after I purchased it. It goes home to charge and empty itself and cleans in a reasonable pattern. I've previously owned the 350 series and some other similar one and they were more toy than utility.
- dgacmu 3y ago
  I found that kind of funny too. Beats me. :) This is my first one with a self-empty base and I'm surprised how much I like it. I don't think the pre-mapping self-empty units would have worked very well for me because they would usually get stuck, but I've been quite impressed at how well the j7 manages to avoid that. It does have an annoying quirk that it won't run if it's too dark, so I have to schedule it a little carefully or leave the lights on and schedule them to turn off. But I'm really happy with it overall.

bilsbie 3y ago

For me it’s the robot vs never vacuuming.

_ea1k 3y ago

That's the crazy thing about this ruling. It looks like the company is likely to enter a similar death spiral, similar to what happened to Neato Robotics. A stale product line with a trimmed down staff to maximize profitability based on their name and reputation while their products are steadily supplanted by stronger competitors. Maybe someone else will buy them to extract the last few $$s before turning out the lights. sigh