Live data from Hacker News

Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

thebignewsletter.com

141–150 of 213 posts

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#141
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the author is arguing that the outcome you're describing is tightly coupled to the perverse incentives that he describes in the article. Investors pushed the company towards extraction over innovation and the end product suffered as a result.

That is probably true. But Roomba sucked in the early 2000's too. They never got better.

[deleted]

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#142
I think that the difficulty is that Chinese companies both don't respect IP, but also move much faster than U.S. companies in the consumer electronics space. Part of the speed advantage is being physically close, linguistically close, and culturally close to the factories that are actually making the products, but there are other advantages as well.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#143
post #22

Roombas just weren't that useful for most house layouts and situations (cords/toys/clutter/etc.) I seriously considered getting one and decided it just wouldn't be a win.

I have one and it's OK for my kitchen with hardwood floors. I have a lot of stairs in my house. In a couple of places, there are just one or two stairs going up or down between rooms, but obviously the Roomba can't do it. Because of that, it's based in the kitchen and mostly stays there. With a bunch of little kids, it's quicker than sweeping the floor every night, and I just keep the cords out of its way.

If I had a robot vacuum that could climb stairs, it would be a whole different ballgame, but no one has cracked that code so far to my knowledge.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#144
post #36
post #22

Roombas just weren't that useful for most house layouts and situations (cords/toys/clutter/etc.) I seriously considered getting one and decided it just wouldn't be a win.

Roombas have always been terrible. I bought a top-of-line Dreame, Roborock, and Eufy recently for our place - we have lots of pets. The Dreame is easily 10,000x better than Roomba ever was. It never makes mistakes. I'd advocate for Dreame for anyone in the market for a robot vacuum. The app is annoying, but everything else about it is sublime. Eufy would be better if they'd fix their roller brush design and didn't le…

> Eufy would be better if they'd fix their roller brush design and didn't lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills.

FWIW there are 3p replacements that are super cheap for roller brush, side brush, filters, bags etc. As for detergent for the mop, I first thought I was smart to buy 3p detergents meant for robot vacuums because they were cheaper. Turns out they clogged the tubes which was tricky to fix, but I did it. After that I bought Eufys original, and lo and behold, it was much more concentrated, which meant it was actually significantly cheaper than the 3p ones (and smells better).

Navigation is spot on. Obstacle avoidance sucks though (to be fair my floor is patterned stone - hard to see anything) and cat toys sometimes get stuck in the roller brush.

Btw what’s the alternative to roller brush?

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#145

Hard for me to understand how the consumer was protected by preventing Amazon from acquiring them. Only for Chinese firm to get for cheap in bankruptcy. But maybe I’m not educated enough in socialism to understand the nuances

Why aren't any American firms interested in buying it cheap?

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#146

To be honest the Roomba sucked and got eaten alive by better chinese competitors. I bought a top of the line expensive Roomba years ago and ended up switching to neato a year later, because I would just come home and it would be stuck on something.

> To be honest the Roomba sucked I have an old Roomba (980 perhaps?) and laud it as one of my best appliances. It’s a work horse! We’re had it for five-six years and it still works great. Nowadays it sometimes needs to charge twice to finish, but I only notice if I’m home - and I could just replace the battery. Parts are so easy to replace, that my wife has replaced most, and she isn’t a tinkerer. Maybe I just don’t…

The main thing is with the chinese ones you get lidar and a cached map from that lidar run (so you can send it to clean specific areas) and they cost maybe a third or less what roomba charges, at least when I was in the market.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#147

This is literally what's happening to Apple right now. Instead of focusing on innovation and research, they're just skimming their 30%. Works out great for the share price until something like LLMs come along, and oops you have no innovation muscle left.

Not every company needs to participate in making llms. It isn't like apple consumers are going to ignore the smell that keeps them from android and pc and samsung headphones currently.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#148

This is literally what's happening to Apple right now. Instead of focusing on innovation and research, they're just skimming their 30%. Works out great for the share price until something like LLMs come along, and oops you have no innovation muscle left.

Apple == IBM?

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#149
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wall Street believes current $$$$$ capital investments will create massive long-term value Clearly not. The stock market has a correction at least every few years. So Wall Street only believes they can sell the stock for higher within a few years. Not very long term is it?

If you could predict a stock market correction before it happens, you'd be very, very rich. The fact that corrections sometimes happen does not negate the existence of market-wide expectations for any given stock.

> If you could predict a stock market correction before it happens, you'd be very, very rich.

Same goes for if you can predict the price of a stock... but analysts do it anyway and set targets for stocks.

> The fact that corrections sometimes happen does not negate the existence of market-wide expectations for any given stock.

The crash or not is part of the expectation. Regardless of what you read on articles, those fund managers often sit out situations they don't deem worthy of investing.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#150
post #90

The article makes the case that iRobot mismanaged their business at the behest of investors. Suppose one grants that this mismanagement occurred[0]. Then years into the mismanagement, Amazon offers to buy them. At this point, whatever path the company has been doomed to by mismanagement has already been taken. In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad business decisions have been made. So the F…

> The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.
Post reply on HN