22 ms·

Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

• Sprotch 10mo ago
  :(
• xnx 10mo ago
  Non-paywalled article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-15/robot-vacuum-roomba-maker-files-for-bankruptcy-after-35-years https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-15/robot-vac...
  • mulquin 10mo ago
    Non-paywalled: https://archive.md/7DyNA https://archive.md/7DyNA
  • allears 10mo ago
    Nope, still got a paywall
• hurturue 10mo ago
  They outsourced production to China thinking that they can just do the marketing in US. Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
  • krackers 10mo ago
    It's not just marketing, iRobot basically stopped innovating. For commodity items like robot vacuums or pool cleaners, there is a relentless pressure to innovate. You can't simply coast or else you will soon find yourself left behind. 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-sweeping-the-pool-robot-market https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...
    • nobodyandproud 10mo ago
      The best robovac was Neato. Lidar and mapping 13 years ago. No cloud. Too bad our American leaders sold us out.
      • temp0826 10mo ago
        It's pretty crazy just how much better the Neatos were than brand new ones. I wonder if that (German?) company has tried to sell the IP? RIP...
        • nobodyandproud 10mo ago
          Vorwerk group. No idea, but it’s pointless imho. Roborock and Eufy (and other competitors) clearly either stole or reverse-engineered the tech. If the IP had enough value then I’m sure Vorwerk would’ve pursued it in court. But here we are.
          • sudosysgen 10mo ago
            There is not much tech to steal here. 2D lidar mapping is something a high schooler could do 10+ years ago, and that was their core tech. The value was in executing earlier and better, and applying existing tech to robovacuums. If they could have sued they likely would, this is a valuable market.
            • nobodyandproud 10mo ago
              It’s not just mapping. Also, I recall Neato was often purchased and cannibalized by researchers for its lidar. This was all cutting edge 10+ years ago. Even today, the features it supported offline then is just matched at best today in 2025/2026. Not exceeded; and often crippled when offline.
              • sudosysgen 10mo ago
                There is not that much more to it than lidar and 2D slam as far as the core technology. There are a lot more features yes but they are not nearly as valuable. I agree they are better, but that's for reason of execution and non-enshitiffication, not core tech.
  • makeitdouble 10mo ago
    How many general public appliance makers out there have a competitive production line outside of China ? 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.
    • yorwba 10mo ago
      https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/domestic-vacuum-cleaners https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/domestic-vacuum-cleaners shows China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Mexico as having a significant trade surplus in domestic vacuum cleaners.
    • pbmonster 10mo ago
      The German luxury brands have made the "made in Germany" shtick a core part of their marketing. So Miele, Gaggenau, Vorwerk, ect. Bosch/Siemens are far larger than those, but they outsourced a lot. But even here, significant parts of the higher-end stuff is still made outside China.
      • okanat 10mo ago
        I don't know about individual parts but all of my home appliances are BSH and they are all made in Germany. Some of them actually has the factory location in the nameplate.
    • rerx 10mo ago
      BSH (Bosch, Siemens, Neff brands) have their main production sites in Europe, a lot in Germany still. But of course China as well. https://www.bsh-group.com/about-bsh/bsh-worldwide/ https://www.bsh-group.com/about-bsh/bsh-worldwide/ Miele (at a more premium price point) production is even more concentrated in Germany. https://m.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm https://m.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm (Edit: No replies after 8 hours, but of course they then came in quickly after Europe woke up..)
      • mlrtime 10mo ago
  • jack_tripper 10mo ago
    >Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too. 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".
    • pmontra 10mo ago
      Because that's always the case at the beginning, the country doesn't matter. It takes time to learn and improve. People look at the first or second generation models, get complacent and then they are surprised that by the third or fourth generation those remote countries start to innovate and sell better and cheaper products. It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably. By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.
    • miki123211 10mo ago
      This is replication. THe Chinese seem to be extremely good at taking western products and just layering on tons of incremental improvements, which make their versions that much better. It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
      • leoedin 10mo ago
        > It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them. I think that's a dangerous assumption to make. Certainly it's true that for most major technologies so far, western countries were first - but that's probably mainly because China's been busy playing catch up. But now the Chinese have huge numbers of factories, suppliers big and small, machine shops, PCB fabs and experienced engineers. You really think they're not coming up with original ideas? Any engineer will tell you a new product is a little bit of idea and a lot of execution. The Chinese are able to execute in a way that the west isn't any more.
• SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Now all their customer data will be sold to the highest bidder.
• xnx 10mo ago
  So the FTC blocked Amazon's acquisition of iRobot in January 2024 and now China gains control of the assests for a bargain? Another stupid application of antitrust.
  • striking 10mo ago
    From Bloomberg: > Earnings began to decline since 2021 due to supply chain headwinds and increased competition. I know that there's a slight difference between Chinese-state owned enterprises and Amazon, but isn't a sale to either one worrying?
