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.
I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced.
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I guess Rodney Brooks got busy with other interests, and whomever ran things didn't realize that Tim Ferris is full of shit.
It was extremely frustrating to watch these assholes destroy the company right from the outset. All they needed to do, was to slowly walk forward and iterate with improvements.
The only surprise in this news is that it took SO LONG for them to dismantle the company.
I do not think it's appropriate for an organization holding this much deeply personal data can be sold to any foreign entity.
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.
So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.
But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.
I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
While those patents are not enforceable in China (unless equivalents were also filed in China -- unsure if they would be worth much) they would be when imported to the US. This is one of the reasons the ITC exists, and it played a prominent role during the smartphone patent wars. So at least the US market would be protected from knock-offs.
> If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.
That's an opinion, and not one I agree with.
If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades.
Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example.
It's asinine to think you can outsource manufacturing of whatever object to some other company in another country, but that no one on the planet can make the same thing because "the idea is yours".
> Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire.
What happens at expiration is an important and intended feature of patents. They trade a legally guaranteed headstart against the requirement of publishing your methods for your competitors to learn from.
Coasting on their patents is exactly why iRobot went bankrupt. If they had a proper incentive to continue innovating, they might be around today. Instead, the patent system incentivized them to erect a tollgate and snooze away in the booth next to it.
Zhaoxin makes X86 and countless make ARM chips. SMIC being a foundry.
> The Chinese Microsoft?
Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance.
>The Chinese Boeing?
Comac makes passenger and Chengdu fighter jets.
>The Chinese NVIDIA?
Huawei makes AI GPUs.
>People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world
Considering the US never had its industry blown up in any war and could reap the benefits of 150+ years worth of higher education, stability, skilled immigration, compounding wealth, and taking over the vacuum of Europe's post-war industrial powers, that's not really something THAT impressive.
>and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
If it isn't halfway trying, why does it feel the need to sanction or ban chinese competitors?
>> US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government.
> Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA?
Where are the new ones?
Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing.
> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.
I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
* built a lithium refinery
* produces its own battery cells
* makes its own motors and drivetrains
* makes its own car seats
* owns and operates a fast-charging network
* sells direct, bypassing dealerships
* offers insurance integrated with vehicle data
* develops its own autopilot AI
Great point, and to drive it home -- TSLA is the only competitive non-Chinese company in the EV space. You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms, considering the whole U.S.-Taiwan stranglehold on chip mfg
> I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
I think there are a lot of different reasons:
1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.
2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US.
3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.
>I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.
Just post your ideas to crowdsource websites and wait for the aliexpress clone to appear, zero r&d costs, zero dev and manufacturing/qa! That said, Taobao and Ali are so full of bizarre products (transparent rubber domes to be able to type with 5cm long nail extensions), it will be a challenge to stand out
They could improve the design and get people to replace their machines with the improved ones, repeat and repeat.
Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
> They could improve the design and get people to replace their machines with the improved ones, repeat and repeat.
> Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
This strategy has limits, and I think iRobot hit those, and they didn't didn't lower themselves to switch to the second strategy of selling cheap unreliable garbage.
> The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
I'd dispute this in this case: Rumbas may not have solved the vacuuming problem for everyone, but they solved it for me (at least), and they were built pretty well (reliable, modular & reparable design, etc.).
> Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
1. I've got both, and the Roomba works a lot better than not vacuuming with the canister vacuum at all. It doesn't frustrate me, and it took far less time to Roomba-proof than vacuuming it every week for a year.
2. I agree with the IP address thing, but I think at only got added when they attempted to "get people to replace their machines with the improved ones." I have a couple of the older models that have no network connection.
I remember the "upgrade for pets" option, which... didn't work. After buying the maxed out version I realized that the product simply had a long, long way to go - but iRobot did nothing with it other than launch new segments like "upgrade for vision based mapping" etc.
The promise didn't pan out for us. You have to prepare and cordon off the floor, and the unit gets stuck half the time. Somehow it's exactly the right height to get wedged under furniture.
My wife got one to try and automate away the vacuuming. We went through the same thing, and it still needs to be babysit anyways. For the sheer amount of time and frustration of basically all robot vacuums, it has been easier to just get a nice Kenmore upright bagged vacuum and do it yourself anyways (and the results are basically always way nicer).
I'm pretty optimistic about biped robots for this. Either you buy or lease one and a cleaning service teleoperates it, or subscribe to a cleaning service that drops it off and teleoperates for a few hours a week. Suppose it could even walk itself to the next customer if close enough.
They were saying that whoever was running things at Roomba must have been duped by the 4 hour work week bs because nothing was getting done. Specifically whoever took over operations, planning, and product improvements from Brooks.
Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government. The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders (e.g. Meng Wanzhou, Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried, Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom, etc.).
> Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government.
You're making zero sense:
1. I predict there will be no change in the US government's access as a result of this.
2. I don't think Americans aren't so indifferent to their own country that they'd prefer a situation where an adversary country gets handed an intelligence asset. I mean, hypothetically, would an American prefer US trade policy be set that disadvantages American workers, because some politician got blackmailed because of something his Roomba recorded?
> The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders
3. The Chinese government has been going after people in the US. They've long been engaged in industrial espionage, but there's also their "overseas police stations" (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65305415). It's worth noting that US citizens can have a Chinese origin, and I doubt the Chinese government would suddenly become uninterested in a dissident once he got naturalized.
> Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.
When Twitter had its recent VPN reveal, what actually took me by surprise was how many divisive accounts weren't from China or Russia, but from regions of the world like Turkey, India, Africa, and South America. Sure, they could be spouting divisive politics to push an agenda of someone who is paying them, but the simpler answer might be that they spout divisive politics because it earns them money in terms of advertising dollars.
And that's the real problem, IMHO. The subversion of democracy isn't happening because of China, Russia, or any number of adversarial countries, but because our social media companies don't care enough about our country or the people living inside it to meaningfully crack down on ragebait engagement farming.
The general thing about state actors is that they have every incentive to have a dossier of compromising information on every foreign national regardless of current relevance, for potential use in the future. You could, for instance, someday be in a position where you have privileged access to data that becomes relevant to them, and thus your history becomes useful.
True, but the US has a long track record of pursuing both foreigners and citizens—through prosecutions, extraditions, sanctions, or asset seizures—often years later and regardless of nationality. In practical terms, the risk of being targeted by the US for breaking a law is far higher than being blackmailed by a foreign state like China. The consequences are asymmetric as well: blackmail usually amounts to little more than embarrassment, whereas being pursued by the US government can carry lengthy prison sentences or worse.
This is not to mention that the US also engages in data collection for coercion purposes.
Since this can be a significant security issue for the state, why doesn't the government sponsor a security audit of the software. Does it upload the data or everything is done on the device? (Also, will have to keep up with the updates)
Because regulation is bad, according to the current executive?
Politics aside, the FDA applies a very generous amount of regulation (mostly justifiable), not sure we want to pay multiples for our consumer electronics, as it (mostly) shows acceptable behavior and rearely kills anybody.
It is bad. Regulations have been historically hijacked to benefit corporate interests. See Intuit and tax policy for example.
Voters on the right naively thought he'd work to fix it. (Wrong!) But it is very much bad for a very large number of issues. Maybe next executive will fix it? (Wrong!)
Well, I hope you learned your lesson and now won't blindly trust any corporation again, but rather demand open code and full control over the device you bought.
Especially if it is a moving camera in your home...
At least in the US, the Chinese government realistically should have been the least of your worries. What's China gonna do, if they caught you reading the Quran, or snorting crack? They could livestream your marriage proposal in WeChat to a billion people and you wouldn't ever notice. Meanwhile Snowden revealed, covertly watching random people through webcams is a leisure activity at the NSA, a national institution incidentally sharing jurisdiction with you. And evidently, your wife's death in a car accident may become a trending video at Tesla headquarters, while they deny your claims for a lack of such evidence.
> demand open code and full control over the device you bought
What do we do with companies/products like Tesla, short of shutting them down? Fully open code and absolute full control seems like it's going too far. Idealistically I like it, but practically I can't see it working.
Let's just say a family member has a very important and somewhat secretive job. The most classified meetings don't happen in our home, of course, but for a state adversary even small clues can be what's needed.
(So why get a roving camera in the first place? We judged that one from a historically and currently aligned state would be safe enough, even though it's not ideal.)
The inside of a lawmaker's house? A general's? A CEO's? Why would anyone ever want insider information, including possible blackmail evidence, from them?
People like that have a cleaning service, they don't do their own housework. And ironically, the cleaning service is far better equipped to plant surveillance devices or exfiltrate information than a robot vacuum gadget.
Why would the Chinese government want to regularly launch cyber attacks against US infrastructure, except it's been happening for years? US security companies and governments have been defending against it for years and have even cataloged the state-sponsored attack groups.
Blackmail for one: "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....". That will work on some people, discovering extramarital affairs, or proving you know intimate details about the inside of someone's house, along with threat of physical violence will work on others. You just need to be sufficiently creative. You can parlay the successes from one target to the next: "I can get both of you divorced unless you install the rootkit on your work's network"
I will reference a quote I originally heard on HN years ago, though: the audio surveillance is magnitudes more valuable than the video.
Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough, but when people are having sexy time, they are not really likely to be running the roomba. Having that thing running is the opposite of sexy. When the thing is parked on the base station, it is facing the wall. So exactly how frequently do people think a roomba is running to be capturing all of this explicit footage?
To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some of these examples are just bat shit crazy well beyond paranoid
> they are not really likely to be running the roomba.
You seem to assume that they have somehow physically disabled access to any kind of remote activation. That seems extremely unlikely given the overall selling points of the roomba.
The roomba doesn't have to "run" in order to be using its microphone, which as noted is likely the more valuable data acquisition source here.
Maybe read the comment I was replying to before replying with something unrealted? "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....".
Turning on a microphone is not going to capture the required pics for this blackmail campaign.
Yes, that's deliberately missing the point of what was said though. We know the vacuum is using the camera (when equipped) while the unit is running. Go back and re-read what I wrote to see why this is not the same thing.
I don't like this kind of surveillance any more than anyone else on HN, but we get this here all the time. People make these posts that X leads to Y and jump way over the details. Sometimes X does lead to Y. Other times, it's the Underpants Gnomes: There's a big "???" step between X and Y that people don't like to take the time to articulate. This is how conspiracy theories take hold--you ignore the ??? and just assume "Of course X leads to Y! We all know it!"
HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.
Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.
We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.
What is not for sale today, can be for sale tomorrow. Even Apple and Alphabet, should their leaders see greater market value in selling data rather than not selling it.
At this point I trust the Chinese government way more than almost every US tech giant.
I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.
But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.
As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.
Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.
This reminds me of the line from "Jackie Brown": "You can't trust Melanie. But you can trust Melanie to be Melanie".
I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.
I disconnected my Roomba from the network right after programming its schedule. It still works great, following the same schedule for 7 years.
I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.
If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
> Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
Most people don't have the required knowledge to make an educated decision about whether to care. In fact, most people are not even aware of the question, let alone have the knowledge, let alone caring, let alone making a choice.
I don't think there are tens of millions still in use.
Unless you design your house and buy your furnitures taking these roomba into account, they get stuck nearly every where or at the first sock left on the ground by someone in your household. They have a number of wearable most owner will not even want to replace and will start being inefficient rather quickly. Add to that some battery wear and I don't think there is a lot of +5y old devices in the wild.
I and most people I know went back to regular vacuum cleaners. The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house. Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them and cleaning the bathroom and toilets correctly are both much more time consuming and annoying jobs.
> The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house.
Hard disagree, because vacuuming is something you often need to do daily. Spending 10 min/day becomes over an hour a week. That's a significant chunk. If you have smooth floors, running a Roomba kind of becomes a no-brainer.
On the other hand, I only need to dust once a week, and that takes all of 10 minutes. Cleaning the bathroom is similarly once a week (assuming you wipe/brush the sink and toilet bowl as necessary after use).
Reducing vacuuming time, to me, is the #1 thing you can do to save cleaning time, if you live in a Roomba-compatible space.
I agree with this take, it has been my experience as well. The robot vacuum isn't there so you never need to vacuum, the robot vacuum is there so you can have decently clean floors daily and only need to do the deeper cleaning once a week or so.
But I also get the difficulty when you have a space with lots of larger debris around. The robot vacuum was excellent before kids. Now with little kids that will leave toys and other obstacles all over the place, it requires diligence to pick up after them (and work to teach them to clean up their toys and socks) to ensure the vacuum can be effective.
>Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them
With furnishing optimized for dust generation (less materials where the dust-shitting microbes live, like material curtains) and daily Roomba runs (plus eventual air filter running in the background) there is very little to dust off of surfaces. If there's little dust on the floor, it doesn't get kicked up and doesn't land on things. Ergo - Roomba makes dusting easier.
A lot of people probably bought them for the novelty and then decided they weren't really all that useful for their homes and lifestyles. At least that's what a number of friends have told me. Cordless stick vacs also came in and made a lot of vacuuming jobs quicker and easier.
Yeah - they don't work well at all. And work from home is definitely incompatible with roombas. Those things are loud and run for a long time. Both ours are in the storage room collecting dust.
I am one of those weirdos! I bought a roomba in 2015 and it's still going. Second battery, sixth set of rollers and brush, god knows how many filters. Mine's also a dumb one: no wifi or pathfinding, just boring old "drives around until it smacks into shit" navigation.
I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
I used to have a similar dumb one (Roomba 860 if memory serves) and it would take the same path over and over again in certain corners of my house, which meant my carpet ended up with unsightly wheel tracks on it from the repetition. I don't think it did a very good job vacuuming either, no matter how much it ran, a normal vacuum would always pull a boatload more crud up.
It's an interesting idea but it just didn't work for me and I wouldn't consider buying another.
It's not for hardcore use for sure, not a replacement for a proper vacuuming. I use it in my office/part of my basement, it gets the vast majority of stuff up and keeps the cat hair under control.
I don't know that I'd buy another, especially because the new ones creep me out with all the cameras and such, but as long as I can keep this one running, it does a good enough job.
I worry a lot about privacy in general but its hard for me to figure out the danger posed by my roborock. I suppose it has the floor plans of my house and knows we vacuum on Saturdays. It doesn't seem to know if the object passing by is me or my cat.
Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets.
I think this is the wrong mental model (attempt to articulate threats from a specific information leakage). The problem I have with this approach is that it ignores "sensor fusion" by treating each leak as independent and defining threats as "things i can picture happening".
I think the correct mental model for this is "leaking bits". Leaking bits is bad, it doesn't take many bits to uniquely identify you and you're also not able to anticipate how those bits might be used in future or correlated with other bits.
Just stop leaking bits when you can avoid it. Then you don't have to mentally model every threat you come across
One of the more tractable examples here is the information what cell towers your cell phone is connected to. On it's own, it doesn't tell you that much.
But if you have this from 2-3 people, you can start inferring if they are meeting sporadically, meet a lot, possibly live together.
Or, if you add information about the services in the vicinity of cell towers, you can start deducing changes in a persons life. Suddenly the phone is moving more, to places with a doctor nearby, a gynecologist nearby, clothing stores, furniture stores, ... eventually a hospital. Start mixing in information about the websites they visit...
This incremental discovery of information about a person is surprisingly powerful depending on the data you have and hard to predict.
I agree with this completely. I feel like my phone is leaking so much sensitive information about me in so many ways. And it has access to my location, my communications, my finances. And it is hard to turn off. I can turn off my vacuum cleaner for months if I want. I can't turn off my phone or the computer in my car.
I guess that's why the vacuum doesn't worry me. The phone really does.
In a scenario, where the US and China go to an actual shooting war, moving a couple million high-energy-density devices near the most flammable object in a houshold and purposefully setting the device on fire would be an interesting new variety of shock and awe. Not too new actually, thinking about the mossad pager attack.
The concern - for you, maybe nothing. However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us" (trying to capture private conversations of politicians. Or it could do the same for vacuums located new military bases or corporate headquarters. With transcription software and AI, it could simply record and transcribe every conversation it hears and look for important information or mentions of key phrases.
