This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.
Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
81–90 of 839 posts
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#82My brother has a house that is pretty much custom-made for a robo-vacuum. One level, no transitions, they have pets. And they like it well enough (not an iRobot)--and it still gets tangled up in stuff from time to time. I have a 2-level house. Even after some house work, one room that probably still has too high a transition. A lot of different surfaces (And I'm not religious with cords and the like.) I'm guessing th…
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…
Having white socks stay white has been a breath of fresh air. Love my roller mop robot.
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#83Didn't Amazon acquire iRobot?
Last sentence of the article: "A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns."
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neato, which had a robot vacuum with LIDAR, shut down in 2023. That's not the key problem. Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It's short range compared to the inter-camera distance. Vehicle object ranging at distance is much tougher and can be fooled.
> Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It could be, but it just is not. VSLAM robots were practically significant worse. There are a lot of limitations to multi-ocular vision for a robot vacuum, for example the relatively featureless walls and few features across the horizontal binocular axis. Neato was never as big as iRobot. They didn't fail from commanding heights, they never were that successful…
Didn't Matic solve this (non-Lidar robot vacuum)? People seem to rave about them.
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#85Didn't Amazon acquire iRobot?
No, the deal was killed:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#86If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline. It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily custom…
Absolutely. I bought a new Roomba after my old one died and was surpised to learn it's basically unchanged and still just as stupid as the old one. Returned it, got a Dreame X40. Much better, night and day difference.
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#87I 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 moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.
A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#88I wonder what happens to the app and cloud functionality. > Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganized company. The company’s common stock will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan. Hopefully they keep the lights on.
I had a roomba i5 fully stop working earlier this year. It said it couldn't connect to the internet but I believe what it meant was "some aspect of the remote server has decayed to the point that it no longer works with this platform". I threw it in the trash, vowed to never let this happen again, and got a valetudo machine. I think the lights have been off for some time already.
You threw ewaste with batteries in the trash?
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#89They outsourced production to China thinking that they can just do the marketing in US. Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
How many general public appliance makers out there have a competitive production line outside of China ? As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.
https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/domestic-vacuum-cleaners shows China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Mexico as having a significant trade surplus in domestic vacuum cleaners.
Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a roomba i5 fully stop working earlier this year. It said it couldn't connect to the internet but I believe what it meant was "some aspect of the remote server has decayed to the point that it no longer works with this platform". I threw it in the trash, vowed to never let this happen again, and got a valetudo machine. I think the lights have been off for some time already.
You threw ewaste with batteries in the trash?
Related username? ;) I think it was a figure of speech.