    • avalys 10mo ago
      In what sense is a sale to Amazon “worrying” compared to bankruptcy?
      • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
        Years of layoffs after swearing to not so layoffs that shells out the assets and then leaves a carcass in 2025 instead of a corpse. China might at least make some products out of this purchase. Most of these US companies would just sit on it.
      • tguvot 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        • mattmaroon 10mo ago
          At least with China we don’t need anti-semitic conspiracy theories to know they’ll be doing something evil!
          • tguvot 10mo ago
            come on, you can't compare CCP to Cabal. It's not on same level
          • deleted 10mo ago
• dc3k 10mo ago
  https://archive.ph/7DyNA https://archive.ph/7DyNA
• xqcgrek2 10mo ago
  robot vacuums never made economic sense over a maid service
  • ghaff 10mo ago
    I'm not sure that's fair but you need the right house layout and right practices in terms of cords/clutter/etc.
  • jacekm 10mo ago
    Depends on where you live. In Poland the house cleaning costs ~$15/h. The robot vacuum would pay itself off within a year. But I am aware that in e.g. some parts of Asia the maid service is dirt cheap.
• yieldcrv 10mo ago
  Makes sense, 20 years of needing to have no rugs, cords, toys on the floor, masquerading as a cleaner
• IgorPartola 10mo ago
  I had a Roomba about 10 years ago. It was OK but required a lot of “handholding” to not run over cords, kids toys, etc. It just was not really worth it to use it in an environment where you can’t keep everything nailed down and off the floor at all times. Relocated it to a basement level where we had much more empty but sill finished space. The cat angrily pooped just outside her litter box and the Roomba ran right over it and shredded them turds all over the floor. Since then it has lived in my mind as the dumbest smart product. 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.
  • wincy 10mo ago
    I was agreeing with you on all accounts but seriously doubt they’ll be open source. I think the average person will barely clock this as mattering, and will pay up. The market has shown time and again that consumers prefer highly integrated environments that work seamlessly vs open source, especially for hardware. 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).
• kingstnap 10mo ago
  I wonder what happens to the app and cloud functionality. > 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.
  • willis936 10mo ago
    I had a roomba i5 fully stop working earlier this year. It said it couldn't connect to the internet but I believe what it meant was "some aspect of the remote server has decayed to the point that it no longer works with this platform". I threw it in the trash, vowed to never let this happen again, and got a valetudo machine. I think the lights have been off for some time already.
    • avian 10mo ago
      This is surprising to me because not long ago I bought a Roomba i5 specifically because it was one of the few robot vacuums that could still work fully off-line (in the "just vacuum everything reachable" mode, but I don't need anything else).
    • garbagewoman 10mo ago
      You threw ewaste with batteries in the trash?
      • sunaookami 10mo ago
        Related username? ;) I think it was a figure of speech.
      • willis936 10mo ago
        I pulled the battery. As an aside, I will say that municipal waste has antipatterns for responsible waste disposal. Someone could: A) disassemble their ewaste, remove the battery, look up which of 10 days a year they can drop it off, and pay a $50+ fee B) quietly put it in their trash I'll let you guess what most people are actually doing. Contrast this with car batteries where manufacturers pay for batteries that are not responsibly handled and consumers are incentivized to dispose of them responsibly with a financial carrot. The manufacturer pays for the disposal, passes that cost on to the consumer, and the consumer gets the money back when they responsibly dispose of it.
• sudosysgen 10mo ago
  iRobot's failure is that they made a bet to use CV instead of Lidar for their mapping robots for a long time until it was too late. That made their affordable, non-mapping robots far far worse than only slightly higher priced lidar robots, while their mapping robots were too expensive for mass appeal and were still worse at navigation than up-market lidar based robots. Ultimately they were simply outcompeted.
  • CrossVR 10mo ago
    Reminds me of a certain self-driving car company.
    • dzhiurgis 10mo ago
      Is it one with P/E > 300?
  • Animats 10mo ago
    Neato, which had a robot vacuum with LIDAR, shut down in 2023. That's not the key problem. Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It's short range compared to the inter-camera distance. Vehicle object ranging at distance is much tougher and can be fooled.
    • sudosysgen 10mo ago
      > Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It could be, but it just is not. VSLAM robots were practically significant worse. There are a lot of limitations to multi-ocular vision for a robot vacuum, for example the relatively featureless walls and few features across the horizontal binocular axis. Neato was never as big as iRobot. They didn't fail from commanding heights, they never were that successful to begin with, for entirely different reasons. If they had managed to get to iRobot's level of ubiquity and distribution they would have had a much better shot of still being around nowadays.
      • Animats 10mo ago
• anonu 10mo ago
  will be replaced by humanoid robots soon
  • jayd16 10mo ago
    You gotta love the idea of a humanoid robot, shuffling around and bumping into everything to navigate while wiping up a bit.