> However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us"
The old company could have done the same thing. I recognize that China is a u.s. geopolitical adversary, but when it comes to politics domestic adversaries are just as ruthless.
> The old company wasn't a domestic political adversary
That depends entirely on the politics in question. It's well known that corporations are willing to abuse their power for political ends if it serves their interests to do so.
Do you think the Chinese government would ever have reasons to "ask the company forcefully" to take pictures and/or record audio inside specific offices and homes?
The broad concern that some people have is misplaced (China doesn't care about the average American home). The narrow concern is extremely plausible: that China would happily use it to target dissidents for example, or people that have fled China for various reasons. We've seen how aggressive they are over time in targeting those people, including physical kidnappings in the US and elsewhere.
The acquisition of iRobot should be immediately blocked on national security concerns. China would have no problem doing the same if the situations were reversed.
I’m curious about this too. I’d worry about a local burglar having this information, but what can a Chinese tech company do with this data that I should be concerned about?
First, just the evergrowing tracking of everything, it's just unwholesome in general.
Second, why assume a random Chinese tech company will manage to keep this information to themselves? I wouldn't exactly bet against some terabytes of videos appear on some torrent indexer. Now, combine with modern AI tools for sifting for what you are interested in, and it might hit closer to home for someone.
What I don't get is why people buy robots that carry microphones, lidars and cameras AND connect to the Internet.
I don't really care if the camera is American or Chinese, I just don't want a camera/mic in my home that I don't control. And yeah, the smartphone counts but it's a lot harder not to have one.
Assuming an efficient market it'll eventually be sold to a local burglar. Also, I imagine ICE might be interested in a list of homes where something besides English was spoken. Also there are those email scams that claim to have video of you doing something embarrassing, but usually don't. Given the trajectory of AI, their claims might start being true.
> The Chinese aren't the ones running massive scam orgs backed by their government. They're bust teaching up and innovating on a massive scale.
The scammers would be in India, backed by their government.
That's patently false. The "Indian Govt" isn't behind any scams any more than a random Sheriff abusing his power is a spokesperson for the White House - and that's generously assuming there are politicians with vested interests behind these, which I haven't seen anything to suggest.
If it is a practical view of privacy, like the "I don't want others to know I have foot fetish" kind, or even typical operational security like not letting others know you own something valuable, then the concern is most likely minor. In fact, it may be a good thing that the data goes to China instead of in your own country, because there is a border somewhat protecting you.
If you take a more general approach of just making less data available about you on the internet, for things like targeted ads, AI, etc... Then US or China shouldn't change much and you should avoid connecting your robot to the internet in the first place, most work without it for the simple "clean" function.
Now if you are a US citizen and a patriot, then yeah, it matters.
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict what new information can be derived from the combination of different datasets collected from your devices.
I know we have older models for upstairs and down, and saw a newer one with camera at a thrift store. It could have been a different brand, but I saw camera facing up at about 30 degrees and thought to myself, nope. There are reports of it sending revealing pictures I read, and am quite happy that the bump and go ones keep down dust and fur overall. Most of my wifi gadgets have cameras not moving on their own.
US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire.
From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more.
You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.
It is, because Apple's privacy stance and record are known. What do we know about this Chinese company, besides the fact that it is beholden to a government that does not care for privacy?
Apple's record is complying with a majority of government requests for customer data.
Not to mention its CEO manufacturing and gifting on bended knee a custom 24-karat gold Apple plaque to a federal government leader that does not care for privacy or foreign customers. That sent the message internationally, loud and clear.
Apple's policy is to submit to nearly all requests made by the federal government, though they get substantial credit for resisting some requests. This of course depends on the decisions made by current leadership, which can and will change (while the phone in your pocket remains the same).
The problem is that not all governments constrain themselves to only use requests and/or allow companies to challenge said requests. And that's at least what you get dealing with Apple and the USA (most of the time).
There are tens of much more successful robot vacuum companies. You do not buy roomba because of their capability in making robot vacuums, that already drove them bankrupt. If all you wanted was the brand name, you could have bought just that. The valuable asset here is the large number of products in people's homes which can now be monetized.
Let's put aside whether you can trust apple for a moment.
Where the hardware comes from is much less of a risk than the fact than where the locked down firmware and software comes from.
Yes the west's over-dependence on Chinese hardware is a liability, but what's easier? Compromising hardware or compromising software? If you don't know, I'll tell you, it's the latter.
Which is why the parent said "for anyone outside the US". Of course for anyone in the US, at least Apple is a US company. But that only works for people in the US :-).
Not the OP, but I understood it as "anyway we're screwed, and if you're okay with the company in question being in your country, Apple is okay only for people in the US".
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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
I've never owned or really used a different brand than roomba (I've joked that I've owned 4 roombas, but never purchased a single one...) but I fully agree that the modular nature of their parts replacement is a super welcome thing. The fact that the electrical contacts are all just sprung into each other, and each component is basically designed for near-minimal replacement overlap (not replacing things that are not broken) is something that I would LOVE to be implemented in more things. I always assumed that it was this 'forward thinking' design that a) Likely added a bit to the cost of the brand b) Likely didn't assist with future sales from breakages, etc.
Out of the 4 I've acquired over the years, one has been stripped of parts and discarded. One is relatively in that process, and the other 2 are happily (?) doing the different areas of my house. A few amazon batteries later (Which I originally only charge when I am home and able to check on them, then place faith in 'not burning down the house') and everything is hunky doory.
Also, they have been around so long, there are a boatload of 3d printed replacement parts floating around that can be quite useful if one has a 3d printer.
I've always held them in pretty high regard for repairable tech.
That was kind of my point, I don't buy any of these surveillance appliances.
But answering as a hypthetical roomba owner: As I am from the EU, this new ownership would actually be better for me. The US already mandates spying with devices like these, and has been caught multiple times doing so already. It is also known to share info with the domestic services, the latter point not being true for China.
the US does not mandate spying with roombas -- wtf are you smoking?
China absolutely shares info with all of its national police services, intelligence services, and military. Depending on the company these PLA may literally own some / most / all of the organization.
I am not in the US or China, and on balance I am less worried about the Chinese blowing my house up, but don't pretend they're nice, or that they're your friend. I don't want them having my data any more than I want the NSA, Research & Analysis Wing, or the NK Reconnaissance General Bureau.
You have the Stored Communications Act, the Patriot Act, the Cloud Act, FISA, and so on. Most of which don't require warrants if it is about non-citizens. Which is then shared, through Five Eyes and similar agreements, with foreign countries, so a workaround for not needing warrants in the target country. This is what I commented about, data sharing with the services in my country. Of course Chinese intelligence agencies will share info with the Chinese police, but they don't share with police in the EU.
Again, the root problem of course is that there is any data to share in the first place.
As an American, I'd much rather a Chinese company have data on me than an American one.
The American government and FBI and police don't have access to the Chinese company's data. But with a subpoena (and sometimes just with a friendly ask), they sure do have access to an American company's data.
Now if the US is at war with China and you're a politician or in the military, then of course get rid of every device in your home and workplace from China that could be used to spy. But if you're just a normal citizen worried about your government collecting information on you, it seems preferable to stick to foreign companies, like Chinese ones.
Yeah I think a lot of privacy advocates like to pretend they are some high value target. A nation you don't live in, that has no use for information about you is collecting information on you. What is the problem that wasn't there before? I can at least understand a principled stand of not wanting cloud connected cameras or microphones, but the China hawking is just ludacris.
It really depends. Where I live there is a large Chinese expat community, including many democracy activists from Hong Kong, Falun Gong practitioners, anti-CCP critics, and other expats who left China out of fear of persecution. They do have legitimate reasons to worry about the Chinese government tracking them down[1], and now they have to worry about whether their friends who invite them over for tea have a Roomba at home.
But if you live in an area with little exposure to these communities, I doubt the Chinese government would care about your private information.
But no matter who I am I certainly wouldn't want North Korea to have my private information, because they'd have no qualms about finding ways to use it to empty my bank account.
The US is the biggest world wide surveillance state by far. If you don't worry about that why would you worry about NK a country that has 0 soft power and will have 0 impact on your life whatsoever. At that point I'd give my data more willingly to Russia or China, at last it would equilibrate things a bit
They made the devices. I would say its fair to assume they already had access to the data if they needed it. Other than the fact they legally own it now I don't think this makes much difference from before.
Why are you concerned about china having access to this data anyway? I'm far more concerned about how much access the US gov has to this type of data. They can easily use it against someone in the country they control if they want.
American tech companies have already built an apparatus of mass surveillance that works hand in glove with our government to violate our constitutional rights on a regular basis.
But it turns out that an economy based on rent extraction and enshittification can’t in the long run compete with one based on a real economy of industry, agriculture, and public services.
We should have privacy laws including mandated user control of user data. In my view, scaremongering around China just demonstates how uncompetitive the US is, in the long run. We should set our sights higher than merely begging to trade one form of technofeudalism for another.
what is in between a disc shaped robot vacuum and an android walking around with a broom? there's no obvious path between those two designs. the answer is all the growth iRoomba needed and another $10b.
the problem with disc shaped vacuums is adapting your whole home to make their labor saving make sense. not maps or china or all this other bs.
It's not exactly the missing link, but a lot of brands have started adding features that could be seen as in between, like a little robot arm to pick things up, and little "legs" to go up stairs.
I take it you also believe then that every third person on the planet has an iphone, yes?
(Apart from the innumeracy, also the gall to still launder this type of conspiracy theories in 2025, after the entire world can see you now for what you really are. Mindbending)
Well, not to worry. The Biden Admin FTC and the EU ensured this outcome in the interest of making sure consumer rights are protected. Therefore, consumer rights must be better protected in this scenario.
I appreciate the alarm. However, I don't know if we should feel China having this is less safe than an America, European, or other country. I think we have seen that whatever alleged rights to privacy and data protection we have are becoming more-and-more meaningless as the corporatocracy of the US manifests itself more.
I mean to say, this should not be any more alarming than if, say, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon bought Roomba vs. any random Chinese company.
I say this not to say that China has no human rights issues to worry about, but rather, that the US and other Western countries have just as many concerning human rights issues (including privacy, freedom of speech suppression, and police state) that we're just more familiar with and used to, compared to the Other that is China.
100%. Amazon actually has a sizable robotics presence in Boston. It would have been great for Boston job market and there are actually a handful of companies based out of MA including BD. You really need a cluster of companies to strengthen an industry. I mean see biotech in Kendall if you need an example.
Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.
Amazon wouldn't have kept the manufacturer alive by making Roombas better, but by making it more expensive for other manufacturers to sell their vacuums through Amazon.
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.
She should be, honestly. To me as an American, China has a better reputation than Amazon. Of those two choices, I'm happier with this outcome than giving even more stuff to Amazon.
As an American with a strong personal interest (kids) in keeping the country strong and competitive in the future, it seems bizarre to cheer for our largest adversary to gain advantages over us.
I also would have preferred to keep it in the country, but the fact is that Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is. Hence "Of those two choices... I pick China."
I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.
Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future.
So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.
To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company. They bring in Chinese products by the boatload, warehouse them here and offer 2 day shipping. That's virtually their entire retail business and value proposition. It's a slightly curated selection, easy ordering and fast shipping. You can buy all the same stuff for less at Ali Express if you don't mind waiting 3 weeks.
I don't mean to make light of what Amazon actually does. Their logistics are incredible. But, really, that's what they are. A logistics company. Your money still goes to China and you pay more so an American company can get their cut too.
>"To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company."
Have you actually used AliExpress? I use both Amazon and AE, and the former definitely offers a lower-deceit, easier to use, and better customer experience. Amazon powers most of the web, whereas AE regularly has massive bugs (I was completely unable to sign in for over a month due to a UI bug last year).
Opposing one purchaser does not imply supporting another purchaser. I don't know the details of this specific transaction, but I would guess the Chinese buyer does not have the same market power that Amazon does, so isn't running afoul of antitrust law. It's also possible Warren is opposed to this purchase, too, but no longer has the influence to stop it.
I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.
The emergence of a totalitarian state compared to a liberal democracy (for all it's faults and current state due to voters making bad choices) is so much worse for everyone in the world. Us included
Maybe instead of ad-hoc fear-driven interventions in the market when Chinese companies do too well (TikTok), US should have some general data protection laws, and not allow making surveillance devices that are locked-down and serve their corporate overlords?
Amazon isn't on your side. They would have sold this access to China if they could make a buck on it.
No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America.
The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but that ship sailed here centuries ago) but they do send vans to harvest the organs of dissidents. And Google “persecution of Uyghurs”.
They’re not a benign organization just because they shoot less, they just get shot at less.
Hard to tell if someone is ignorant, not bright, or a CCP propaganda bot these days, but anyone who thinks the Chinese government is preferable to Amazon is one (at least) of those 3.
No county matches the depravity of the U.S justice system? Other countries (china for example) have reeducation and labor camps. The us has its problems, and we should make things better! But it's incomparable, china actively imprisons political enemies, puts Muslims in "reeducation" camps, and has an iron fist on free expression.
Maybe there's a 3rd option... like encrypt the footage in a way that it can't be accessed en-masse without passwords?
Like imagine if the US government gave a warrant to apple and said "Give us all iphone pictures from this area on this date"... they'd presumably say "We won't because we designed it so that we can't."
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.
It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.
Ford themselves said they need to stay in the Chinese car market no matter what - not because they think they can win in it but because they can't compete anywhere if they leave.
The one tech area the US is most definitely ahead is AI - both software and hardware. The US will be ahead as long as China does not have access to EUV manufacturing yet.
IMO, the US business industry has become over-financialised to the point of self-sabotage. R&D and capital expenditure are seen as "bad" things to have on accounting statements. Combine this with Jack Welsh type CEOs who do everything they can to cut out "costs" on financial statements and you get organizations like GE turned into (badly run) banks.
Cisco is now essentially a publicly traded PE firm that buys up other companies to milk dry. Most internal development is outsourced by suits far removed from any qualifications on quality.
We all know the foibles of Boeing, where accountants made the final calls on everything.
The only innovations the traditional American car companies seem to be able to focus on is how to make cars bigger to increase margins. It's ludicrous that it took a new company (Tesla) to make electric cars available.
I could go on. This is not to say that other countries (including China) don't have their own issues with their business climate, but the United States has an environment where some of the smartest and best paid people in the country are working their asses off to find out better ways to show ads (Google/Facebook).
That's ultimately what you get when you have a system that 1) has most of its money held by the retirement/pension funds of a generation that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth and 2) has incentivized returns to those institutional investors at the board and c-suite levels of most companies.
I mean if we're talking about generations that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth, then China is actually ahead of us there. Their birth rate plummeted below replacement well before the US's did.
Everyone acts like the C8 corvette doesn’t exist when they shit on American cars. Actually GM is an innovative awesome company.
The C8 has topped many “top car” lists since it came out in 2020. The reviews on it are universally excellent and it gaps pretty much anything that the turn-signal hating BMW crowd manufactures both in literal performance and in design.
Also there's no longer really any such thing as an American car. Everything now is some globalized mess of parts from brands here and there. Made in factories wherever is most financially convenient.
The bigger risk specifically with roomba may be that people who have connected their roomba’s to wifi and have their floor plans mapped and possibly in the cloud.
Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.
There's very low value to the Chinese state to having detailed floor plans of a random person's house. Or even a prominent person's house. A lot of this stuff is semi-public domain regardless as many real estate listings will include a floor plan.
> It is complacency or is China just accelerating?
Specifically in the case of Roomba complacency certainly played a role. I have one of their robots for several years already, and while it mostly works fine for my usecases their app is a complete mess. Sometimes the roomba has an issue and aborts a run but there's zero to no detail visible in the app as to why that happened. I seem to be unable to look at old runs, see statistics over time, basically anything that might be useful other than the bog-standard basics, and even those are lacklustre at best.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually reverse-engineered their APIs and made a better app on top of them; the app is comically bad with little to no improvement since I've started using the product.
