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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#641

Post by gs17 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #411
array_key_first wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how you can sell 40 million units and go bankrupt.

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.

https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/dreames-new-...

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#642

Post by palmotea »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #621
mensetmanusman wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.

>> 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.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#643

Post by jack_tripper »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #621
mensetmanusman wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.

>Who is the Chinese Intel?

Zhaoxin makes X86 and countless make ARM and RiscV 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 stability, higher education, skilled immigration, compounding wealth, and taking over the vacuum and brains 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?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#644

Post by citizenpaul »

cs702 wrote: post #254

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…

> Chinese owner .... inside people's homes

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.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#645

Post by IgorPartola »

wincy wrote: post #23
IgorPartola wrote: post #16

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 o…

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…

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.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#646

Post by cj »

jijijijij wrote: post #625
kqr wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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…

> 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.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#647

Post by mattmaroon »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #499
mattmaroon wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you called a Chinese person to respond to a crime?

Is that an option I’m not aware of? 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

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.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#648

Post by mrguyorama »

secondcoming wrote: post #420
adrian_b wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clai…

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.

So?

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.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#649

Post by amanaplanacanal »

xnx wrote: post #638
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRobot says it was the EU: https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...

Wrong link? I don't see how that applies to the EU more than the US.

Read the italicized paragraph at the very beginning of the article.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#650

Post by IgorPartola »

Earw0rm wrote: post #87
IgorPartola wrote: post #16

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 o…

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 moo…

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.

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