    • schainks 10mo ago
      Reminds me of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcNIWPkNzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcNIWPkNzA
    • imtringued 10mo ago
      https://youtube.com/watch?v=zBCu8HmXoRo https://youtube.com/watch?v=zBCu8HmXoRo
• kayson 10mo ago
  Does anyone have recommendations for a robot vacuum that can handle dog hair and won't sell my floorplan to advertisers?
  • havaloc 10mo ago
    https://maticrobots.com/ https://maticrobots.com/
    • onair4you 10mo ago
      I’ve been hoping these folks do well.
      • kobieps 10mo ago
        I'm quite happy with the product, it performs really well for the most part
    • pimlottc 10mo ago
      And for the privacy aspect: > At Matic, we believe your data should stay within your home. > Matic's intelligence is localized on the device, and it never sends any of your data to the cloud for processing. That means no user information is ever sold, shared, or even collected in the first place. https://maticrobots.com/privacy-policy https://maticrobots.com/privacy-policy
      • bink 10mo ago
        That's great, but I'm not sure I'll ever feel comfortable putting a camera attached to a mobile robot inside my home.
  • parineum 10mo ago
    Find a vacuum that supports valetudo[1] and a brush/roller like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F54134JY https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F54134JY [1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
• olivierlacan 10mo ago
  If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline. 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.
  • tguvot 10mo ago
    i got roomba less than year ago, because it was hard to find well reviewed non-mop vacuum with docking station that sucks all the dirt out.
    • dzhiurgis 10mo ago
      > non-mop vacuum Such a good point. Vacuum wars website has no way to filter out vacuums without mop (my house is mostly carpet, I do want a good product but they are all with mops nowadays). It's such a common issue with sites like this. It's either all products or products WITH this feature. No way to find products WITHOUT this feature. Anyway quite happy with my Mova which is a rebranded Dreame.
      • tguvot 10mo ago
        my house is actually mostly tiles/hardwood (at least areas that are accessible for roomba). but i want it just to be vacuumed. polished tiles will always have some water marks after washing and require pass with floor buffer to buff it out. i also don't want to deal with with clean/dirty water (yeah, i know that are now few models that you can hookup to drain/water supply. but it's not exactly trivial to arrange in convenient way). what i really want, is dock integrated with central vacuum.
        • jgilias 10mo ago
• ghaff 10mo ago
  My brother has a house that is pretty much custom-made for a robo-vacuum. One level, no transitions, they have pets. And they like it well enough (not an iRobot)--and it still gets tangled up in stuff from time to time. 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.
  • prawn 10mo ago
    A friend has a robot vac and just puts it in a room, closes the door, and leaves it for a couple of hours. Avoids the issue of worrying about which areas don't have kids' toys around, Lego, cords, etc. Higher touch than is ideal, but if you're already working from home and the kids are at school, it can work.
    • ghaff 10mo ago
      I guess. If I need to vac a room, that's probably 5 minutes work to pull out a broom vac and do it.
    • patrickk 10mo ago
      You can typically select certain rooms to clean rather than “clean all” on decent brands like roborock or Dreame. You can put it on a schedule too.
  • maxglute 10mo ago
    Depends on your tolerance for filth (not a value judgement). You don't know how messy your enviroment is untih you see a robovac fill cannisters of shit each week. Having baseline for cleaniness helps with allergies. Like everything you can optmize for some big QoL gains, i.e. i basically just whip crumbs from surfaces straight to the floor knowing it'll get picked up. The solution for 2 level homes is 2 robovacs, cheap second hand, going to get disgusting anyways, replace filters and bristles. A few 100 dollars to have 80% clean floors is pretty life changing. Does not replace need for manual vaccing nooks and corners every once in a while.
• jmclnx 10mo ago
  >A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns. 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.
  • amanaplanacanal 10mo ago
    It appears that it was the EU which blocked the deal rather than the US.
    • trinix912 10mo ago
      Do you have a source to back this up or you're just assuming? So far I've only seen FTC statements on this and they wouldn't have been too pleased with the merger.
      • amanaplanacanal 10mo ago
        Yeah, iRobot's press release: https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-to-terminate-pending-acquisition https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-... "Amazon's proposed acquisition of iRobot has no path to regulatory approval in the European Union, preventing Amazon and iRobot from moving forward together—a loss for consumers, competition, and innovation."
• tzs 10mo ago
  People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service). 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.
  • syntaxing 10mo ago
    Thanks to the full Chinese supply chain, you can replace every single part of the roborock. Even if Roborock doesn’t sell it directly, someone does. I’ve owned a couple and I haven’t had any main board die. But you can buy anything from the wheels, to main board, to lidar online.
    • vjk800 10mo ago
      I liked how you could buy an official Roomba spare parts kit, though. In a mechanical device meant for messy places, parts necessarily wear out quicker than in most electronics, and being able to buy and swap out the parts easily seemed like a nice feature.