China's definitely much more advanced that it was twenty years ago. The science, design etc. was much worse than the west, now it's on par or sometimes ahead.
Agree. I visited China recently and every time we ordered a Didi (equivalent to Uber there) we were surprised with their vehicles, we used to order “deluxe” ones and boy we got some fancy electric vehicles.
Just wanted to point out that Roborock is now in a similar position - they have completely slept on the roller mop trend - and meanwhile other Chinese manufacturers are building better robots.
There was an interview from a Chinese Founder and he said something that I think accurately sums up the difference.
US R&D may be on top in some areas especially AI or Frontier Tech. But it is at best 2x better than China. What sets Chinese companies apart they can have product from Lab to market and manufacturing at scale that is at least an order of magnitude faster than US, not to mention a lot cheaper.
Motorola Smartphone is now Chinese owned. I dont think people even realise it. Most of the Consumer Appliance from Washing Machine to Microwave are not just manufactured in China, the brand itself are sold off to Chinese companies as well. Toshiba Home Appliances for example. Even if they are not Made in China, they are made by a Chinese Companies in SEA Region.
For TV, most of the LCD Panel are from China. TCL and Hisense are not just copying but innovated with newer panel technology. CSOT Produce the Panel for Sony top range Bravia 9 TV. Inkjet Printing OLED commercially coming out this year.
Even Agricultural tech China is catching up, something traditionally US is strong in. And some of those results are coming in already.
There are a lot more in the pipeline they have been hammering for the past 10 - 15 years and they have finally coming out where most mainstream media haven't covered because they have no idea. I remember reading Bloomberg around 12 years ago saying Tesla Battery facility being biggest in the world and they have never heard or reported anything about CATL.
And there has been a lot more Chinese companies exporting directly. I am wondering if anyone have heard of a brand called laifen where it was massively popular on IG for their toothbrush a while ago. They called it how Apple would have design and make toothbrush. And they are using exactly the same Apple packaging box for their product as well.
Even Beauty products where it used to be R&D and manufactured in South Korea. China is now picking up a lot of market share as well. And it is apparent in Cosmoprof, largest beauty and cosmetics trade show.
Edit: I forgot to mention something I think is bigger than AI. But doesn't get the headline like AI. Robotics. Not only do I believe they are far ahead in Humanoid Robots, they are also manufacturing it better and faster and cheaper. They are already deployed in some places in production already.
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China has won. And they are not Japan in post WWII where US can force them give up certain things. Nor do they have a free flowing currency, arguably their biggest moat where the whole bubble may burst. Barring any black swan event China will dominate in nearly all consumer industries along with other adjacent industries. And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.
And I am writing this on the day they announced [1] Jimmy Lai was found quality under Hong Kong's National Security Law.
[1] Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong tycoon and democratic firebrand who stood up to China
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back.
Unfortunate in what sense?
And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.
The last 200-250 years seems to be an abnormal period in which China was not a superpower. Historically, China has always had 25-40% of the world's GDP. It's been so long that many generations have lived and died without seeing China at the top. I think it's kind of neat for this generation to witness it.
15 years ago I would've agreed. I saw SUVs with obvious BMW inspired styling cues that had manufacturers badges that were conveniently the same place and the same size as the BMW roundel. I saw Starbucks and Pizza Hut look-alikes. I saw the dismay on the barista's face when I ordered a coffee drink instead of tea. They regarded the US with a sense of awe. When I told my Chinese colleagues it was unlikely that the US would lead the way in nuclear power because only China could do it at enough scale to succeed, they were shocked.
Now the Chinese have their own expensive coffee brands. They even have what one could call private equity with Chinese characteristics: private equity in China is strategic, mostly minority stakes, and often behaves like late stage VC.
I'm not making a moral comparison here. The impact of bad PE deals in China is that an often technology oriented pre-IPO company goes bust, whereas in the US your local hospital will close. Make up your own mind which is worse.
Not to disclaim Britain's & France's atrocities in China - but blaming Mao's victory on those is simplistic at best. China is not a cardboard NPC village, where nothing happens unless the PC's visit and start pulling strings. And while various Chinese people may find it convenient to say "because $western_country did $thing", 99% of actual Chinese decisions are made from their own motives, for their own benefit, with minimal-at-best regard for Westerners.
>But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.
This is very insightful. But it's more profound than what's observed on surface. There was a chain of reactions along with many coincident events.
If we consider a collection of human bounded by different glues, i.e. tribes, culture, religions, ethnicities , political beliefs, cooperate, LLCs, etc., as a new form of creature superior to nature animals, then Chinese as a new creature is very special one. Maybe next to Jews.
The failure of Opium war and consequential changes caused a humiliation that created a special stress on this creature, resulted in a strong response which also drove many revolves inside China. Chinese elites seeking different solutions as reaction to those changes.
One big revolt lead by revolutionaries , the predecessor of the Nationalists who fled to Taiwan in 1949, overthrew the last dynasty of China. However it didn't address the issue of humiliation. The elites continue to seeking solutions while tried to reunite China. CPP was one of them.
After WWII, only 2 contesters survived. Another 4 years of civil war later, the Nationalist lost and Republic of China migrated to Taiwan. In 1971, ROC lost the seat in UN, CPP took over as the representative of China.
Both CPP and the Nationalists are nationalists , among others who lost in the history. The majority of early members of CPP, even strongly believe in the Marxist ideology, deep in their heart they are the same as the other nationalists even they hate and kill each other.
Marxism is a tool which is very effective proved by history, used by the unique creature called China to restore its honor and dignity, without the user of the tool even realizing it. Today it is called "Socialism with Chinese character", a heavily modified and unrecognizable version of Marxist ideology.
That's a little long version of
>that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949
I wish I have time to write a book about it as real long version after some time, maybe 10 years.
Yes, being able to pay wages that amount to slavery opens a lot of doors. There is a lot of positive Chinese sentiment on this website, much of it exaggerated, and all of their accomplishments pretty much hinge on being able to exploit their workforce, of which we just sort of wave our hands and dismiss it in these types of discussions.
Not to mention the blatant corporate espionage. They may have some of their own innovations, and I’m sure there are plenty of smart people there who, despite being oppressed, still find joy in building things. But let’s not pretend this is all due to excellence.
Why do American companies have to rely on artificial protections like IP in order to compete? Don't forget it's only "stealing" if you're culturally inclined to see IP as actual property, whereas in China the idea has long been that ideas are common good, even predating Marxism.
They introduced more and more IP laws due to requirements from the WTO[https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/completeacc_e.htm...]. At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies, and now we're at the stage where there's essentially legal parity.
Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions. But now they're getting to the point that they can start to lead the conversation.
Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
> At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies
Funny how that works.
> Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions
Like making it mandatory to have a Chinese co-owner own 50% for all businesses created in China? I don't remember seeing that in the WTO rules.
> Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
R&D is very expensive and you want some protection for having borne that cost. If a competitor can just swoop in and clone your tech then they’re at an immediate, unfair advantage.
There is a huge difference between "some protection" and blocking the competition for many decades, because an incompetent patent office has approved many exaggerated claims, either about things that are obvious and well known by anyone in the field, but nobody was shameless enough to claim them in a patent before, or else about things that the patent filer is completely unable to do in the present, but they are claimed in the patent for the case when someone else will figure how to do them in the future.
Today the vast majority of patents are not intended for any kind of licensing and they might be even completely useless if licensed, but they are only intended for preventing competition in the market where the patent owner is active.
In order to be useful, a patent system should start to require again that the inventor shows a working prototype that demonstrates all the features claimed in the patent. Moreover, the patents should expire much faster, certainly not later than after 10 years from being issued. Perhaps a longer validity could be accepted for patents owned by individual inventors, but in any case not for the patents assigned to the employers of the inventors, as most patents are today. Also, patent owners should offer "Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing" (FRAND), otherwise the patent should be invalidated.
Patents aren’t the only means of copying something. I would imagine China has a very sophisticated reverse engineering skill set. Made even easier since pretty much everything is made there so if you want the specs of some component you can just call someone up.
The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US!
On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places.
Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things!
People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymore, and in the same breath get pissed that China doesn't kneel to our absurd IP laws!
The US COULD compete if we put building shit ahead of rewarding some shithead capitalist for someone else's work.
Except that you have the technical know how to keep advancing, and have already been producing them before they hit market an have been reverse engineered.
Also a lot of research is already done at, or in cooperation of universities, or with research tax breaks.
Let alone the fact that a lot of patents are absolute bullshit. There are patents on UI elements, even black rubber handles with a hand grip. Not white ones, mind you. It’s insanity and stifles innovation.
But if patents and trademarks and copyright are so incredibly important for innovation, I guess that’s why stuff like math and theoretical physics has the lowest amount of innovation, right?
Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
IP is an incentive to develop the IP in the first place. Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long? America and Europe have been creating and innovating for centuries and millennia. In recent decades China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West? What is the plan to surpass the West without someone else supplying the IP? Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done? Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
A key difference is that the West are liberal democracies and there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
> Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
No it isn't and this comes across as a straw man. Competing on price, build quality, distribution, aesthetic, service support etc etc are all very real.
> Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
How/why did we ever develop anything prior to 1710? And we can add first movers advantage to the list of "real" protections, as well as prestige, marketing etc.
> And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long?
Define superpower here? It seems to me that Western powers became global powers first because of colonialism, which A) was driven by materials not by IP, and B) caused direct harm to China.
> China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West?
Was China in a bad position before the Europeans arrived? Since the Opium Wars they've been forced to play along or risk being wiped out completely. Where could they be without the west indeed.
> Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done?
Haven't they? It seems that they are very competitive for a host of practical manufacturing reasons that could have been implemented elsewhere if there had been a will or long term vision.
> Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
Japan was completely neutered and propped up by the US for half a century while they "recovered." It's not a comparable situation.
> there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Is there? Did Britain become a superpower because of its free and cosmopolitan society? Is being a superpower our end goal?
> Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
This isn't an argument at all, just an ad hominem not in keeping with site guidelines. I'm happy to discuss but strawmen and as hominems are very off-putting.
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.
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.
I generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look.
Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this.
Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets).
Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration).
„Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
Western politicians did it to us. China was allowed into the WTO but never held to any of the rules.
It is still treated with kid gloves by governments as if it were a developing country despite the fact that it hasn't needed such treatment for decades.
That’s an over simplified view of the world that completely ignores all the benefits of outsourcing our manufacturing to China brought. It may have been short sighted of us, and we may have over valued those short term benefits, over the long term costs, but it wasn’t a decision made by some shadowy group of “politicians”. It was a collective societal decision, to choose easy consumerism, cheap products, and rapid growth in quality of life, over the long term viability of societies.
But this story hasn’t ended yet, and China certainly isn’t treated like a developing country. It’s treated like a country that has a vice grip on our economic nether regions, and we really don’t want to make any sudden unexpected moves.
Those benefits were chiefly lower prices for the manufactured goods. But the Federal Reserve interpreted this as a problem per their mandate to keep CPI going upwards, and created a bunch of new money that went into asset bubbles. So the "benefits" to the average person also included housing unaffordability and the general financialization of everything. Viewed through this lens, it does not seem like any sort of collective societal decision.
iRobot hasn't got that excuse. They had market dominance and high margins for long enough that, had they retained focus, they could've created follow up products that would've made for durable, defensible market leadership, even if not every product was a success. I hope everyone is clear that that's the world we live in now <cough>Model Y</cough>.
No, as someone in the western side of product development things. The problem is studied in the standard MBA course for Strategy, without even China mentioned.
First-mover advantage, which comes from R&D into new markets is short lived no matter what. It is critical for firms that hit new ground to find ways to continue to grow their position and market as soon as they can. Copy-cat firms always always come, even big western megacorps love to come in and push out the little western corps, this is typically what is taught in said MBA class. Depending on the market, making newer products that are cheaper is absolutely something a firm must evaluate if there is a demand for it that can be a position and a threat to them.
It's simply the song and dance of the business lifecycle. It's one of the many reasons why 90% of startups fail.
DJI as consumer and professional drones seems like they‘re most certainly they are also an R&D leader given the fact that there are essentially 0 western competitors.
When it comes to more commodity tech, batteries immediately come to mind. Chins has spent years funding battery research and they are now the biggest supplier for LiIon batteries of basically all kinds. Solar panels seem like another example.
Every category I can think of where China is near-first there is some international manufacturer that has a better product.
Several areas where there are much higher volumes or outstandingly better value though. Things like automotive lidar, construction assemblys (like double glazed window units), consumer electronics like quadcopters.
I recently bought a handheld spectrophotometer for work (color assessment). The product from the leading US company (X-Rite) is ~US$15k in my market. I bought the Chinese equivalent for US$3k. Maybe if I needed guaranteed nine 9s of colour accuracy the US product would be worth it, but for 95% of users in the market, the Chinese product is more than fine.
I have a vague theory that China's massive home market of poorer people keeps the innovation going. There's always an upside for making something 1% cheaper and simpler as more people can buy it.
That gets mocked by rich people in rich countries in the short term but then leads to disruptive innovation from below, cheaper, simpler items growing and eating the market.
I think you are on to something. In the US I feel the focus is more and more on catering to the maybe top 20% who can afford to pay a lot more for things. There are less and less low end cars. Concerts and sports events are super expensive. New apartments are usually in the higher price range. No starter homes anymore. Instead of innovating, we just increase the price of assets.
BEVs most certainly aren‘t. Chinese EVs are strongly competing on price. Based on my own experience with them (n=4). They are very good as a EV, solid as a rolling smartphone, but not leading as being a car. Given the choice, I still would prefer a BMW EV any day.
However, batteries as a commodity are a good example where china is leading as volume and R&D leader
They are more than capable. I have just looked at what BMW, Mercedes and Audi have on offer. Then compare what Zeekr and Xpeng has on offer (7X, G9). Quality wise they feel the same or even better.
While I agree as a "complete car" the full package might not quite be there yet. But that is from a European perspective as they mostly are focused on their home markets. But this is changing. This is then simply iterating for product/market fit.
Personally I find the major problems in chinese cars are the software. That is the easy fix and they are getting closer with each iteration.
So much that today I would choose a Zeekr 7X but choose to postpone as the software was too annoying (adaptive cruise control, lane assist, sign recognition, auto brake, audio cues).
The big loss we have with EVs are servicability. But that is a universal problem with all automakers.
> American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies.
Let's take Roomba as the example, because "innovate" does not mean what people think it means.
Roomba invented the consumer robot floor care machine and won the market early on.
Roomba's competitors innovated more (iteratively adding features) and Roomba has now lost it's independence.
See Blackberry, Motorola for some more recent examples. What the lesson is: there's only one way to go when you are #1 in your market category. You cannot allow gravity to work.
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.
It is definitely still relevant. A friend showed me two products- one from a US manufacturing company he worked for, and one on alibaba- that were practically identical. One was designed and developed, the other an illegal rip off.
The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
I feel like there is a hypothesis that open source and open science has helped the West but the IP laws have slowed innovation whereas China is kind of an open source culture internally which confera an advantage.
While I would love to attribute it to their culture of hard work I believe the credit should go to the combined effect of poor choices made in the west. You cant begin to list our spending on bullshit directly nor instances of money intended for useful things that was lost in bureaucracy. China does this too of course but we are so much better at it.
> Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads
I think this, plus different attitudes to intellectual property are the two big reasons western companies can’t compete.
The general strategy for R&D in the west is to spend significant sums developing a new technology, then building an IP moat around it to prevent direct competition. Our IP laws make this approach viable, and it allows companies to develop something new, then exploit it for decades without needing to innovate further.
China on the other hand does not have this approach to IP. Copying is rife, even between Chinese companies, and generally the idea of being given a state enforced monopoly just because you were first is laughable. As a result, when one Chinese company figures something out, that technology, process, technique, rapidly spreads around the entire market, and all of the competing companies benefit.
This creates few interesting side-effects.
