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To be honest the Roomba sucked and got eaten alive by better chinese competitors. I bought a top of the line expensive Roomba years ago and ended up switching
by daft_pink 10mo ago
To be honest the Roomba sucked and got eaten alive by better chinese competitors.
I bought a top of the line expensive Roomba years ago and ended up switching to neato a year later, because I would just come home and it would be stuck on something.
- km144 10mo agoSure, but the author is arguing that the outcome you're describing is tightly coupled to the perverse incentives that he describes in the article. Investors pushed the company towards extraction over innovation and the end product suffered as a result.
- Grosvenor 10mo agoThat is probably true. But Roomba sucked in the early 2000's too. They never got better.
- viscanti 10mo agoI believe the author's thesis is that if they had invested in innovation over a couple decades, the product probably would have sucked less.
- charcircuit 10mo agoThe innovation being shutdown wasn't innovation towards making robot vacuum cleaners better. It was innovation direct towards military applications like building robotic hands.
- crazygringo 10mo agoExactly this. If they had been innovating in vacuum technology then maybe this article would have a point. But they were building stuff for the military and for space, and there's a good reason investors wanted them to get out of that because it was sucking up money and not resulting in better vacuum cleaners.
- satellite2 10mo agoWell it's 2025, we've just spent the better half of the year discussing the bitter lesson. It seems clear solving more general problem is key to innovation.
- charcircuit 10mo agoHardware is not like software. A general purpose humanoid cleaning robot will be superior to a robot vacuum but it will always cost an order of magnitude more. This is different from software where the cost exponentially decreases and you can do the computer in the cloud.
- crazygringo 10mo agoI'm not sure advancements in AI and advancements in vacuum cleaners are at similar stages in terms of R&D. I'd be very wary of trying to apply lessons from one to the other.
- randomfrogs 10mo agoIt's a vacuum cleaner. All you want it to do is suck.
- nine_k 10mo agoBut not at navigation.
- pgwhalen 10mo agoIt does seem like that upon reading the article, but it’s not what the title of the article suggests.
- justinclift 10mo agoOr perhaps would have sucked more where it needed to, and sucked less where it didn't.
- kibwen 10mo agoAnd the commenter above is highlighting the article's hypothesis about why they never got better.
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- sleight42 10mo agoYet they were about far more than just vacuums! In the 2000s, no one was doing what they were doing.
- fellowniusmonk 10mo agoExplore vs exploit? Let's run an expierement where we just run exploit forever, let's restrucute the private sector, our countries moral baselines and eventually our executive leadership to be maximally exploitive, lets do that for about 45 years and see where it lands us -Some greed is good guys in the 80s probably.
- daft_pink 10mo agoIt just doesn’t seem like these other vacuum robotics companies spend so much money on research and development. I’m sure they could have built more advanced robots, etc. If they had focused on research, but when virtually every competitor is cheaper and offers better technology. It seems like their competitors just applied something off the shelf and not some grand big brain advancement.
- sleight42 10mo agoMissing the point. iRobot was far more than vacuums until they weren't. Read the article. The author spells it out. I lived it. I read about them and bought a Roomba back when they first sold them. They had so much in the pipeline, consumer and otherwise. Hell, they even had a STEM kit programmable Roomba. History repeats itself because people forget.
- daft_pink 10mo agoIt just says that they sold off their defense robot division and launched a consumer products company. They just aren’t consumer centric. The neato was so much better than the Roomba and that was so long ago
- rootusrootus 10mo agoThat's a good reminder I need to go track down my roborock, it got stuck somewhere again. There's a map thankfully which helps me figure out where to look.
- fluidcruft 10mo agoYou could stick a tracker on it
- dpc_01234 10mo agoDid your Roombas also yelled in the middle of the night "PLEASE CHARGE ROOMBA!!!" every few minutes with no way to disable that behavior? I now have 2x $150 iLifes and couldn't be happier. They're also imperfect, but they are affordable and simple.
- bhaney 10mo agoOne of the first things I did with my robot vacuum cleaner was open it up and yank out its speaker.
- stephenitis 10mo agoGenius! Why I didn’t think of this!
- like_any_other 10mo ago> better chinese competitors. From the article: Under a trade regime overseen by men like Furman, the company offshored production, thus teaching its future rivals in China how to make robot cleaners.
