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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#661

Post by tguvot »

Saline9515 wrote: post #104
tguvot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You can avoid water marks by using distilled water.

water marks in this case will be because water mixes with dirt and it's not 100% wiped off and polished off

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#662

Post by x0x0 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #578
anymouse123456 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! 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 Br…

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 actuall…

a roomba, in a perfect world where it could avoid cat/dog toys scattered around the living room floor, makes pet ownership much more pleasant

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#663

Post by tguvot »

torh wrote: post #119
dzhiurgis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-mop vacuum 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.

I have a Roborock S5, and when I don't use the mop, I just remove the mop AND the water tank. And without the water tank it never gets stuck in doors.

it feels like getting instead of pickup track minivan, removing 2 rear seating rows and then chopping off parts of roof and doors

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#664

Post by maxglute »

trinix912 wrote: post #122
maxglute wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ch…

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 th…

TBH after a while I optimized things around robovac, or tidiness levels. I have hardwood floors, woven carpets, just stuff where vacs pick thing sup very effectively.

I don't know if Chinese ones are any better in terms of performance, suction levels only matter when you're on carpet and then it heavily depends how worn out or well maintained your brush head is which is where cheap consumables start to matter. For me the easy surfaces get 80%+ clean, the harder surfaces get 50% but even with very highend vaccuums I can still scrapes tons of hair out with a fur brush. But part of it is also I have a ancient magic high performance furbrush (random plastic junk for 30 years ago) that somehow digs out more fur than any other brush.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#665

Post by seanmcdirmid »

SoftTalker wrote: post #578
anymouse123456 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! 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 Br…

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 actuall…

> 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.

Cords suck. So I bought a cordless vacuum, and was able to vacuum more. But I also needed a mop because vacuums don't do well enough on my laminate, stuff still gets stuck on. So I bought a cordless mop, so I could map more. This worked great for awhile but...

But it turns out if I did my vacuuming and mopping every night, I could keep my floor in better condition. I don't have time for that, but a robot from Eufy does and doesn't cost much compared to how much I would benefit from it.

Luddism on HN is a bit weird, but I get it, some people don't see the point of automating these tasks because their lives aren't complicated enough yet (e.g. they don't have kids, or have lots of free time and energy to spend on house work).

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#666

Post by tguvot »

IAmBroom wrote: post #531
tguvot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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!!!

i bypassed this specific problem by getting dogs that don't shed (frankly, i shed more than both of them).

i contemplated getting spare dock for my roomba and modding it. but one thing I didn't figure out yet it's a how to close opening into central vacuum piping when it's not actively engaged. probably possible to do something with servos/etc, but it feels like too complicated/messy

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#667

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #626
SoftTalker wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actuall…

I have a Miele canister vacuum. I love it. My wife bought the Dyson garbage anyway because she can't ignore her instagram feed.

I don't understand how people deal with cords anymore, and basically I've stopped thinking about those for more than a decade now.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#668

Post by rockemsockem »

echelon wrote: post #412
fny wrote: post #365

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

I was so angry at this. 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.

Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this.

I doubt it though

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#669

Post by rockemsockem »

coldpie wrote: post #449
miohtama wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elizabeth Warren is proud of blocking this deal: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-room...

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.

[flagged]

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#670

Post by Zen1th »

IAmBroom wrote: post #505
olalonde wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

> The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.

Ah yes, as opposed to the United States that have never meddled with another country's politics.
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