* One a ginormous ecosystem of basic parts and components that are basically common between all competitors in a market (looks at the LiDAR units of robot vacs). This drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players, it’s easy for them to get access to everything they need to build a “good enough” product, without having to do much R&D themselves.
* Two, it forces all companies to innovate and developer technology continuously. There is no state enforced monopoly for IP, so companies can only maintain an edge by innovating and advancing faster than their competitors at all time.
* Three, it’s makes a failure to constantly innovate an absolute death sentence for a company. Not just because they loose their edge, but because it takes time to rebuild the R&D skills needed to innovate as fast as their competitors. Once you start falling behind, you can never catch up, there is no space to financialise a company and sweat its assets. It’ll be dead before you got any return.
All this creates huge problems for companies like Roomba. They developed so very cool tech early on, but stopped innovating as fast, thinking they had a strong edge over any of their competitors, and solid IP moat. Unfortunately once Chinese companies caught up, and figured out how to get around their moat, its was impossible for Roomba defend against these new competitors. They were able to innovate orders of magnitude faster, because the environment that created meant only the fastest innovating companies could survive, they had huge momentum, and also a huge common core of shared components that had driven the cost of a basic robot vac to well under anything iRobot could achieve.
The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well.
I've owned a few 3d printers, including a kit printer, and the Bambu doesn't have any tech that other printers don't. They just always work well, and are easy to maintain.
Others are finally catching up, though. Snapmaker really scared them with the U1 (which is getting insane reviews), and Prusa has finally stepped up and started innovating again, too. The Centauri Carbon is another really good entry-level printer as well and it's eating into Bambu's market.
What do you mean they didn't innovative? The H2D and the AMS are new techniques and their latest release is certainly innovative with the 6 extra hotends
The H2D's printer/laser combo was done by Snapmaker before that, and the "2 heads" thing was done numerous times in many different ways before the H2D.
The AMS may not have looked exactly like that, but the same idea was already in place by Prusa at least.
Tool changers are not new, and the way that the extra hotends are held and dispensed was already in use in industrial machines. The "6 extra hotends" thing ... I'm willing to admit that might have been an innovation not yet seen in the 3d printing space, but BondTech announced their INDX before Bambu announced their solution. Both were in R&D for years before that, of course.
But Bambu was big and popular long before their current generation of printers. Only the AMS could be seen to contribute to their popularity, and again, it was because it works so well, not because it was a new idea.
"make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products." according to Oxford.
It's a stretch to me to think that "make it work reliably" is a new idea, and their products and methods were all already done by others, but less reliably.
Chinese companies don't have quarterly financial metrics to report to shareholders, which result in severe punishment if the "growth at all costs" strategy isn't followed. This means chasing quarterly profit over innovation, because it's much easier to milk an asset for as long as possible until suddenly it isn't and you're left behind. But that doesn't matter when the pressure is entirely placed on showing financial growth three months from now. Chinese companies are allowed to strategize for the long term, and receive assistance from the CCP to dominate foreign rivals.
They're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially.
We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years.
I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
You're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker.
The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.
Totally agree on those points too, but I think you're giving US companies too much credit when you say:
> playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years"
5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
Same for drones, and you know why? Because all of these civilian technologies can be easily leveraged for military... so a) they get the good stuff first because they're leading the sector and b) western countries buy their shit instead of making their own, which means we don't develop the tech and we effectively subsidise theirs
Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.
Anybody who played Doom, or Quake, or Counterstrike knows: if you are not moving, you are dead. And if you try to show a counterexample, and say: "Look, I'm not moving, and I'm alive all right", it's an illusion, because the rockets, grenades, nails, and plasma charges that will slay you are already in flight, you are just failing to see them.
Camping is a viable strategy in many Quake levels, and it is problematic to the point that many servers will kill you if you stay in one place for too long.
And if you look at e.g. https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ you can see companies like Dreame and Eufy coming up in the space. It's a really competitive market and these things are getting better at a very fast pace.
I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
There is also another thing where quality Chinese products are very cheap compared to western products. Since Chinese engineers are cheaper, they can live with lower margins on their products.
A roomba was twice as much as a roborock that was better.
Prusa MK4S is 720 EUR, the arguably better Bambu Lab A1 is 260 EUR.
You can probably maintain your Prusa forever. The Bambu... not so much. It is a philosophy choice here and the 3D printer space is vastly more complex and nuanced for many users than an appliance that has one simple job. Yes if you /just/ want to print stuff and treat it like an appliance as a curious consumer dabbling in the space the Bambu is great. That was never Prusa's target. I don't think the comparison is very strong.
It wasn't labor costs that made the Roomba twice a Roborock, but manufacturing costs. Roomba teardowns basically show that iRobot was just really bad at cost-optimizing their vacuums for mass production.
I've been happy with the Roborock but I did not expect it to match the cleaning levels of a human. I can run it while I'm not there or doing other tasks, though, and it does a good enough job until I feel the need to intervene.
When I was looking at getting one, the iRobot one took hours / days to map out a house and it needed the lights on to do that. The Roborock model could do this in 15 to 30 minutes, and it could do it in the dark because it used LiDAR instead of a camera.
That was several years ago now, and iRobot _just_ added LiDAR to their latest models.
This is the cost of taking too much funding. Roomba could have remained a modest robovac company and continued indefinitely... they still sell millions of units. American corporate leadership in partner with VCs are chasing massive paydays and absolutely wrecking the companies they're running to do it.
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.
I used Valetudo on my early Roborock model and it worked great for many years. Unfortunately, the battery gave out and it's somehow DRMed, so even though everything else works fine, the vacuum refuses to work because it doesn't like the new battery.
It's the worst kind of e-waste, it's only waste because someone decided I should buy a whole new vacuum when the battery dies, but Valetudo is otherwise good. Just never try to look for support at all.
Did you look inside the old battery? It may well be just a bunch of 18650 cells with some electronics in a plastic case. Just desolder the old cells and solder on new ones.
I did the same for my wife's cordless vacuum, and it works better than new, because the new cells are about 2x the capacity of the originals.
Luckily, I do happen to know that stuff, so I used the existing board with brand new 18650 cells. Unfortunately, the board seemed to brick itself when it lost power, so the vacuum kept complaining the battery wasn't kosher.
>This is only good advice if you're good at soldering
I meant soldering onto the pre-welded tabs that come with the new cell (unless you have a spot welder). You don't need much soldering experience for that.
>and know details about cells like which ones have in-built protection.
It's highly unlikely that the individual cells would be protected ones. Manufacturers are not stupid to pay N times the cost of a management circuit.
I don't think you'll ever find a battery pack using cells with integrated low-voltage protection, if that's what you're referring to. All that stuff is managed by the BMS.
What you should be on the look-out for is the cell's operating range, continuous and max power. Personally I use buy VT6's in bulk and never think about any of that.
Lets go with the usual reminder: de-soldering / soldering Li-ion cells can be super dangerous. With a bit too much of heat it can fire or even explode...
I mean, if you want to think I broke it, you're free to. The fact remains that my battery connections were correct, the voltages were right, but the vacuum didn't work with either the battery I made or the new one I bought.
It's too bad because it's such a great project otherwise. He puts a ton of free labour into the system and I'm sure he's dealt with some entitled users but it's really a huge reason I don't recommend it to more people. Actively telling people they must learn to solder and making the only support channel on telegram are two big turn-offs for a lot of people.
This is absolutely his right and perhaps his intention to keep the project small, but in that case I wish there was another alternative vacuum firmware project.
I have a roomba i3, it's blocked at the network level, but it is connected to my home assistant instance. It can clean and map rooms but doesn't communicate with the cloud because of the network blocking.
For me it's so weird nobody makes a thing you can trust. I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud and the need to do some hacking with valetudo, with an official service and support for the device. Yet nobody is willing to take the money. They'd rather go bankrupt..
> I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud and the need to do some hacking with valetudo, with an official service and support for the device. Yet nobody is willing to take the money. They'd rather go bankrupt..
I feel like you are over estimating market demand based on your own preferences. Been there, done that. Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
The market for privacy focused vacuum robots (at a significant premium) is probably not even going to pay for the injection mould tooling
>Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.. and there's this weird idea of owning thing you were sold, i know - its' a bit weird.
Just like when you go buy some food you don't have to think if it is safe to eat.
Unfortunately, companies prioritize profits over everything else, and sometimes that is at the expense of what should be the morally right thing to do. They can only be pursuaded against this by regulation, which they're also in a position to influence at their will. To say nothing about the usual government incompetence and tech illiteracy, which is another factor for technology products specifically.
And then you add the point GP was making, which is that regulation only happens when citizens demand it, and it is politically favorable. The extremely low percentage of the market that demands privacy and security, coupled with everything else, means that these things rarely if ever happen.
> Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
Exactly. Everyone I’ve talked to about my own robot vacuum (which is using Valetudo, so not phoning home to China) just kind of shrugs and says “who cares if audio and video inside my house are being piped to China, I don’t do anything interesting, what use would they have for it?” This also applies to other consumer electronics that do similar things.
They just can’t conceptualize that _in aggregate_ all this mundane information can be wielded by bad actors for their own gains. Which is funny, because they certainly have strong opinions about how Facebook et al are being used to push misinformation.
Yeah. The real options are usually: a Chinese device from a company that seems nebulously a little close to their government, imported (so, limited need to follow local safety or privacy regulation); or, a US product from a company with explicit connections to the Google/Facebook/Amazon network, and with a warranty that lasts a whole month (as long as you don’t open the battery hatch).
I don’t know if people would pay 3X for something that actually works in their interest, probably not, but it isn’t as if such a product has been tried in the last ~50 years.
As it is so easy to start a mass production of vacuum cleaners, yes. Give me a week in my garage. TBH I have zero idea where I should go to start a business of such scale even if I have a 100% zero-risk shot which is never the case. Not everybody has an MBA, some of us just code stuff.
For what it's worth I never connected my 5-years-old Xiaomi Mi to the Internet - I just push the button and it starts. A wheel stopped working this year but I bought the replacement and installed it without much fuzz.
As for modern vacuums I have no idea what happens if you never set up their WiFi.
Installing Valetudo stops any firmeware updates forever from the OEM. [1]
I wouldn't consider it a hack. It's an alternative way to run your vacuum, with yes potentially less features if the OEM makes a lot of future updates, but Valetudo also comes with their own set of updates.
Unless you happen to live in a jurisdiction that care more about users than companies, like the EU. The manufacturer would have to prove that the new custom firmware is actually the cause of the damage, otherwise they need to fulfill the warranty guarantee regardless of what firmware you run.
> Good luck proving that changing the firmware is not voiding a warranty.
You're thinking about it the wrong way around. The manufacturer has to prove that the custom firmware is the reason it broke, you don't have to prove anything. Username not accurate.
>Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down?
It depends on what exactly you want. My Roborock can't connect to my Wi-Fi anymore for some unfathomable reason. It no longer runs automatically, and I can't edit its map or tell it where exactly to clean. I just hit the power button once a day to start it manually, and it cleans everything it can access.
My D7 lost its mapping capability (including markerless no go zone) a few weeks ago due to the new owner pulling the plug early on their server. An enthusiast is jerry rigging an offline solution thanks to a vuln in an earlier firmware, but for those unwilling to solder an esp32 to the debug port of their vacuum they essential got a lesser robot overnight.
Lots of modern appliances connect to the Internet, have multiple computers inside that need updates, maintenance, maybe subscription payments, and that need to phone home everything they see, hear and do.
You've apparently been off the web and out of stores for over a decade. Home Depot sells a bluetooth-connected shower head (just the head - it doesn't turn the water on). There are smart thermostats that are wifi connected so you can change the temperature of your house from anywhere in the world... for reasons...
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.
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.
I don’t get where the fear mongering is coming from on this. All or nearly all robot vacuums have controls for their various functions on the side. Plenty of robotic vacuums even come with remotes so you can program schedules without a phone/wifi/internet. If you go really cheap you can get decent robots that won’t even let you connect to WiFi if you tried (at least as of a few years ago).
Just buy an old Roomba on Ebay. Mine doesn’t even know what the internet is. You push the button and it goes. There is a huge market of cheap aftermarket batteries for it.
I have eufy 11s. It does a braindead bump-and-run algorithm that uses no computer vision and does not map your room. It's a bit slower, but still does a solid job. Cheap too.
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.
> 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.
Not sure that works though for flogging, say, client IP to affluency data to advertisers, unless they can already reliably pinpoint the client IP to an address (which for all I know, maybe they can).
The roombas with cameras don't need an internet connection to work-- they need it if you want the app control features like scheduling. The imagery based navigation is still local.
When I got one in ~2019, I covered the camera and connected it long enough for it to get firmware updates (which annoyingly you can't trigger and it takes a few days)... then I firewalled it off to get no internet access.
I later figured out that if you let it connect and firewall it off it just sits in a tight loop trying to connect again hundreds of times per second which meaningfully depletes the battery faster.
Changing the SSID name so it couldn't connect to the wifi solved the problem.
I'd like to get a new one-- the old one still runs well (with some maintenance, of course) but the latest robot vacuums are obviously better. Unfortunately at least some are more cloud dependent and I can't tell which are and to what degree.
Would the US security leviathan give away other people’s money for highly current floor plans of every residence in the country just on the 1-in-a-million chance they decide to kick in your door and shoot your dog? Probably.
You’re looking at this from a point where the only piece of information about you out there is the data collected by the roomba. In reality, every sensible data broker would just add that signal to your already verbose profile and feed it to a model to determine the stuff you’re likely to buy… or would trigger you to generate engagement or whatever is needed.
The privacy danger here is not the one data point, it’s the unknown amount of other parties who will mix and match it with more data.
With GDPR, I’ve been requesting copies of my telemetry from various corps and it’s amazing the kind of stuff they collect. Did you know kindle records very time you tap on the screen (even outside buttons), in addition to what you read and highlight and pages you spend time on? Now add to that your smart tv’s insights about you and your robot vacuum cleaner … you see now this all grows out of control.
I don't get this, so you're saying than they can and do sell maps of your home to the highest bidder. But... it's actually overblown, even though they're doing exactly what people were concerned they were doing?
It's MY home! I don't want anybody filming it or recording it or selling maps of it. Full stop!
> [iRobot CEO] Angle said iRobot would not sharing data [sic] without its customers' permission, but he expressed confidence most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.
The "sharing data" here meant sharing data with other brands' smart home devices but appears misinterpreted as "sharing data with advertisers/data brokers/etc." Say Sonos wanted to make a hi-fi system that optimized audio to your room layout based on Roomba's map.
Upon careful re-reading of the article, I think what the CEO was saying was that they were pursuing becoming the spatial backend for Alexa / Google Home / HomeKit, but the journalist wrote Amazon / Google / Apple, which makes it seem more about advertising data collection than about smart home technology.
(Evidence that this is the correct interpretation: Facebook, despite being a giant data harvesting and advertising operation, was not listed as a potential partner, because they do not have a smart home platform.)
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.
I read a story about Dreame. The founder worked in aerospace, but wanted to make a mass-produced motor with aerospace standards. So he modelled air flow using aerospace tools, built the motor to tight tolerances. Conventional vacuum motors run at 30k rpm, his runs at 100k rpm. Then he standardises on a single motor, for all his devices, robovacs, stick vacs etc, so he gets scale.
Dont be. Source: tried roborock and dream. They are both useless because you spend so much time troubleshooting it dealing with stuck issues you may as well get the cheap vac out.
Datapoint: I've used my Roborock s7 max ultra in three different households (2 houses, 1 apartment) and have had zero issues with this.
It actually was night and day compared to the $1000 equivalent roomba I had at the time. lidar is the game changer in this space, and roomba was complacent with their technology.
I've had a few issues, but they're far from useless. The issues are, e.g. a sofa has tapered legs so the end part is very low to the floor and basically invisible so the vacuum gets stuck there. I've placed a rag that stays there above the leg and nobody sees it or cares except the robot.