  • forinti 10mo ago
    My Roomba has many years by now, and I've swapped a few parts. 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.
    • pandemic_region 10mo ago
      Same here, AliExpress for the custom parts like brushes etc at 1/5th of the price.
  • rgovostes 10mo ago
    Aside from having parts available, I was unexpectedly impressed that my RoboRock self-emptying dock (c. 2023) was clearly designed for painless serviceability. The ducts are easily accessed via removable panels, and you need only a Phillips screwdriver. 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.
• syntaxing 10mo ago
  Not too surprising. iRobot was all into SIFT for 15 years before the patent expired in 2020. Meanwhile, Chinese robot vacuums reverse engineered/stole/copy Neato's XV-11 lidar and made it better over the span of a decade (RIP Neato). iRobot joined the lidar party recently but it was too little too late. Product was too expensive and their brand was soured by the poor VSLAM performance. I had one of their mopping robots during the pandemic and you had to keep the lights on to mop. It would often get really lost if it went under a table. I got rid of it and replaced it with a roborock shortly after.
  • sudosysgen 10mo ago
    As far as I can tell cheapish 2D lidar for mapping and robot navigation were a bit earlier than the XV-11; they were made by Hokuyo in 2006. I remember that their lidar module was made by some other (American?) company that in turn competed with Hokuyo, people would take them out and use for their own projects. 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.
    • syntaxing 10mo ago
      I think the XV-11 was the first affordable (as in, affordable enough to be part of the COGS and reliable enough to be in a product) for consumers. It helped how there was a cult like following (understandably so) and everything got reversed engineered from schematic to firmware. By principle, a lidar is simple but most things are. The hard part is how to make a product out of it. One of the main things Chinese suppliers improved on 2D LiDAR is having the laser portion completely wireless. Induction powered, and LED light pipe for data communication. This removes the need for the slip ring which wears out and is hard to package.
• FuturisticLover 10mo ago
  Didn't Amazon acquire iRobot?
  • greenyoda 10mo ago
    Last sentence of the article: "A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns."
  • jader201 10mo ago
    No, the deal was killed: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/statement-regarding-termination-amazons-proposed-acquisition-irobot https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
    • MrBuddyCasino 10mo ago
      "[..] the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into the merger. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and several Democrats in the House of Representatives sent a letter to then-FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying "the FTC should use its authority to oppose the Amazon–iRobot transaction."" [0] Thanks, I guess? Better to let China buy the husk than evil Amazon, right. [0] https://reason.com/2025/10/31/irobot-faces-bankruptcy-after-elizabeth-warren-helped-kill-1-65-billion-amazon-merger/ https://reason.com/2025/10/31/irobot-faces-bankruptcy-after-...
• simonjgreen 10mo ago
  This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.
  • vjvjvjvjghv 10mo ago
    That seems to be a problem with many companies. Chinese companies are innovating aggressively while others don’t. You see that with 3d printers where Bambu is kicking ass. I remember when GoPro did a drone and it simply wasn’t good. Or American carmakers are trying to turn back the clock on electric instead of embracing it.
    • bamboozled 10mo ago
      Like Japan 40-50 years ago.,
    • devsda 10mo ago
      I know people like to say that it is American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies. This may be true in certain areas, but I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product all while the original company refuses to act. Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads but I don't believe that's the only reason they are not competitive.
      • LightBug1 10mo ago
        Yeah, "Chinese companies just copies" was 10-15 years or beyond. No way is that relevant now. I've been wondering about why this is. With no evidence, I wondered if one of the reasons is the long term result of the many design and engineering graduates (I notice an incredible amount in the industry I work in) who were educated in the "best western uni's" and have now returned home and grown up. They were a honeypot for said uni's for so long. But the end result may now mean they're kicking all asses in product markets. It can't just be cheap labour ... or maybe it's the combination.
• renewiltord 10mo ago
  Another success for EU antitrust law. By blocking an acquisition, they have allowed a bankruptcy purchase by a Chinese firm so that the market is between a few Chinese firms.
  • tacker2000 10mo ago
    The US FTC was also against the merger.
    • renewiltord 10mo ago
      We are forever in debt to Lina Khan as well for this success. Clearly an action of great regulatory foresight.
• woile 10mo ago
  I bought a roomba because I associated it with quality. It's crap! I bought a nice mopping model. The cheap one I had before was even better with a simple only-turn-left algorithm. I'm not surprised by this. 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.
• elric 10mo ago
  I was rather happy with my old, dumb Roomba. It just bounced around until things were clean. No cloud required. No mapping. No AI marketing foo. Seems like all the newer alternatives want internet access and send maps of your premises to some cloud somewhere. Seems completely unnecessary to me.
  • RealityVoid 10mo ago
    Mapping is very useful. I get the want to safeguard your data, but having smart navigation and obstacle detection just makes the product better.
    • ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
      Are you implying that internet access is required in order to have "smart nagivation" and obstacle detection? If so, could you clarify what you think the connection is?
      • RealityVoid 10mo ago
        No, I'm implying mapping is useful. I'm certain you can have local only mapping. But OP seemed to put the mapping as well as the rest of the features in the "unnecessary" bucket and my problem is that I consider mapping super necessy.
        • ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
          Ok, I see. I think that you're right.
    • elric 10mo ago
      Maybe mapping is very useful to you. The lack of it hasn't bothered me in the slightest. You also don't need mapping (or internet access) for obstacle detection. But I find that the old dumb roomba's bumpy nature is a good motivator to keep my place somewhat free of obstacles, which has other benefits. YMMV.
• 4ndrewl 10mo ago
  This is a shame. Unsure about later models, but my Roomba 620 is eminently repairable. Just last weekend I replaced the wheels with some original (from iRobot). It'll still be going in another 10 years, but the AliExpress sourced parts are never of the same quality.
  • Raed667 10mo ago
    i have a roborock and pretty much every moving part is replaceable and unofficial parts are available on aliexpress for dirt cheap
• furyg3 10mo ago
  Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down? 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.
  • mzhaase 10mo ago
    Check out valetudo.
    • gkhartman 10mo ago
      Second this if you are willing to do some mild hardware hacking. I've been running valetudo on two Dreame L10 vacuums for three years without issue. Keeps a lot of the smart features, for use over lan instead of a cloud connection.
      • shantara 10mo ago
        I have bought a Dreame L10 Ultra with Valetudo in mind, but I discovered that if you skip connecting it to the internet during the setup process, you can still use it normally. I don’t care about any of the smart features and simply start a full cleaning or a spot cleaning by pressing a hardware button on the robot itself.
        • ahoka 10mo ago
          Yeah, just press the button? I thought all machines have that.
        • gkhartman 10mo ago
          Good point. That seems like a good option as well if you don't need any other features. I don't really use many of the smart features, but the ability to set up cleaning zones in valetudo has been really nice. Same goes for "do not clean" zones.
• pjjpo 10mo ago
  Before clicking through I read the url as bloomber-glaw and thought it might be a phishing / fake news type of thing. Not a particularly useful comment but curious of others also have trouble reading that domain.
  • mabedan 10mo ago
    I read it the same way as you did
• rgovostes 10mo ago
  One of the privacy fears stoked about iRobot years ago was about them "selling maps of your home to the highest bidder" for advertising purposes. E.g., https://gizmodo.com/roombas-next-big-step-is-selling-maps-of-your-home-to-t-1797187829 https://gizmodo.com/roombas-next-big-step-is-selling-maps-of... 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.
  • cs02rm0 10mo ago
    > 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? I've no idea about rug pile depth, but I'd have thought a simple link between square footage and location would be a reasonable proxy for that affluency.
    • ageitgey 10mo ago
      Sure, but a simple address database seems like a lot easier way to get there than robots roving around houses with LIDAR?
      • whywhywhywhy 10mo ago
        Did Roomba ever use lidar? I thought their mapping feature was a camera pointing to the celling which is bringing in much richer data than lidar. Robot vacuums with lidar don't even need internet connections to work.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• everdrive 10mo ago
  This is one of the reasons why data collection is such a big problem: companies either sell the data, or they get bought themselves. If you trust a service with your data, all you need to do is wait.
• batisteo 10mo ago
  They went bankrupt even with all the personal floor map data they sold?
  • IAmBroom 10mo ago
    Golf clap. Well played.
• wolfgangbabad 10mo ago
  The problem is that all are quite tall which is a problem with some older sofas etc. Samsung did one "slim" model I think some time ago, but not sure if you can still buy it.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• neuroelectron 10mo ago
  My Roomba is about 10 years old, works great and I can still get parts for it. I guess that's where they messed up.
• christkv 10mo ago
  I guess my romba is about to be banished to a private network now.
• lvl155 10mo ago
  Where is Lina Khan who struck down the acquisition? Read the comments from the FTC. That was from less than two years ago. I am all for antitrust but Lina Khan was inept as they come in terms actually dealing with anti competitiveness in the tech. This is called dumping. Long-term dumping but it is what it is. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/statement-regarding-termination-amazons-proposed-acquisition-irobot https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
  • the_real_cher 10mo ago
    So an American company (amazon) was going to buy iRobot, but that was struck down by the courts. Now a Chinese company is buying them and there's no problems. is that the background on that?
    • lvl155 10mo ago
      They struck it down because they said it hurts competitiveness based on faulty economic arguments. It was clear even two years ago that the market was extremely competitive with much cheaper iRobot copies. Lina Khan just didn’t want Amazon to save an American company. Plain and simple. Anybody in the robotics field in MA could have told you iRobot was struggling and that Amazon was throwing them a bone to keep those engineers afloat.
