Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges • Hacker News Board

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#701

Post by decimalenough » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:46 PM UTC

abtinf wrote: post #694

jasonkester wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does your theory account for Dyson?

A lot of Dyson products are wildly overpriced and kind of shit, but people keep buying them because they look pretty.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#702

Post by tgma » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:50 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #679

rockemsockem wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents. Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop. It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector. Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's G…

The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half.

The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#703

Post by joenot443 » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

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.

That's interesting. To me as a Canadian, I think Amazon is more aligned with my best interests than China.

What makes you feel otherwise?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#704

Post by sfjailbird » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:53 PM UTC

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #293

aurareturn wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Chin…

It is unfortunate given China's abysmal stance on human rights, freedom of information, and pollution.

Fortunately, China is not strongarming or invading the rest of the world.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#705

Post by Saline9515 » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

tguvot wrote: post #661

Saline9515 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You fix this by doing a cycle of vacuuming first. Robots allow you to clean frequently to prevent large buildups. It's the same as if you were cleaning by hand. I have tiles as well and no dirty water marks.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#706

Post by RobotToaster » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:57 PM UTC

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.

All of those have government subsidies, we just call them national security contracts.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#707

Post by hedora » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:59 PM UTC

kqr wrote: post #289

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…

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!

Back when Amazon was going to buy Roomba so they could use the cameras to sell us crap and/or sell the feed to law enforcement, I unplugged ours.

They were unimaginably unreliable compared to our older Roombas, and I was kind of shocked how little we missed them.

Anyway, I looked into getting a secure (or at least not malicious) alternative. At the time, the best bet was to get a Chinese model, then MITM its connection to the cloud + run your own server locally.

At that point, I realized it was less effort to just manually vacuum the house and moved on. I'm certainly not the only one, given the size of the modder community for the Chinese competitors.

Now, I wonder how far the modders are from buying a handful of commodity components + just 3d printing the rest of the robot, since that's less effort than dealing with enshittification.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#708

Post by capr » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 8:01 PM UTC

osiris970 wrote: post #636

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government is more likely to be a threat to my personal freedom than the Chinese.

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

"due to voters making bad choices" ahahahahahaha

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#709

Post by kccqzy » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 8:01 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #391

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I found Rohorock a bit sucky so god knows how bad a Roomba is. 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.

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 coul…

I have a Roborock too. It is certainly good at quickly creating a reasonably accurate map, but it just gets stuck so easily. Things like going into an enclosed corner but unable to get out. Or going into a room, cleaning the floor just behind the door such that the door shuts and now unable to leave the room. I certainly cannot run it while not at home. It will just get stuck.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#710

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 8:06 PM UTC

knowitnone3 wrote: post #616

ryandrake wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 assu…

how hard is this to understand. you have a roving camera/microphone in your house and you think that is OK?

Yes? You also have several cameras and microphones in your pocket, and probably wearing more microphones on your head at various times of the day. And so does everyone around you.

GP is correct. "Roving camera/microphone" -> ??? -> "harm". What is "???" and what is "harm" specifically, and how the former leads to the latter, in specific steps?