I had a Roomba+Braava Jet for a few years and I constantly had some issues with both devices, but the worst part was that in theory they should be working well together. There's this function "linked cleaning" where Braava mops the floor right after Roomba finishes vacuuming. But in practice it often didn't work, either the automation didn't trigger, or Roomba got stuck somewhere, cancelled the cleaning, and then Braava started mopping floor that hadn't been vacuumed.
Eventually I moved to Roborock with vacuum+mop in a single device. It still has its issues, but it is ten times better. It's able to lift the mop on the carpet, the mop is self-cleaning, and it has a large tank so that I only have to refill the water once a week instead of every other day. Day and night. Roomba eventually introduced a similar model, but it's been years after competitors had them.
I have a second-hand "dumb Eufy" and it's great. No cameras, no microphone, no Wi-Fi, no app, no calling home to mommy. It just spins, sucks and bangs (gently) around my house and I don't get mad when it gets stuck. It cleans under things I can't reach easily with a vacuum, and it cost me almost nothing.
Just out of curiosity as I don't own a vacuum robot: do yo loose any key functionality by rooting your device with Valetudo, compared to what the manufacturer offers?
Yes, they put that on their website. That if you are looking for features, stick with the original firmware. Valetudo is for privacy. That being said, they still support most of the features and honestly I don't miss anything.
Absolutely. I bought a new Roomba after my old one died and was surpised to learn it's basically unchanged and still just as stupid as the old one. Returned it, got a Dreame X40. Much better, night and day difference.
Currently looking to make my living space robot friendly, I wonder: can they clean hard to reach spots behind doors or under the ledge of a sofa (I can't remove every obstacle)?
Robovacs aren't a drop-in replacement for a maid, they aren't a fire and forget cleaning solution for a house that's already dirty and messy or have constant spills and stuff left on the floor, but more for regular maintenance of an orderly place that still gets cleaned or maintained in the tough to reach places every now and then.
But if your place resembles a crack house, a robovac won't magically clean it.
Doors no, couch yes (if it fits). I wouldn’t get one unless you see value in having 80% of your home vacuumed once a day. For me that’s still a huge improvement and spending a few minutes spot vacuuming every two weeks or so is all I need to handle the corner cases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
>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".
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.
> I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.
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.
Well, allow me to make a suggestion, that the US came up with the original idea, in 1947 - the transistor, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Similar to how Germany had been capitalizing on the invention of combustion engine and various chemical processes for a century. Now, the curve of innovation on top of the fundamental invention (of the transistor) is in the flattening out region, where all the low hanging fruits had been taken down, and now it's about the remaining 5% of polishing - something that the labor force of well fed and comfortable nation is not really motivated to do.
> 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.
That's a generalization with some truth, but in this case it was blatantly obvious that iRobot was not putting much effort into improvement - or was not effective at improvement. They basically ignored the moat and relied on their headstart to the point that even brand new entrants to the market could equal or overtake them in an initial product offering.
And the business model aspects they relied on for their protective moat - e.g. mass commercial electronic production - was generalized and massively optimized in China (not just for vacuum robots but mass commercial electronics).
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.
Vorwerk makes really good hardware and home appliances. Its only negative part is the almost pyramidal sales style. It's not really pyramidal as in the scam, because you actually buy something and you don't need to become a seller, but it uses "regular housewives" [1] as sellers.
[1] at least 30 years ago, now many of them do also another paid work (not Vorwerk-related) on top of unpaid house chores.
Well, I don't know how much you can innovate in that space, while keeping things reliable for decades like Vorwerk does. I own a (2n hand) TM31 that's probably 15 years old now, and I have friend with the TM21 (I guess?) which is like the first version and it has over 20 years now and it's still perfectly working.
Last versions, with big LC touchscreen, recipes on a cartridge o downloaded from Internet, and now I read that latest one can reach 160C to caramelize things or can do slow cooking.
I mean, I don't feel like they sat on the product, although the other day I saw a cooking robot from some other (japanese?) manufacturer which had 2 bowls in the same machine to cook 2 things at the same time. That seems an interesting feature Thermomix is missing.
Not all innovation or value offerings are technical, though admittedly it's what first drew me in.
Example: I buy an iPhone over the competition because it's a superior experience. Their walled-garden (RIP) made for a less appealing attack vector than Android, their commitment to privacy is real (a reflection of Tim Cook), and how they as a company project those values against government entities are all positives.
Before then, I never imagined buying Apple products; and always believed they were overpriced (in many respects, yes) but there are other harder-to-quantify benefits.
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.
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.
Unintentional I’m sure, but that’s a goalpost shift.
What made cloudless Neato amazing was how many real-life edge cases it handled well. That’s where the innovation was.
It’s the integration of the vacuum and sensors along with great software that allowed it to handle furniture shifts and creeping up to stairs without being confused.
I think of it this way: Tesla’s core tech were batteries and electric motors. Nothing groundbreaking. But integrating the core tech as a vehicle took real effort and trial-and-error; then more, in order to make a manufacturing pipeline.
Sorry if I sound bitter. I fell in love with the product on my first purchase and was mortified when the market utterly failed to reward them for the innovation.
Yeah, this company went through an amazingly bad period. They quite innovating, and also worked really hard to segment their products in a way that would extract every last $ out of the consumer. "Oh you want it not to run into things? You'll need one more step up for another $100-200" It wasn't really based on the hardware, so much as the intentional limitations of the software.
Meanwhile cheap roborocks had no arbitrary limitations and more honest marketing.
I miss the optimism that this company used to have, but I won't miss the entity that they became.
I haven't seen a useful innovation in a robovacuum for at least a decade. What are you talking about?
Biggest issue has been the flood of cheap chinese units on the market - like GoPro, they had nowhere to go, and got beat on price once feature parity was achieved (which didn't take that long).
Emptying into the dock instead of having to empty the robot's dustbin weekly and almost everything involving mopping in combined units is within that time range. Lidar mapping was also pretty rare a decade ago, Neato was the first and it took a while before others did it too, then there was apps for controlling no-go zones using those maps instead of variations of virtual walls, if they had anything like that at all.
Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.
The roller mop vacuum are getting incredibly good; that is in the last year also.
Just got a Mova z60, it's shocking how much progress has been made even in the last 5 years compared to my old lidar Roborock. The z60 can even hurdle over small barriers.
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.
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.
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.
Roomba couldn’t remember map, so when you wanted to clean part of the apartment you had to build barriers or just walk with it. It also got lost way too many times.
As for the Chinese products - look at Valetudo. If you write about cloud and privacy considerations then you are already aware enough to just flash it and you have local, cloud-free, GREAT product.
I still have one like that, and it runs mostly fine, but is partly held together by duct tape these days. Not replacing it as long as I can keep it running.
Especially considering that story some year ago about photos taken by Roombas that had been uploaded to the cloud and leaked.
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?
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.
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.
I like being able to tap my phone a couple times and tell it to clean out e.g. the area around my cat's toilet, or my kitchen floor after I spill something, etc...
You can still find ones that don't need to be registered online and will work without WLAN or app. They will not remember the room layouts and you won't be able to lay virtual fences, but apart from that they work fine.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve repaired a eufy vacuum without issue, pretty easy to find repair parts as others have mentioned. I replaced a wheel assembly that wasn’t working quite right.
Repair shops will refuse to look at them outright; pretty frustrating they wouldn’t take my money and I had to do it myself. But I think that was categorical for all robot vacuums.
In general though, robot vacuums as a category are improving so quickly I doubt repair is the right options many times. A 10-year-old (or even 3-year-old, because they were always so behind) Roomba is almost like running a 10 year old Intel Mac in 2025.
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.
This was the main reason I bought a Roomba last year. It wasn't clear to me that any competitor could match their repairability and availability of parts.
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.
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.
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).
We moved this year and couldn't get my old(ish) Roomba i5 to work in my new wifi easily. I've been meaning to debug the problem further, but if it can be confirmed that it's an iRobot issue and there's nothing I can do, it would save some effort.
It sucks, though, that I can use my fucking vacuum cleaner because a remote server of the manufacturer has decayed. Does anyone know if there are robotic vacuums that work fully locally without remote servers?
I can't give 100% confirmation, but it was working one day and not the next, with no changes to my network along the way.
Yes, it is an absolutely infuriating state of affairs and one could claim we were naive to not see this coming. Needing to be this cynical is the root of crisis of trust. The only thing we can rely on is that everything is a race to the bottom.
That being said, there aren't many commercial offline robot vacuums. I bought a secondhand roborock unit that is on the approved list put out by valetudo. I got one that required some disassembly to flash, which maybe lowers the market price. It's been working great and the home assistant hooks are working. There isn't a company on the planet that is in between me and my robot vacuum now.
I have an i3 controlled by Home Assistant, it is on an "IoT" network without access to the Internet. Works like a charm. The integration allows to start, stop and view information like battery level, area cleaned, issues, etc. No mapping though.
The only caveat is that to associate it with a WiFi network, the legacy app is required. So if the app is pulled from the app stores, it may not be able to connect again after a factory reset. I don't think the pairing requires access to the Internet but it uses a bluetooth protocol that I don't think anyone reverse engineered yet.
Edit: I vaguely remember that mine also stopped working a year or so ago. I factory reset it, re-paired it and it has been working well so far.
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.
Honestly, the app has been stagnating and there is a glimmer of hope the new owners will invest in it! For example, myself and many others still cannot access the "Obstacle area review will normally appear here" error, so I have no idea what photos my robot is actually taking of my socks.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was also dreaming of an opening in a wall where I can brush my dust into and it magically disappears... Since having cordless vacuum I no longer dream about that.
I mean even a plug which would let you plug in an elephant nose - I think that is more cumbersome than the cordless vacuum. I mean having to get that hose and hook it up every time I want to vacuum something? Meh. Easier to pick up the 21th century broom that makes dust disappear when you roll over it.
And manual brooming makes you give n passes over the same place to do the job... juck.
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.
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.
Definitely, but my experience with Roomba has been that it picks up far less than 80% of the dirt, I'd say more around 50%. I can just use a classic vacuum once a week and actually do a good job, plus not have to worry about a noisy robot pulling cabled stuff of my desk.
Perhaps these Chinese ones actually do a good job?
iRobot hasn't really done anything about that for quite a while so I'm not at all surprised by the headline. Not to mention insane prices for consumables (filters, bristles, etc) - I got Aliexpress replacements at 1/10 of the cost and there's literally no difference in the end result.
Probably fair. I have a pretty high tolerance for both a level of floor droppings and clutter until I pull out my broom vac every week or two. And I do have a housekeeper every 3-4 weeks to do a deeper cleaning--a lot of which wouldn't be handled by a robovac.
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.
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.
That's my experience as well. We got rid of our Roomba because you need to remove pretty much everything from the floor, only for it to spend 20 - 30 minutes vacuuming at incredible volume. Getting the 20 year old Miele vacuum from downstairs, vacuuming and putting it back takes 10 minutes, you just move stuff out the way as you go, and it clears better too.
A robot capable of preparing meals also has a similar hazard matrix to a car.
Absolutely no way I'm having something cloud-connected - with human-body level degrees of freedom and the actuator strength to pick up a knife and chop a carrot - or anything else it might want to chop - in the house.
Plus, anything that smart is connected by definition. It doesn't need wi-fi, it's got eyes. Open-source-ness is somewhat moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.
A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.
Why would the food prep robot be humanoid? There is no reason for that. And my point is that I wouldn't want it to be cloud-connected at all. No reason for that either. I don't need it to be intelligent. I need it to have recipe-following, and specific functions like measure(), chop(), dice(), grate(), mix(), etc.
For laundry, have you considered that not everything is a T-shirt? Suits, socks, onesies, pajamas, sweaters, halter tops, lingerie, long johns, bedding, etc. And drawers are only suitable storage for some types of clothes. Putting a suit into a drawer is for example a terrible idea.
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).
I honestly am not sure why hardware startups do not adopt the open source model more frequently. At the very least they could do a software escrow where if they go belly up, the software becomes open source. The point is that it is a huge marketing point that they could use but do not. You are right that if let's say Samsung started selling completely autonomous kitchens then it is less likely that in two years they go belly up. But they also will want to cram it full of ads and spyware. Why can't a hardware startup position themselves against this and keep hammering their marketing with how they are open source and do not want and will not to show you ads or spy on you.
I think the point is that consumers never have a choice in these things so even if they cared, what would be the outcome? For phones, TVs, laptops, cars, if I do care about not just privacy but repairability, what options do I actually have? For phones there are various attempts at libre phones but they are all unusable in some way. Dumb TVs exist and so do open source media players, but something that lets me stream all my video subscription services + local media and does not have some phone home cloud thing built in just doesn't exist at all. Laptops are maybe as close as you can get with things like Framework, etc. and I think this is where I am surprised at the lack of serious marketing. Finally, cars are a complete mess. I have seen one or two open source ECUs but it is so far from plug and play it's not even on the horizon.
Basically, consumers don't care because they aren't choosing between a libre phone and Google Pixel. They are choosing between a Google Pixel and a buggy prototype or a dumb phone.
> will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways.
Running my 1.2kW vacuum for <2 minutes is guaranteed to defeat the roomba from a work capacity standpoint. These products are fundamentally unserious to me.
The big thing for me was that hauling out a canister vac was just a big PITA. But I concluded that a 10 minute job with a broom vac (Dyson) dealt with 80% of the headache (and I had a monthly housekeeper anyway). A robovac just didn't really do anything for me and would have had various issue with cords or random stuff on the floor.
I think anyone getting married with the intent of treating their spouse like a maid is in for a bad time with that whole "70% of marriages end in divorce" statistic.
i watched via camera 12 years ago roomba spreading my dogs diarrhea all over living room (thanks god to tile floors). I connected to camera first time in a months just few seconds before roomba took first swipe over the poop. Still remember feelings of paralysis, despair and lack of control.
Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.
latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".
The camera based object (and poop) avoidance actually works pretty well in my Roomba j7+, bought in 2022.
The cloud-based software for everything else has degraded in quality, tjough. I'll probably upgrade to a lidar-equipped competitor model if this continues to get worse after this bancruptcy.
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?
> 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.
Word to the wise: installing Valetudo can be a nerve wracking task even for the tech savvy. On my model, a Dreame L10s Ultra (there’s about three similarly named models and only this exact one is valetudo compatible, and isn’t sold any more) you are strongly recommended to use a custom pcb and to use Debian to run the commands, and not in a VM. If something goes wrong you can permanently brick your device. I ran into all kinds of esoteric sounding errors, and I half gave up and one point since I was burning valuable free time on evenings and weekends to get it done (busy family with small kids and stressful job). The robot sat unused for several months but I eventually got it done. I’m glad I did it but it was an ordeal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"[..] 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.
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.
>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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Right. The cheap solution to that is projecting a pattern of IR dots on the walls to give them some features. One version of Microsoft's Kinect did that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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[a] https://www.ft.com/content/239d4720-aee4-443d-a761-1bd8bb1a1...
I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced.
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I guess Rodney Brooks got busy with other interests, and whomever ran things didn't realize that Tim Ferris is full of shit.
It was extremely frustrating to watch these assholes destroy the company right from the outset. All they needed to do, was to slowly walk forward and iterate with improvements.
The only surprise in this news is that it took SO LONG for them to dismantle the company.
I do not think it's appropriate for an organization holding this much deeply personal data can be sold to any foreign entity.
I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.
So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.
But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.
I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
If you win? Good luck collecting damages from China, and have fun suing the next brand that starts selling the same machine in different plastic
That's an opinion, and not one I agree with.
If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades.
Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example.
It's asinine to think you can outsource manufacturing of whatever object to some other company in another country, but that no one on the planet can make the same thing because "the idea is yours".
What happens at expiration is an important and intended feature of patents. They trade a legally guaranteed headstart against the requirement of publishing your methods for your competitors to learn from.
People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
Zhaoxin makes X86 and countless make ARM chips. SMIC being a foundry.
> The Chinese Microsoft?
Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance.