    • novaRom 10mo ago
      Shouldn't first CFIUS oversee this takeover?
    • JetSpiegel 10mo ago
      The Chinese company has outstanding loans, it's not an "acquisition" per-se. It's the Chinese supplier getting made whole.
• thedangler 10mo ago
  I wonder if they would still be in business if they worked offline.
• cs702 10mo ago
  According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a] 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-a761-1bd8bb1a1923 https://www.ft.com/content/239d4720-aee4-443d-a761-1bd8bb1a1...
  • uxp100 10mo ago
    Nope, not all of them are connected to the internet and not all of them have cameras.
    • cs702 10mo ago
      Thanks. That's true. I edited my comment to reflect as much.
  • bhouston 10mo ago
    Definitely not all live and functioning. In fact I suspect less than 10m are actively used. It is a company that has been around for years and it has run into sales issues that last few years with competition and their products have tech product lifespans of around 3 years I suspect.
    • horsawlarway 10mo ago
      Personally, I have a Roomba I bought in Jan 2019 that's still doing just fine (So 7 years now). Most of the parts are pretty easily replaced (genuinely pleasant surprise, as an aside) and the company stocked most replacement parts for a long time - I just checked again and I can still get parts for my model (I-series) incl batteries, wheels, brushes, filters, etc. Which is less than it used to be, but still enough to keep mine rolling around for another 3ish years without any likely problems. And that's outside of the whole "unofficial" replacement parts ecosystem that popped up online. 3 years doesn't track with my experience on this one. I'd bet it's 5 to 10. --- For context, Amazon tried to buy them for exactly the same purpose ~2 years back (home/house data) and failed to get EU regulatory approval, so scrapped the deal. I'm not thrilled to have ownership transferred to another company (I was also very unhappy to hear the Amazon rumors back then) and I think this is a pretty clear risk. Even if a user is no longer using the device, Roomba still likely has plenty of data about their home floating around.
• rcarmo 10mo ago
  Well, time to see if valetudo (or some other "free the vacuums" project) can help me replace the firmware on mine...
• clarionbell 10mo ago
  One more proof that you need real industrial policy, not just 'let the market handle it'. Otherwise you end up as a consumer of products designed and manufactured somewhere else. The good thing is that China has proven that there is a way to turn not-industrial country into industrial one. So there is a blueprint for that.
  • BurningFrog 10mo ago
    Industrial policy was what stopped Amazon from buying Roomba.
• joejohnson 10mo ago
  Roomba should have taken Detroit's approach and asked the government to make any of the better vacuums cost 3x the price of a Roomba
• mattfrommars 10mo ago
  In one of the articles, they said Roomba were greatly affected by tariffs. Well, this company has been in business for a long time and should have figured out how to build roomba in the US, that would have been great innovation. But like most US corp, they only cared about profits and stock price.
  • ramraj07 10mo ago
    Until this administration there was no mandate to move manufacturing home, and importantly why would any company forgo significant profit to match an ideological framework, unless the ideology is what they sell or market?
  • legacynl 10mo ago
    That guy from smarter every day had a great youtube video about why that's basically impossible in the US right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY I'm not a fan of big coorps either, but these changes happened gradually over time, starting way back in probably the 50/60s. The blame is with the companies and the US government back then for allowing this critical knowledge to be lost. But Roomba didn't exist back then, and the problem is bigger than a single company. The only real solution is for the US government to invest heavily in regaining this capability for the coming 25 years. But doge and trump axed any chance of this happening so though luck i guess.
    • mnau 10mo ago
      Won't happen. In one of those videos, they showed earnings of metal workers and other such professions. It's downwards. Unless US can solve the problem "That job doesn't pay", there is no way forward. And it can't. It's just like a textile industry. The only way is if it's all done by robots.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• fny 10mo ago
  I'm all for antitrust, but it's a shame the Amazon acquisition was blocked.[0] 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-acquisition-over-antitrust-regulator-scrutiny https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-ac... 0: https://archive.is/rBn7z https://archive.is/rBn7z
  • echelon 10mo ago
    I was so angry at this. I want Amazon and Google to be broken up, but not in this category or along with these lines. This wasn't going to create some household appliance monopoly. Amazon has plenty of competition, and Roomba was already behind the curve. Now America is out of this market category. A category we invented. This felt like our last toehold in consumer robotics.
