481–490 of 839 posts
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Our household (and I suspect many with us) bought a Roomba specifically to not give the Chinese government a roving camera in our home. Ouch!
Why do you think they want to see the inside of your house, and what do you think they'd be able to do with the information?
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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.
So you’d prefer we send access to China? The comment above was pointing out that we blocked the acquisition that would have kept it in the country.
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 mobil…
I'm all for antitrust, but it's a shame the Amazon acquisition was blocked.[0] iRobot was in a distressed state then, and immediately laid of 1/3 of staff when the deal fell through. I knew a survivor of that mess. Now this. 0: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-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.
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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…
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 manufactu…
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.
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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 star…
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.
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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 star…
> didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. 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.
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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).
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 mobil…
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…
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..
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).