>The Chinese Boeing?
Comac makes passenger and Chengdu fighter jets.
>The Chinese NVIDIA?
Huawei makes AI GPUs.
>People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world
Considering the US never had its industry blown up in any war and could reap the benefits of 150+ years worth of higher education, stability, skilled immigration, compounding wealth, and taking over the vacuum of Europe's post-war industrial powers, that's not really something THAT impressive.
>and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
If it isn't halfway trying, why does it feel the need to sanction or ban chinese competitors?
> Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA?
Where are the new ones?
Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing.
> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.
A lot of Chinese EVs are much better and cheaper than the Cybertruck.
I think there are a lot of different reasons:
1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.
2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US.
3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.
Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.
Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
> Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
This strategy has limits, and I think iRobot hit those, and they didn't didn't lower themselves to switch to the second strategy of selling cheap unreliable garbage.
> The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
I'd dispute this in this case: Rumbas may not have solved the vacuuming problem for everyone, but they solved it for me (at least), and they were built pretty well (reliable, modular & reparable design, etc.).
> Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
1. I've got both, and the Roomba works a lot better than not vacuuming with the canister vacuum at all. It doesn't frustrate me, and it took far less time to Roomba-proof than vacuuming it every week for a year.
2. I agree with the IP address thing, but I think at only got added when they attempted to "get people to replace their machines with the improved ones." I have a couple of the older models that have no network connection.
My wife bought the Dyson garbage anyway because she can't ignore her instagram feed.
If the EU was concerned enough about Amazon taking them over in early 2024 to block the deal, I'm still concerned about a foreign owner in 2026...
You're making zero sense:
1. I predict there will be no change in the US government's access as a result of this.
2. I don't think Americans aren't so indifferent to their own country that they'd prefer a situation where an adversary country gets handed an intelligence asset. I mean, hypothetically, would an American prefer US trade policy be set that disadvantages American workers, because some politician got blackmailed because of something his Roomba recorded?
> The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders
3. The Chinese government has been going after people in the US. They've long been engaged in industrial espionage, but there's also their "overseas police stations" (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65305415). It's worth noting that US citizens can have a Chinese origin, and I doubt the Chinese government would suddenly become uninterested in a dissident once he got naturalized.
Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.
When Twitter had its recent VPN reveal, what actually took me by surprise was how many divisive accounts weren't from China or Russia, but from regions of the world like Turkey, India, Africa, and South America. Sure, they could be spouting divisive politics to push an agenda of someone who is paying them, but the simpler answer might be that they spout divisive politics because it earns them money in terms of advertising dollars.
And that's the real problem, IMHO. The subversion of democracy isn't happening because of China, Russia, or any number of adversarial countries, but because our social media companies don't care enough about our country or the people living inside it to meaningfully crack down on ragebait engagement farming.
This is not to mention that the US also engages in data collection for coercion purposes.
Almost anything can be a significant security issue for the state. They have to carefully choose where they are going to spend effort & money.
And they pick whatever will keep them safely in power... which never ever includes "strict regulation of vacuum cleaners".
but has routinely included "network and encryption related technologies".
It's just that these two worlds now, amazingly and probably incorrectly, overlap.
Politics aside, the FDA applies a very generous amount of regulation (mostly justifiable), not sure we want to pay multiples for our consumer electronics, as it (mostly) shows acceptable behavior and rearely kills anybody.
Voters on the right naively thought he'd work to fix it. (Wrong!) But it is very much bad for a very large number of issues. Maybe next executive will fix it? (Wrong!)
At least in the US, the Chinese government realistically should have been the least of your worries. What's China gonna do, if they caught you reading the Quran, or snorting crack? They could livestream your marriage proposal in WeChat to a billion people and you wouldn't ever notice. Meanwhile Snowden revealed, covertly watching random people through webcams is a leisure activity at the NSA, a national institution incidentally sharing jurisdiction with you. And evidently, your wife's death in a car accident may become a trending video at Tesla headquarters, while they deny your claims for a lack of such evidence.
What do we do with companies/products like Tesla, short of shutting them down? Fully open code and absolute full control seems like it's going too far. Idealistically I like it, but practically I can't see it working.
(So why get a roving camera in the first place? We judged that one from a historically and currently aligned state would be safe enough, even though it's not ideal.)
The inside of a lawmaker's house? A general's? A CEO's? Why would anyone ever want insider information, including possible blackmail evidence, from them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat#Chi...
It's very easy to think other people are being paranoid when you're ignorant about the topic.
I will reference a quote I originally heard on HN years ago, though: the audio surveillance is magnitudes more valuable than the video.
To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some of these examples are just bat shit crazy well beyond paranoid
You seem to assume that they have somehow physically disabled access to any kind of remote activation. That seems extremely unlikely given the overall selling points of the roomba.
The roomba doesn't have to "run" in order to be using its microphone, which as noted is likely the more valuable data acquisition source here.
Turning on a microphone is not going to capture the required pics for this blackmail campaign.
X now gets monthly checks from Y. Done.
https://blog.avast.com/what-do-security-cameras-know-about-y...
Data brokers love this data, dont play with me I know you better than that
https://www.cloaked.com/post/the-data-broker-economy-will-hi...
HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.
Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.
We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.
The book Surveillance Capitalism wrote about this a decade ago: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791
If people are still skeptical then they are ignoring reality.
Did you weigh data collection, persistence and transferability before purchase and then conclude that the risk/benefit was there?
I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.
But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.
As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.
Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.
I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.
I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.
If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
Most people don't have the required knowledge to make an educated decision about whether to care. In fact, most people are not even aware of the question, let alone have the knowledge, let alone caring, let alone making a choice.
Unless you design your house and buy your furnitures taking these roomba into account, they get stuck nearly every where or at the first sock left on the ground by someone in your household. They have a number of wearable most owner will not even want to replace and will start being inefficient rather quickly. Add to that some battery wear and I don't think there is a lot of +5y old devices in the wild.
I and most people I know went back to regular vacuum cleaners. The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house. Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them and cleaning the bathroom and toilets correctly are both much more time consuming and annoying jobs.
Hard disagree, because vacuuming is something you often need to do daily. Spending 10 min/day becomes over an hour a week. That's a significant chunk. If you have smooth floors, running a Roomba kind of becomes a no-brainer.
On the other hand, I only need to dust once a week, and that takes all of 10 minutes. Cleaning the bathroom is similarly once a week (assuming you wipe/brush the sink and toilet bowl as necessary after use).
Reducing vacuuming time, to me, is the #1 thing you can do to save cleaning time, if you live in a Roomba-compatible space.
People that don't vacuum that frequently, I'd assume, are also the type of people that don't clean a litter box for a week instead of daily.
But I also get the difficulty when you have a space with lots of larger debris around. The robot vacuum was excellent before kids. Now with little kids that will leave toys and other obstacles all over the place, it requires diligence to pick up after them (and work to teach them to clean up their toys and socks) to ensure the vacuum can be effective.
With furnishing optimized for dust generation (less materials where the dust-shitting microbes live, like material curtains) and daily Roomba runs (plus eventual air filter running in the background) there is very little to dust off of surfaces. If there's little dust on the floor, it doesn't get kicked up and doesn't land on things. Ergo - Roomba makes dusting easier.
I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
It's an interesting idea but it just didn't work for me and I wouldn't consider buying another.
I don't know that I'd buy another, especially because the new ones creep me out with all the cameras and such, but as long as I can keep this one running, it does a good enough job.
Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets.
What is the concern?
I think the correct mental model for this is "leaking bits". Leaking bits is bad, it doesn't take many bits to uniquely identify you and you're also not able to anticipate how those bits might be used in future or correlated with other bits.
Just stop leaking bits when you can avoid it. Then you don't have to mentally model every threat you come across
But if you have this from 2-3 people, you can start inferring if they are meeting sporadically, meet a lot, possibly live together.
Or, if you add information about the services in the vicinity of cell towers, you can start deducing changes in a persons life. Suddenly the phone is moving more, to places with a doctor nearby, a gynecologist nearby, clothing stores, furniture stores, ... eventually a hospital. Start mixing in information about the websites they visit...
This incremental discovery of information about a person is surprisingly powerful depending on the data you have and hard to predict.
I guess that's why the vacuum doesn't worry me. The phone really does.
The old company could have done the same thing. I recognize that China is a u.s. geopolitical adversary, but when it comes to politics domestic adversaries are just as ruthless.
I'm not making moral comparisons; I'm just saying that the motivations of the PRRC and Coca-Cola are different.
That depends entirely on the politics in question. It's well known that corporations are willing to abuse their power for political ends if it serves their interests to do so.
And just because a corporation is based in China doesn’t automatically make it some kind of government managed communist entity.
The acquisition of iRobot should be immediately blocked on national security concerns. China would have no problem doing the same if the situations were reversed.
Second, why assume a random Chinese tech company will manage to keep this information to themselves? I wouldn't exactly bet against some terabytes of videos appear on some torrent indexer. Now, combine with modern AI tools for sifting for what you are interested in, and it might hit closer to home for someone.
I never assumed American companies kept this data to themselves so nothing has changed in that regard.
I don't really care if the camera is American or Chinese, I just don't want a camera/mic in my home that I don't control. And yeah, the smartphone counts but it's a lot harder not to have one.
That's patently false. The "Indian Govt" isn't behind any scams any more than a random Sheriff abusing his power is a spokesperson for the White House - and that's generously assuming there are politicians with vested interests behind these, which I haven't seen anything to suggest.
There were various in depth investigations by media and law enforcement across countries, here is a US source
https://www.uscc.gov/research/chinas-exploitation-scam-cente... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/world/asia/scam-centers-m... https://apnews.com/article/asian-scam-operations-cybercime-f...
German source https://www.dw.com/en/why-is-china-clamping-down-on-scammers...
...
Etc
If it is a practical view of privacy, like the "I don't want others to know I have foot fetish" kind, or even typical operational security like not letting others know you own something valuable, then the concern is most likely minor. In fact, it may be a good thing that the data goes to China instead of in your own country, because there is a border somewhat protecting you.
If you take a more general approach of just making less data available about you on the internet, for things like targeted ads, AI, etc... Then US or China shouldn't change much and you should avoid connecting your robot to the internet in the first place, most work without it for the simple "clean" function.
Now if you are a US citizen and a patriot, then yeah, it matters.
Especially as the N of datasets grows.
With that being said, I specifically got a roborock device with only LiDAR and no camera just in case.
From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more.
You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.
Not to mention its CEO manufacturing and gifting on bended knee a custom 24-karat gold Apple plaque to a federal government leader that does not care for privacy or foreign customers. That sent the message internationally, loud and clear.
You had all the right reasoning but came to the wrong conclusion. That is exactly how it works, and people should not use iPhones.
Where the hardware comes from is much less of a risk than the fact than where the locked down firmware and software comes from.
Yes the west's over-dependence on Chinese hardware is a liability, but what's easier? Compromising hardware or compromising software? If you don't know, I'll tell you, it's the latter.
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.
I've never owned or really used a different brand than roomba (I've joked that I've owned 4 roombas, but never purchased a single one...) but I fully agree that the modular nature of their parts replacement is a super welcome thing. The fact that the electrical contacts are all just sprung into each other, and each component is basically designed for near-minimal replacement overlap (not replacing things that are not broken) is something that I would LOVE to be implemented in more things. I always assumed that it was this 'forward thinking' design that a) Likely added a bit to the cost of the brand b) Likely didn't assist with future sales from breakages, etc.
Out of the 4 I've acquired over the years, one has been stripped of parts and discarded. One is relatively in that process, and the other 2 are happily (?) doing the different areas of my house. A few amazon batteries later (Which I originally only charge when I am home and able to check on them, then place faith in 'not burning down the house') and everything is hunky doory.
Also, they have been around so long, there are a boatload of 3d printed replacement parts floating around that can be quite useful if one has a 3d printer.
I've always held them in pretty high regard for repairable tech.
BTW I just found on a bunch of robotic vacuum websites that 4-6 years is the quoted expected lifespan with maintenance:
https://us.narwal.com/blogs/product/how-long-robot-vacuums-l...
https://ca.dreametech.com/blogs/blog/how-long-do-robot-vacuu...
https://au.roborock.com/blogs/roborock-au/how-long-do-robot-...
I think that likely means without maintenance it is a little less.
But answering as a hypthetical roomba owner: As I am from the EU, this new ownership would actually be better for me. The US already mandates spying with devices like these, and has been caught multiple times doing so already. It is also known to share info with the domestic services, the latter point not being true for China.
China absolutely shares info with all of its national police services, intelligence services, and military. Depending on the company these PLA may literally own some / most / all of the organization.
I am not in the US or China, and on balance I am less worried about the Chinese blowing my house up, but don't pretend they're nice, or that they're your friend. I don't want them having my data any more than I want the NSA, Research & Analysis Wing, or the NK Reconnaissance General Bureau.
Again, the root problem of course is that there is any data to share in the first place.
Depends on where you live. If you are living in North Korea and somehow you got to own a Roomba, it would be surely a bad thing.
But living in a western country, I would hands down prefer giving all my secrets to the North Korean government instead of my own one.
As an American, I'd much rather a Chinese company have data on me than an American one.
The American government and FBI and police don't have access to the Chinese company's data. But with a subpoena (and sometimes just with a friendly ask), they sure do have access to an American company's data.
Now if the US is at war with China and you're a politician or in the military, then of course get rid of every device in your home and workplace from China that could be used to spy. But if you're just a normal citizen worried about your government collecting information on you, it seems preferable to stick to foreign companies, like Chinese ones.
But if you live in an area with little exposure to these communities, I doubt the Chinese government would care about your private information.
But no matter who I am I certainly wouldn't want North Korea to have my private information, because they'd have no qualms about finding ways to use it to empty my bank account.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/chinese-spy-speaks-out-enquete...
Does comparing sales to households make any sense though? You'd need to figure out (40MM - Roombas in landfills) / average Roombas per household.
They made the devices. I would say its fair to assume they already had access to the data if they needed it. Other than the fact they legally own it now I don't think this makes much difference from before.
Why are you concerned about china having access to this data anyway? I'm far more concerned about how much access the US gov has to this type of data. They can easily use it against someone in the country they control if they want.
But it turns out that an economy based on rent extraction and enshittification can’t in the long run compete with one based on a real economy of industry, agriculture, and public services.
We should have privacy laws including mandated user control of user data. In my view, scaremongering around China just demonstates how uncompetitive the US is, in the long run. We should set our sights higher than merely begging to trade one form of technofeudalism for another.
the problem with disc shaped vacuums is adapting your whole home to make their labor saving make sense. not maps or china or all this other bs.
https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/dreames-new-...
(Apart from the innumeracy, also the gall to still launder this type of conspiracy theories in 2025, after the entire world can see you now for what you really are. Mindbending)
I mean to say, this should not be any more alarming than if, say, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon bought Roomba vs. any random Chinese company.
I say this not to say that China has no human rights issues to worry about, but rather, that the US and other Western countries have just as many concerning human rights issues (including privacy, freedom of speech suppression, and police state) that we're just more familiar with and used to, compared to the Other that is China.
Basically, 6 of one, a half dozen of the other.
iRobot was in a distressed state then, and immediately laid of 1/3 of staff when the deal fell through. I knew a survivor of that mess. Now this.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-ac...
0: https://archive.is/rBn7z
Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-room...
I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.
They want control of Taiwan and are building way more capable hardware than Russia has.
Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future.
So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.
I don't mean to make light of what Amazon actually does. Their logistics are incredible. But, really, that's what they are. A logistics company. Your money still goes to China and you pay more so an American company can get their cut too.
Have you actually used AliExpress? I use both Amazon and AE, and the former definitely offers a lower-deceit, easier to use, and better customer experience. Amazon powers most of the web, whereas AE regularly has massive bugs (I was completely unable to sign in for over a month due to a UI bug last year).
Now think about what the American government can do to you.
Amazon isn't on your side. They would have sold this access to China if they could make a buck on it.