    • rockemsockem 10mo ago
      Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this. I doubt it though
      • echelon 10mo ago
        There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents. Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop. It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector. Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's Game of Thrones production costs using unrelated business units, market those movies and shows for free in the Amazon app, on their website, emblazoned on their delivery vehicles and on every item of packaging. Other companies have to pay hundreds of millions to match this. There is eyeball opportunity cost for consumers, and Amazon is flooding the zone with their free wares. This is a markedly unfair advantage. Amazon moves US union jobs overseas and trains up low cost crews in Eastern Europe. They buy up once successful studios on the cheap because they all tried to catch up with the stupid steaming game. Theatrical box office receipts are the biggest revenue driver for studios by a wide margin. Individually, studios could have countered Netflix and Disney by pulling licensing. Amazon in the mix threatened this, because they had existing content licenses and also controlled home media releases. The studios felt cornered by tech giants basically salting the earth. They had to give up healthy Box Office proceeds and exclusivity to chase streaming and defend their access to eyeballs as best they could. You've heard of Disney eating the mid market film? Amazon ate everything. It left no oxygen in the fish bowl. Amazon's entertainment business needs to be spun off. All of that can be true and completely unrelated to Roomba. Nothing should have prevented their purchase of iRobot. That was insanity.
• dwa3592 10mo ago
  It was bound to happen. I had bought two different robo vaccums at two different times (in 2022[irobot], then 2025[eufy], both upwards of $400) - they both were pretty terrible and I ended up returning both of them. I can't believe people are still using these things. They get stuck when there is no reason to get stuck, they miss dirt that should be picked up.
  • hackernewds 10mo ago
    your anecdote doesn't have much to do with the reasons presented in the article?
  • archermarks 10mo ago
    I got a cheap Chinese one (no camera, wifi) in 2024 and it's been a game changer. Yeah it's kind of dumb but it runs every day and picks up an unholy amount of dust, cat hair, and the like. Maybe if you were already vacuuming every day they're pretty useless but for me it's been night and day. As another commenter said, they're also surprisingly repairable, and I bought a ton of spare parts before the tariffs went in.
  • wpietri 10mo ago
    As a friend described the first generation: they're way worse than hand vacuuming, but way better than not vacuuming. So they're really only valuable for people who don't enjoy cleaning and don't have servants clean for them.
  • somehnguy 10mo ago
    The only ones worth getting have Lidar. I've had a 'random path' one before and it was like you described. My Lidar one runs every day with only a rare issue when I leave a cord strung across the floor or similar.
    • dwa3592 10mo ago
      That's what I thought and hence I bought the eufy model with a lidar; I also thought maybe the technology in 2025 is more mature but it wasn't the case. It would complain about obstacles even thought there was nothing on the ground. Maybe I was unlucky both the times but I am just way more satisfied when I clean the house with my $100 hand held vaccum haha.
• jklowden 10mo ago
  iRobot’s largest creditor isn’t its Chinese supplier. It’s the US government, in the form of unpaid tariffs, some $3.5 million. Arguably it was Trump’s stupid tariffs that drove the company out of business. Rather than bringing manufacturing to the US, it allowed the Chinese to acquire an American company, leaving production right where it is.
• infecto 10mo ago
  About time. They never iterated and made a better product. All of the roombas end up being bump sensor machines, the mapping is garbage. My $200 Roborock has lidar and works flawlessly compared to my roomba I bought 3 years prior for $700. Sure there is a gap on years but the difference is light years apart.
  • fullstop 10mo ago
    .. and iRobot _just_ introduced LiDAR, many years too late.
    • infecto 10mo ago
      Too late and unless pricing changed too expensive. I was amazed when I got this Roborock a year ago it was 2-250 on sale via Amazon. Just a vacuum but it has lidar. I remember it mapping the floor and was amazed how well it worked.
• whiteboardr 10mo ago
  What is alienating to me is how a “chinese” owner seems so much worse than any other nationality in this discussion. How is this different from anybody else?
• mnd999 10mo ago
  Why does a robotic vacuum cleaner need to connect to the internet at all? Mine doesn't (Neato Botvac D85) and it works fine.
• projektfu 10mo ago
  Doesn't/didn't iRobot have a defense business as well? Or am I confused here. I don't see anything about it in the article.
• JSR_FDED 10mo ago
  People worried about Chinese ownership of their Roombas, but completely OK with Alexa and Google devices in their homes.
  • IAmBroom 10mo ago
    I don't want lead in my tapwater, but regularly pour poisonous liquids over ice for drinking. Not all dangerous things are the same thing.
• yalogin 10mo ago
  How bad were they doing? I thought this is a good time to be in robotics and was actually thinking roomba could be the big beneficiary in the new AI personal robot craze. Very surprising to see they filed for bankruptcy, could they have not just raised private equity with some ai buzzwords?
• joak 10mo ago
  The DJI ROMO robot vacuum is amazing. It shows what can be done with today's technology. My Roomba is just crap compared with DJI's. I'm not surprised they went bankrupt. a ROMO video https://youtu.be/Iv7BYURURRI?si=gfaPPiFpEMj1SVaT https://youtu.be/Iv7BYURURRI?si=gfaPPiFpEMj1SVaT
• lenerdenator 10mo ago
  It really is amazing that we keep letting our main geopolitical rival buy up our companies. The "shareholder value == societal benefit" mind virus is easily the worst thing to come out of higher American academia in the last hundred years, and that's saying something.