- malvim 10mo ago* Surprised Pikachu face *
- vincefutr23 10mo agoSucked not the ideal pejorative for a vacuum
- ulrashida 10mo ago"We have not yet begun to truly suck."
- dylan604 10mo agoGrowing up, local morning radio shows were no longer allowed to say "that sucked" so they all switched to "that vacuumed". The ridiculousness of being offended by idioms like this amuses me
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoSucking is a good state for a vacuum. If Roomba sucked well enough, it wouldn't have gone bankrupt.
- goodolddays9090 10mo ago[dead]
- observationist 10mo agoHow much difference was made by the Chinese competitors being able to use whatever IP they wanted, and Roomba being constrained by law and licensing, and not being able to enforce their own IP? What were the consequences of having to engage with China for manufacturing, effectively giving them the capability to clone any R&D on the fly, without having to figure things out themselves? How much did regulation and taxation and red tape play into Roomba's inability to compete? What sort of VC deals were they shackled by, in order to siphon off the data and abuse it for third party marketing, and other forms of enshittification? There's a lot that American companies have been held back by. Some of it is actually good, consumer protective and well crafted, but it won't work if you allow other players in the same market to ignore the regulations and restrictions without consequences. Other policy is just stupid and self destructive, and other policies border on malignant, deliberately giving foreign companies significant advantages, directly and indirectly, without any other purpose. American companies are way too easily forced into a race to the bottom dynamic, resulting in failure and huge wastes of money and effort.
- azurezyq 10mo agowhat law and licensing prevented iRobot to adopt Lidar? Given Lidar is used everywhere already.
- observationist 10mo agoIt's not any particular feature - it's the licensing and royalties paid on tech patented and owned by other parties in the US, or by parties the US recognizes. Since that's not reciprocal, it's a drag on any US company, or company that respects US jurisdiction. Put enough sticky notes on a Tour De France rider and you'll eventually guarantee their loss. That's the one-sided policy problem with the US, internally. Now if other riders are doping and using secret electric motors, but the stickied up rider can't cheat in the same way, then you just guarantee their loss, even if it's only a little degrading. We need a better, more accountable, and more transparent international trade framework. Something that shuts out bad faith players that use slave labor, child labor, exploitative wages, things like that, and appropriately scales tariffs and other mechanisms to penalize the violations appropriately. I'd much rather the playing field be entirely fair and even than do the current US thing of "well, we're going to impose a lot of moralistic and patronizing rules on ourselves, but allow anyone anywhere else to ignore those rules, because it makes for good political theater back home, and it makes shareholders happy."
- iwontberude 10mo agoThey all suck. (No pun intended)
- Semaphor 10mo agoI had an ancient-ish Roomba (620, 11 years ago). The repairability was amazing. This was from back when there was little competition, but just 2 years ago I could still get every part replaced. Only screws, nothing else. It was beautiful. I got a new vacuum/mop now, vastly better functionality, in exchange for the cloud, but I'm glad my old one lives one at my parents. I've read it's way worse nowadays, but if they stayed at their quality from back then, I'd have probably paid more for an offline workable repairable vacuum.
- throw-qqqqq 10mo ago> To be honest the Roomba sucked I have an old Roomba (980 perhaps?) and laud it as one of my best appliances. It’s a work horse! We’re had it for five-six years and it still works great. Nowadays it sometimes needs to charge twice to finish, but I only notice if I’m home - and I could just replace the battery. Parts are so easy to replace, that my wife has replaced most, and she isn’t a tinkerer. Maybe I just don’t know what I’m missing - I’ve never had others - but I love my Roomba.
- macNchz 10mo agoI also have a 980 that's going strong. A number of parts replaced over time, so refreshingly repairable. My mother in law has had a whole lineup of Chinese robot vacuums in the time we've owned Roomba and they haven't seemed miraculously more effective. Ours does get stuck occasionally, but it runs every day so...it's not a huge deal if it doesn't finish on any given day.
- raelming 10mo agoI think a lot of people who have pets or kids who are outside a lot and some rooms with hard floors would be pleasantly surprised at how good even a really mediocre mopping does when it's done often enough.
- asdff 10mo agoThe main thing is with the chinese ones you get lidar and a cached map from that lidar run (so you can send it to clean specific areas) and they cost maybe a third or less what roomba charges, at least when I was in the market.
- caycep 10mo agoI see what you did there...
- sleight42 10mo agoThe top comment completely misses the point. iRobot was remarkably innovative until they were enshittified decades before the term was coined.