Do chinese police even carry firearms? edit: most don’t (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...)
So, given that, I would choose 100/100 times to deal with Chinese police over the US ICE/police murder squads if I had an option
The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but that ship sailed here centuries ago) but they do send vans to harvest the organs of dissidents. And Google “persecution of Uyghurs”.
They’re not a benign organization just because they shoot less, they just get shot at less.
The US has the largest prison population.
China has plenty of problems but no country matches the depravity of the US “justice” system.
Oh and that’s just the “formal” system, go to the south and you’ll see what it is.
Like imagine if the US government gave a warrant to apple and said "Give us all iphone pictures from this area on this date"... they'd presumably say "We won't because we designed it so that we can't."
It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.
Ford themselves said they need to stay in the Chinese car market no matter what - not because they think they can win in it but because they can't compete anywhere if they leave.
The one tech area the US is most definitely ahead is AI - both software and hardware. The US will be ahead as long as China does not have access to EUV manufacturing yet.
Cisco is now essentially a publicly traded PE firm that buys up other companies to milk dry. Most internal development is outsourced by suits far removed from any qualifications on quality.
We all know the foibles of Boeing, where accountants made the final calls on everything.
The only innovations the traditional American car companies seem to be able to focus on is how to make cars bigger to increase margins. It's ludicrous that it took a new company (Tesla) to make electric cars available.
I could go on. This is not to say that other countries (including China) don't have their own issues with their business climate, but the United States has an environment where some of the smartest and best paid people in the country are working their asses off to find out better ways to show ads (Google/Facebook).
The C8 has topped many “top car” lists since it came out in 2020. The reviews on it are universally excellent and it gaps pretty much anything that the turn-signal hating BMW crowd manufactures both in literal performance and in design.
Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.
The camera/microphone is more worrying.
Specifically in the case of Roomba complacency certainly played a role. I have one of their robots for several years already, and while it mostly works fine for my usecases their app is a complete mess. Sometimes the roomba has an issue and aborts a run but there's zero to no detail visible in the app as to why that happened. I seem to be unable to look at old runs, see statistics over time, basically anything that might be useful other than the bog-standard basics, and even those are lacklustre at best.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually reverse-engineered their APIs and made a better app on top of them; the app is comically bad with little to no improvement since I've started using the product.
2005 you had the BYD F3 which was like a bad Corolla rip off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_F3
And now you have them getting the record for fastest production car https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/yangwang-u9-xtreme...
Their bullet trains are also excellent.
US R&D may be on top in some areas especially AI or Frontier Tech. But it is at best 2x better than China. What sets Chinese companies apart they can have product from Lab to market and manufacturing at scale that is at least an order of magnitude faster than US, not to mention a lot cheaper.
Motorola Smartphone is now Chinese owned. I dont think people even realise it. Most of the Consumer Appliance from Washing Machine to Microwave are not just manufactured in China, the brand itself are sold off to Chinese companies as well. Toshiba Home Appliances for example. Even if they are not Made in China, they are made by a Chinese Companies in SEA Region.
For TV, most of the LCD Panel are from China. TCL and Hisense are not just copying but innovated with newer panel technology. CSOT Produce the Panel for Sony top range Bravia 9 TV. Inkjet Printing OLED commercially coming out this year.
Even Agricultural tech China is catching up, something traditionally US is strong in. And some of those results are coming in already.
There are a lot more in the pipeline they have been hammering for the past 10 - 15 years and they have finally coming out where most mainstream media haven't covered because they have no idea. I remember reading Bloomberg around 12 years ago saying Tesla Battery facility being biggest in the world and they have never heard or reported anything about CATL.
And there has been a lot more Chinese companies exporting directly. I am wondering if anyone have heard of a brand called laifen where it was massively popular on IG for their toothbrush a while ago. They called it how Apple would have design and make toothbrush. And they are using exactly the same Apple packaging box for their product as well.
Even Beauty products where it used to be R&D and manufactured in South Korea. China is now picking up a lot of market share as well. And it is apparent in Cosmoprof, largest beauty and cosmetics trade show.
Edit: I forgot to mention something I think is bigger than AI. But doesn't get the headline like AI. Robotics. Not only do I believe they are far ahead in Humanoid Robots, they are also manufacturing it better and faster and cheaper. They are already deployed in some places in production already.
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China has won. And they are not Japan in post WWII where US can force them give up certain things. Nor do they have a free flowing currency, arguably their biggest moat where the whole bubble may burst. Barring any black swan event China will dominate in nearly all consumer industries along with other adjacent industries. And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.
And I am writing this on the day they announced [1] Jimmy Lai was found quality under Hong Kong's National Security Law.
[1] Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong tycoon and democratic firebrand who stood up to China
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/jimmy-lai-hon...
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/against-their-will-the-sit...
China doesn't need or want anything from the West, they do not trust the West and they certainly do not want to rely on the West.
The last time the British came up with the ingenuous opium plan. But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.
There are other American brands that do well such as Nike, The North Face, Coach, Polo, and Estee Lauder.
And while Hollywood movies have been in decline in China, Zootopia 2 did amazingly well recently.
Now the Chinese have their own expensive coffee brands. They even have what one could call private equity with Chinese characteristics: private equity in China is strategic, mostly minority stakes, and often behaves like late stage VC.
I'm not making a moral comparison here. The impact of bad PE deals in China is that an often technology oriented pre-IPO company goes bust, whereas in the US your local hospital will close. Make up your own mind which is worse.
This is very insightful. But it's more profound than what's observed on surface. There was a chain of reactions along with many coincident events.
If we consider a collection of human bounded by different glues, i.e. tribes, culture, religions, ethnicities , political beliefs, cooperate, LLCs, etc., as a new form of creature superior to nature animals, then Chinese as a new creature is very special one. Maybe next to Jews.
The failure of Opium war and consequential changes caused a humiliation that created a special stress on this creature, resulted in a strong response which also drove many revolves inside China. Chinese elites seeking different solutions as reaction to those changes.
One big revolt lead by revolutionaries , the predecessor of the Nationalists who fled to Taiwan in 1949, overthrew the last dynasty of China. However it didn't address the issue of humiliation. The elites continue to seeking solutions while tried to reunite China. CPP was one of them.
After WWII, only 2 contesters survived. Another 4 years of civil war later, the Nationalist lost and Republic of China migrated to Taiwan. In 1971, ROC lost the seat in UN, CPP took over as the representative of China.
Both CPP and the Nationalists are nationalists , among others who lost in the history. The majority of early members of CPP, even strongly believe in the Marxist ideology, deep in their heart they are the same as the other nationalists even they hate and kill each other.
Marxism is a tool which is very effective proved by history, used by the unique creature called China to restore its honor and dignity, without the user of the tool even realizing it. Today it is called "Socialism with Chinese character", a heavily modified and unrecognizable version of Marxist ideology.
That's a little long version of
>that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949
I wish I have time to write a book about it as real long version after some time, maybe 10 years.
Not to mention the blatant corporate espionage. They may have some of their own innovations, and I’m sure there are plenty of smart people there who, despite being oppressed, still find joy in building things. But let’s not pretend this is all due to excellence.
Also, is it still difficult to bring profits back to the US?
Damn'd if you do, dam'd if you don't.
Or do they publish all their IP on a government site for all to see?
Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions. But now they're getting to the point that they can start to lead the conversation.
Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
0: https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/steal-book-elegant-o...
Funny how that works.
> Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions
Like making it mandatory to have a Chinese co-owner own 50% for all businesses created in China? I don't remember seeing that in the WTO rules.
> Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
Thanks for the book recommendation!
I'm not sure what this hat to do with IP laws, could you explain?
> Funny how that works.
It seems to make sense to me, but what are you suggesting?
Today the vast majority of patents are not intended for any kind of licensing and they might be even completely useless if licensed, but they are only intended for preventing competition in the market where the patent owner is active.
In order to be useful, a patent system should start to require again that the inventor shows a working prototype that demonstrates all the features claimed in the patent. Moreover, the patents should expire much faster, certainly not later than after 10 years from being issued. Perhaps a longer validity could be accepted for patents owned by individual inventors, but in any case not for the patents assigned to the employers of the inventors, as most patents are today. Also, patent owners should offer "Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing" (FRAND), otherwise the patent should be invalidated.
The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US!
On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places.
Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things!
People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymore, and in the same breath get pissed that China doesn't kneel to our absurd IP laws!
The US COULD compete if we put building shit ahead of rewarding some shithead capitalist for someone else's work.
How do you know they’re not?
Nothing happens in China without State approval so maybe the penalties for encroaching on a State backed entity are quite severe?
1. Chinese companies steal IP from each other all the time.
2. The Chinese economy is growing quickly and Chinese companies are out-innovating their US competitors in many segments.
And the question then is: do strong IP protections actually benefit innovation? Because China seems to be a counterexample.
Also a lot of research is already done at, or in cooperation of universities, or with research tax breaks.
Let alone the fact that a lot of patents are absolute bullshit. There are patents on UI elements, even black rubber handles with a hand grip. Not white ones, mind you. It’s insanity and stifles innovation.
But if patents and trademarks and copyright are so incredibly important for innovation, I guess that’s why stuff like math and theoretical physics has the lowest amount of innovation, right?
Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
IP is an incentive to develop the IP in the first place. Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long? America and Europe have been creating and innovating for centuries and millennia. In recent decades China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West? What is the plan to surpass the West without someone else supplying the IP? Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done? Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
A key difference is that the West are liberal democracies and there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
No it isn't and this comes across as a straw man. Competing on price, build quality, distribution, aesthetic, service support etc etc are all very real.
> Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
How/why did we ever develop anything prior to 1710? And we can add first movers advantage to the list of "real" protections, as well as prestige, marketing etc.
> And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long?
Define superpower here? It seems to me that Western powers became global powers first because of colonialism, which A) was driven by materials not by IP, and B) caused direct harm to China.
> China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West?
Was China in a bad position before the Europeans arrived? Since the Opium Wars they've been forced to play along or risk being wiped out completely. Where could they be without the west indeed.
> Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done?
Haven't they? It seems that they are very competitive for a host of practical manufacturing reasons that could have been implemented elsewhere if there had been a will or long term vision.
> Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
Japan was completely neutered and propped up by the US for half a century while they "recovered." It's not a comparable situation.
> there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Is there? Did Britain become a superpower because of its free and cosmopolitan society? Is being a superpower our end goal?
> Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
This isn't an argument at all, just an ad hominem not in keeping with site guidelines. I'm happy to discuss but strawmen and as hominems are very off-putting.
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.
Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this.
Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets). Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration).
„Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
It is still treated with kid gloves by governments as if it were a developing country despite the fact that it hasn't needed such treatment for decades.
But this story hasn’t ended yet, and China certainly isn’t treated like a developing country. It’s treated like a country that has a vice grip on our economic nether regions, and we really don’t want to make any sudden unexpected moves.
The west was extremely foolish to think that IP would scale beyond national markets for very long.
First-mover advantage, which comes from R&D into new markets is short lived no matter what. It is critical for firms that hit new ground to find ways to continue to grow their position and market as soon as they can. Copy-cat firms always always come, even big western megacorps love to come in and push out the little western corps, this is typically what is taught in said MBA class. Depending on the market, making newer products that are cheaper is absolutely something a firm must evaluate if there is a demand for it that can be a position and a threat to them.
It's simply the song and dance of the business lifecycle. It's one of the many reasons why 90% of startups fail.
When it comes to more commodity tech, batteries immediately come to mind. Chins has spent years funding battery research and they are now the biggest supplier for LiIon batteries of basically all kinds. Solar panels seem like another example.
Several areas where there are much higher volumes or outstandingly better value though. Things like automotive lidar, construction assemblys (like double glazed window units), consumer electronics like quadcopters.
That gets mocked by rich people in rich countries in the short term but then leads to disruptive innovation from below, cheaper, simpler items growing and eating the market.
However, batteries as a commodity are a good example where china is leading as volume and R&D leader
They are more than capable. I have just looked at what BMW, Mercedes and Audi have on offer. Then compare what Zeekr and Xpeng has on offer (7X, G9). Quality wise they feel the same or even better.
While I agree as a "complete car" the full package might not quite be there yet. But that is from a European perspective as they mostly are focused on their home markets. But this is changing. This is then simply iterating for product/market fit.
Personally I find the major problems in chinese cars are the software. That is the easy fix and they are getting closer with each iteration.
So much that today I would choose a Zeekr 7X but choose to postpone as the software was too annoying (adaptive cruise control, lane assist, sign recognition, auto brake, audio cues).
The big loss we have with EVs are servicability. But that is a universal problem with all automakers.
Let's take Roomba as the example, because "innovate" does not mean what people think it means.
Roomba invented the consumer robot floor care machine and won the market early on. Roomba's competitors innovated more (iteratively adding features) and Roomba has now lost it's independence.
See Blackberry, Motorola for some more recent examples. What the lesson is: there's only one way to go when you are #1 in your market category. You cannot allow gravity to work.
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.
The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
I think this, plus different attitudes to intellectual property are the two big reasons western companies can’t compete.
The general strategy for R&D in the west is to spend significant sums developing a new technology, then building an IP moat around it to prevent direct competition. Our IP laws make this approach viable, and it allows companies to develop something new, then exploit it for decades without needing to innovate further.
China on the other hand does not have this approach to IP. Copying is rife, even between Chinese companies, and generally the idea of being given a state enforced monopoly just because you were first is laughable. As a result, when one Chinese company figures something out, that technology, process, technique, rapidly spreads around the entire market, and all of the competing companies benefit.
This creates few interesting side-effects.
* One a ginormous ecosystem of basic parts and components that are basically common between all competitors in a market (looks at the LiDAR units of robot vacs). This drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players, it’s easy for them to get access to everything they need to build a “good enough” product, without having to do much R&D themselves.
* Two, it forces all companies to innovate and developer technology continuously. There is no state enforced monopoly for IP, so companies can only maintain an edge by innovating and advancing faster than their competitors at all time.
* Three, it’s makes a failure to constantly innovate an absolute death sentence for a company. Not just because they loose their edge, but because it takes time to rebuild the R&D skills needed to innovate as fast as their competitors. Once you start falling behind, you can never catch up, there is no space to financialise a company and sweat its assets. It’ll be dead before you got any return.
All this creates huge problems for companies like Roomba. They developed so very cool tech early on, but stopped innovating as fast, thinking they had a strong edge over any of their competitors, and solid IP moat. Unfortunately once Chinese companies caught up, and figured out how to get around their moat, its was impossible for Roomba defend against these new competitors. They were able to innovate orders of magnitude faster, because the environment that created meant only the fastest innovating companies could survive, they had huge momentum, and also a huge common core of shared components that had driven the cost of a basic robot vac to well under anything iRobot could achieve.
I've owned a few 3d printers, including a kit printer, and the Bambu doesn't have any tech that other printers don't. They just always work well, and are easy to maintain.
Others are finally catching up, though. Snapmaker really scared them with the U1 (which is getting insane reviews), and Prusa has finally stepped up and started innovating again, too. The Centauri Carbon is another really good entry-level printer as well and it's eating into Bambu's market.
Everything wrong with the western tech academic/industrial complex in two sentences.
That’s basically Apple’s MO
The H2D's printer/laser combo was done by Snapmaker before that, and the "2 heads" thing was done numerous times in many different ways before the H2D.
The AMS may not have looked exactly like that, but the same idea was already in place by Prusa at least.
Tool changers are not new, and the way that the extra hotends are held and dispensed was already in use in industrial machines. The "6 extra hotends" thing ... I'm willing to admit that might have been an innovation not yet seen in the 3d printing space, but BondTech announced their INDX before Bambu announced their solution. Both were in R&D for years before that, of course.
But Bambu was big and popular long before their current generation of printers. Only the AMS could be seen to contribute to their popularity, and again, it was because it works so well, not because it was a new idea.
I thought that was the difference between "invention" and "innovation"?
It's a stretch to me to think that "make it work reliably" is a new idea, and their products and methods were all already done by others, but less reliably.