• bitcoinertools 10mo ago
  [dead]
• 127 10mo ago
  Another argument for open source devices that are easily repairable and modifiable by the user (or a 3rd party shop).
• Waterluvian 10mo ago
  After a long time of being skeptical that a $1300 robot will work well enough, I bought the Eufy X10 for $500 CAD. It's insane to me that this thing sells for so little and yet it works incredibly well and has all the features I'd want. The UX is also really, really good (my full-time job is real-time map UI for robot fleets). What impresses me the most is the maintainance section that has "X hours left" for a dozen things you maintain on the robot. Tap one and it shows you a visual step-by-step for how to perform maintainance on that component. It feels like China will be very hard to compete with.
• oxag3n 10mo ago
  Found my rumba vacuum in unexpected place in my house, then saw the news 0_o.
• salmandaw 10mo ago
  Guess who has the largest dataset on the inside of American homes?
• salmandaw 10mo ago
  The chinese robots are gonna love this !
• rkagerer 10mo ago
  Is there a good, alternative robotic vacuum to the Roomba that is not cloud connected?
• syngrog66 10mo ago
  I bought a Roomba around 2006. It died within a month. Never bought again. Today I'd need to assume it would serve as a surveillance tool by the Chinese gov, or other bad actors, and so would also never buy one. All of IoT is a security anti-pattern now.
• BenFranklin100 10mo ago
  Maybe Lina Khan blocking the sale to Amazon wasn’t such a great idea after all.
• krosaen 10mo ago
  Anyone have experience with https://valetudo.cloud https://valetudo.cloud? Seems like could be a good solution to using best rated (chinese) vacuum's while mitigating privacy concerns. I am bummed that US robovacs aren't that competitive. Rooting for Matic, though currently don't seem to be as good as Dreame / roborocks [1] (can't go under furniture, apparently take longer to clean same area, tout "vision only" as a feature while charging more - you would think having fewer sensors / no lidar would bring costs down). [1] https://vacuumwars.com/matic-robot-vacuum-review/ https://vacuumwars.com/matic-robot-vacuum-review/
  • thefunnyman 10mo ago
    Yup, been using it on an older roborock s5 for several years now. It's excellent and works flawlessly with home assistant. Cannot recommend enough. The robot running its own webserver while it cleans my apartment is still so funny to me.
• asveikau 10mo ago
  In home automation circles, Roomba is generally regarded as worse than other brands. Anyone know which brands work when you completely block internet access? I think Roborock is one of the better regarded robot vacuums, but I think I read that they shut down when they can't phone home.. maybe Dreame?
• snorbleck 10mo ago
  Clearly a sign that AI is even taking the tradbots' jobs now.
• abustamam 10mo ago
  I got a Roomba Combo J7+ (auto empty, mopping) a few years back. Spent $700+ on it. A few years into ownership it ran over cat vomit, got it warranty replaced. And then just recently it decided to stop going home — it makes its way to the dock but stops shy of actually charging. I could get some module replaced but it's no longer under warranty, and I really don't want to deal with a dying company. I've been seeing a lot of ads and talk about Roborock, and ChatGPT highly suggested that I upgrade to a Roborock Qrevo based on my household needs. I just don't want to spend $700+ on a new vac that will brick itself in a few years. Anyone have any recommendations? I see a lot of Roborock recommendations in the comments, but also Dream and Eufy so now I'm just overwhelmed.
  • imp0cat 10mo ago
    Sadly, the robotic vacuum market is quite saturated, there are multiple models by many manufacturers and no clear winner.
  • nfredericks 10mo ago
    I bought a Roborock after returning my Roomba, and it was the best choice I ever made. It works amazing, even in a house full of pets.
• downrightmike 10mo ago
  Recommendations for an alternative?
• kensai 10mo ago
  Seriously, and it's not intended to troll. To all those making catastrophical scenarios, how would a Chinese entity start streaming data from your robot cleaner and, more importantly, how will this be a security breach at your home or worse, nation?
  • dyauspitr 10mo ago
    A comment like this belies a complete lack of imagination. Having a view inside the house of anyone remotely in power can be used in all kinds of ways ranging from espionage to simple blackmail. A video of infidelity, large purchases, guest lists at your domicile etc. can be catastrophic for someone that wants something from you.
• dpc_01234 10mo ago
  For all these "Please charge Rumba!!!" in the middle of the night, good riddance.
• silexia 10mo ago
  When you take on investors, this always seems to happen as they saddle your company with debt. My company has been bootstrapped from day one with zero debt. Sixteen years later, financially very healthy and deliver great customer results.
• FloatArtifact 10mo ago
  Can anyone name company name a a vacuum robot that is not made in China?