We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years.
I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.
> playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years"
5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.
Chinese companies compete with eachother ferociously. And Chinese society itself is dog eat dog. Everyone wants to make money.
> if you are not moving, you are dead.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but there is some irony here.
Antitrust is like anti camping mods for the server.
I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
A roomba was twice as much as a roborock that was better.
Prusa MK4S is 720 EUR, the arguably better Bambu Lab A1 is 260 EUR.
My theory is to make a decent robot vacuum that can compete with a human and a $50 vacuum and a cheap mop... you would need a 5k price point.
When I was looking at getting one, the iRobot one took hours / days to map out a house and it needed the lights on to do that. The Roborock model could do this in 15 to 30 minutes, and it could do it in the dark because it used LiDAR instead of a camera.
That was several years ago now, and iRobot _just_ added LiDAR to their latest models.
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.
It's the worst kind of e-waste, it's only waste because someone decided I should buy a whole new vacuum when the battery dies, but Valetudo is otherwise good. Just never try to look for support at all.
I did the same for my wife's cordless vacuum, and it works better than new, because the new cells are about 2x the capacity of the originals.
Otherwise you're just creating a fire hazard.
I meant soldering onto the pre-welded tabs that come with the new cell (unless you have a spot welder). You don't need much soldering experience for that.
>and know details about cells like which ones have in-built protection.
It's highly unlikely that the individual cells would be protected ones. Manufacturers are not stupid to pay N times the cost of a management circuit.
Imagine having a blowtouch that you can't extinguish or touch which is likely rolling around.
"Hey, the worst case is that you get jets of super-hot flames that are impossible to extinguish!"
This is absolutely his right and perhaps his intention to keep the project small, but in that case I wish there was another alternative vacuum firmware project.
I feel like you are over estimating market demand based on your own preferences. Been there, done that. Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
The market for privacy focused vacuum robots (at a significant premium) is probably not even going to pay for the injection mould tooling
No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.. and there's this weird idea of owning thing you were sold, i know - its' a bit weird.
Just like when you go buy some food you don't have to think if it is safe to eat.
And then you add the point GP was making, which is that regulation only happens when citizens demand it, and it is politically favorable. The extremely low percentage of the market that demands privacy and security, coupled with everything else, means that these things rarely if ever happen.
Most techies vastly overestimate how much money most people have available for nice-to-haves like privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
Exactly. Everyone I’ve talked to about my own robot vacuum (which is using Valetudo, so not phoning home to China) just kind of shrugs and says “who cares if audio and video inside my house are being piped to China, I don’t do anything interesting, what use would they have for it?” This also applies to other consumer electronics that do similar things.
They just can’t conceptualize that _in aggregate_ all this mundane information can be wielded by bad actors for their own gains. Which is funny, because they certainly have strong opinions about how Facebook et al are being used to push misinformation.
Those wall-to-wall advertising packed smart TVs that cost $350 for a 65" outsell the $1500 65" 10 to 1.
People love low prices. Their concerns about privacy are a distant second or even third (after aesthetics).
I don’t know if people would pay 3X for something that actually works in their interest, probably not, but it isn’t as if such a product has been tried in the last ~50 years.
It’s weird that you have identified this business opportunity with such confidence, but you are also unwilling to take the money.
As for modern vacuums I have no idea what happens if you never set up their WiFi.
plus it can void your warranty
I wouldn't consider it a hack. It's an alternative way to run your vacuum, with yes potentially less features if the OEM makes a lot of future updates, but Valetudo also comes with their own set of updates.
[1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/usage/firmware-updates.html
Unless you happen to live in a jurisdiction that care more about users than companies, like the EU. The manufacturer would have to prove that the new custom firmware is actually the cause of the damage, otherwise they need to fulfill the warranty guarantee regardless of what firmware you run.
You're thinking about it the wrong way around. The manufacturer has to prove that the custom firmware is the reason it broke, you don't have to prove anything. Username not accurate.
It depends on what exactly you want. My Roborock can't connect to my Wi-Fi anymore for some unfathomable reason. It no longer runs automatically, and I can't edit its map or tell it where exactly to clean. I just hit the power button once a day to start it manually, and it cleans everything it can access.
Can't vouch for their newer models just because this one has worked so well for years.
What do you mean? Why would you need an internet connection for a vacuum cleaner?
(Sorry for asking, I've never owned a robot one, plus I am old.)
Subscription payments? For household devices you own?
I suspect "phoning home" is a good incentive for manufacturers, but why would anyone buy such a device then?
You've apparently been off the web and out of stores for over a decade. Home Depot sells a bluetooth-connected shower head (just the head - it doesn't turn the water on). There are smart thermostats that are wifi connected so you can change the temperature of your house from anywhere in the world... for reasons...
Obviously no guarantee that Miele will exist in a decade, but I wouldn’t bet against them personally.
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.
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.
I mean, their teenage kids certainly lobby for them, at least as far as iPhones go...
Robot vacuums with lidar don't even need internet connections to work.
When I got one in ~2019, I covered the camera and connected it long enough for it to get firmware updates (which annoyingly you can't trigger and it takes a few days)... then I firewalled it off to get no internet access.
I later figured out that if you let it connect and firewall it off it just sits in a tight loop trying to connect again hundreds of times per second which meaningfully depletes the battery faster.
Changing the SSID name so it couldn't connect to the wifi solved the problem.
I'd like to get a new one-- the old one still runs well (with some maintenance, of course) but the latest robot vacuums are obviously better. Unfortunately at least some are more cloud dependent and I can't tell which are and to what degree.
The privacy danger here is not the one data point, it’s the unknown amount of other parties who will mix and match it with more data.
With GDPR, I’ve been requesting copies of my telemetry from various corps and it’s amazing the kind of stuff they collect. Did you know kindle records very time you tap on the screen (even outside buttons), in addition to what you read and highlight and pages you spend time on? Now add to that your smart tv’s insights about you and your robot vacuum cleaner … you see now this all grows out of control.
It's MY home! I don't want anybody filming it or recording it or selling maps of it. Full stop!
They floated the idea of "shar[ing] maps for free" with other companies in a Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-irobot-strategy-idUSKBN1A... I am skeptical it ever happened.
> [iRobot CEO] Angle said iRobot would not sharing data [sic] without its customers' permission, but he expressed confidence most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.
The "sharing data" here meant sharing data with other brands' smart home devices but appears misinterpreted as "sharing data with advertisers/data brokers/etc." Say Sonos wanted to make a hi-fi system that optimized audio to your room layout based on Roomba's map.
Upon careful re-reading of the article, I think what the CEO was saying was that they were pursuing becoming the spatial backend for Alexa / Google Home / HomeKit, but the journalist wrote Amazon / Google / Apple, which makes it seem more about advertising data collection than about smart home technology.
(Evidence that this is the correct interpretation: Facebook, despite being a giant data harvesting and advertising operation, was not listed as a potential partner, because they do not have a smart home platform.)
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.
They might be great designers and talented engineers, sure.
It actually was night and day compared to the $1000 equivalent roomba I had at the time. lidar is the game changer in this space, and roomba was complacent with their technology.
Eventually I moved to Roborock with vacuum+mop in a single device. It still has its issues, but it is ten times better. It's able to lift the mop on the carpet, the mop is self-cleaning, and it has a large tank so that I only have to refill the water once a week instead of every other day. Day and night. Roomba eventually introduced a similar model, but it's been years after competitors had them.
Robovacs aren't a drop-in replacement for a maid, they aren't a fire and forget cleaning solution for a house that's already dirty and messy or have constant spills and stuff left on the floor, but more for regular maintenance of an orderly place that still gets cleaned or maintained in the tough to reach places every now and then.
But if your place resembles a crack house, a robovac won't magically clean it.
Certainly "vile", but that's not a noun.
I got a Q7 M5+ for this exact reason, for $265 shipped. (And yes, that includes a self-emptying bin.)
For the vacuum function, it seemed to be highly rated.
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.
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.
I have two dogs that shed HEAVILY. I fear to even turn my robovacuum on, since getting them.
I NEED THIS!!!
This is called dumping. Long-term dumping but it is what it is.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
Now a Chinese company is buying them and there's no problems.
is that the background on that?
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/
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".
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.
Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.
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.
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.
And the business model aspects they relied on for their protective moat - e.g. mass commercial electronic production - was generalized and massively optimized in China (not just for vacuum robots but mass commercial electronics).
Nah, they just had access to more capital. That hasn't been true in a while tho.
This is a good article to describe the viewpoint of Chinese iRobot competitor https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...
Too bad our American leaders sold us out.
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.
[1] at least 30 years ago, now many of them do also another paid work (not Vorwerk-related) on top of unpaid house chores.
Zero creep factor (ignoring later cloud offering)..
Last versions, with big LC touchscreen, recipes on a cartridge o downloaded from Internet, and now I read that latest one can reach 160C to caramelize things or can do slow cooking.
I mean, I don't feel like they sat on the product, although the other day I saw a cooking robot from some other (japanese?) manufacturer which had 2 bowls in the same machine to cook 2 things at the same time. That seems an interesting feature Thermomix is missing.
Example: I buy an iPhone over the competition because it's a superior experience. Their walled-garden (RIP) made for a less appealing attack vector than Android, their commitment to privacy is real (a reflection of Tim Cook), and how they as a company project those values against government entities are all positives.
Before then, I never imagined buying Apple products; and always believed they were overpriced (in many respects, yes) but there are other harder-to-quantify benefits.
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.
What made cloudless Neato amazing was how many real-life edge cases it handled well. That’s where the innovation was.
It’s the integration of the vacuum and sensors along with great software that allowed it to handle furniture shifts and creeping up to stairs without being confused.
I think of it this way: Tesla’s core tech were batteries and electric motors. Nothing groundbreaking. But integrating the core tech as a vehicle took real effort and trial-and-error; then more, in order to make a manufacturing pipeline.
Sorry if I sound bitter. I fell in love with the product on my first purchase and was mortified when the market utterly failed to reward them for the innovation.
Meanwhile cheap roborocks had no arbitrary limitations and more honest marketing.
I miss the optimism that this company used to have, but I won't miss the entity that they became.
Biggest issue has been the flood of cheap chinese units on the market - like GoPro, they had nowhere to go, and got beat on price once feature parity was achieved (which didn't take that long).
Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.
Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.
Just got a Mova z60, it's shocking how much progress has been made even in the last 5 years compared to my old lidar Roborock. The z60 can even hurdle over small barriers.
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.
Miele (at a more premium price point) production is even more concentrated in Germany. 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..)
How many US homes have a Bosch/Miele washer/dryer vs LG/Samsung? (Outside of NYC).
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.
As for the Chinese products - look at Valetudo. If you write about cloud and privacy considerations then you are already aware enough to just flash it and you have local, cloud-free, GREAT product.
Especially considering that story some year ago about photos taken by Roombas that had been uploaded to the cloud and leaked.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
YMMV.
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.
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.
Repair shops will refuse to look at them outright; pretty frustrating they wouldn’t take my money and I had to do it myself. But I think that was categorical for all robot vacuums.
In general though, robot vacuums as a category are improving so quickly I doubt repair is the right options many times. A 10-year-old (or even 3-year-old, because they were always so behind) Roomba is almost like running a 10 year old Intel Mac in 2025.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think the lights have been off for some time already.
It sucks, though, that I can use my fucking vacuum cleaner because a remote server of the manufacturer has decayed. Does anyone know if there are robotic vacuums that work fully locally without remote servers?
Yes, it is an absolutely infuriating state of affairs and one could claim we were naive to not see this coming. Needing to be this cynical is the root of crisis of trust. The only thing we can rely on is that everything is a race to the bottom.
That being said, there aren't many commercial offline robot vacuums. I bought a secondhand roborock unit that is on the approved list put out by valetudo. I got one that required some disassembly to flash, which maybe lowers the market price. It's been working great and the home assistant hooks are working. There isn't a company on the planet that is in between me and my robot vacuum now.
The only caveat is that to associate it with a WiFi network, the legacy app is required. So if the app is pulled from the app stores, it may not be able to connect again after a factory reset. I don't think the pairing requires access to the Internet but it uses a bluetooth protocol that I don't think anyone reverse engineered yet.
Edit: I vaguely remember that mine also stopped working a year or so ago. I factory reset it, re-paired it and it has been working well so far.
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.
[1] https://github.com/koalazak/dorita980
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?
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.
Reading the comments, I'm glad the industry is way ahead, and I was just confused. I think I'm gonna sell and get a better one.
I 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.
If I was going to custom build a house around vacuuming, I'd get a central vacuum system, not a robotic one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_vacuum_cleaner
I mean even a plug which would let you plug in an elephant nose - I think that is more cumbersome than the cordless vacuum. I mean having to get that hose and hook it up every time I want to vacuum something? Meh. Easier to pick up the 21th century broom that makes dust disappear when you roll over it.
And manual brooming makes you give n passes over the same place to do the job... juck.
Perhaps these Chinese ones actually do a good job?
iRobot hasn't really done anything about that for quite a while so I'm not at all surprised by the headline. Not to mention insane prices for consumables (filters, bristles, etc) - I got Aliexpress replacements at 1/10 of the cost and there's literally no difference in the end result.
Not a particularly useful comment but curious of others also have trouble reading that domain.
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.
Absolutely no way I'm having something cloud-connected - with human-body level degrees of freedom and the actuator strength to pick up a knife and chop a carrot - or anything else it might want to chop - in the house.
Plus, anything that smart is connected by definition. It doesn't need wi-fi, it's got eyes. Open-source-ness is somewhat moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.
A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.
For laundry, have you considered that not everything is a T-shirt? Suits, socks, onesies, pajamas, sweaters, halter tops, lingerie, long johns, bedding, etc. And drawers are only suitable storage for some types of clothes. Putting a suit into a drawer is for example a terrible idea.
I also agree it’d be worth more to me than my car, and I’d hope much like modern cars such an expensive consumer purchase will end up with similar warranty protections and eventually a third party market for replacement parts.
Much like cars, I’m guessing it’ll be a better idea to go with a large company that’ll be able to honor that warranty without being financially ruined. The first few generations will see lots of experimentation and thus be more risky for the consumer before the market settles out with a few big winners (as is often the case).
I think the point is that consumers never have a choice in these things so even if they cared, what would be the outcome? For phones, TVs, laptops, cars, if I do care about not just privacy but repairability, what options do I actually have? For phones there are various attempts at libre phones but they are all unusable in some way. Dumb TVs exist and so do open source media players, but something that lets me stream all my video subscription services + local media and does not have some phone home cloud thing built in just doesn't exist at all. Laptops are maybe as close as you can get with things like Framework, etc. and I think this is where I am surprised at the lack of serious marketing. Finally, cars are a complete mess. I have seen one or two open source ECUs but it is so far from plug and play it's not even on the horizon.
Basically, consumers don't care because they aren't choosing between a libre phone and Google Pixel. They are choosing between a Google Pixel and a buggy prototype or a dumb phone.
Running my 1.2kW vacuum for <2 minutes is guaranteed to defeat the roomba from a work capacity standpoint. These products are fundamentally unserious to me.
This cracked me up, as it implies the cat had thoroughly planned her skirmish :)
Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.
latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".
The cloud-based software for everything else has degraded in quality, tjough. I'll probably upgrade to a lidar-equipped competitor model if this continues to get worse after this bancruptcy.
> 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
[1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
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.
It'll still be going in another 10 years, but the AliExpress sourced parts are never of the same quality.
> 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?
China might at least make some products out of this purchase. Most of these US companies would just sit on it.
https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
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-...
All of IoT is a security anti-pattern now.
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.
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."
Not all dangerous things are the same thing.
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.
How is this different from anybody else?
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
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.
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.
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.
Right. The cheap solution to that is projecting a pattern of IR dots on the walls to give them some features. One version of Microsoft's Kinect did that.
But I am aware that in e.g. some parts of Asia the maid service is dirt cheap.
But like most US corp, they only cared about profits and stock price.
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.
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.