Roomba Maker 'iRobot' Files for Bankruptcy After 35 Years (msn.com) 100
Roomba manufacturer iRobot filed for bankruptcy today, reports Bloomberg.
After 35 years, iRobot reached a "restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny." Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganised company... The plan will allow the debtor to remain as a going concern and continue to meet its commitments to employees and make timely payments in full to vendors and other creditors for amounts owed throughout the court-supervised process, according to an iRobot statement... he company warned of potential bankruptcy in December after years of declining earnings.
Roomba says it's sold over 50 million robots, the article points out, but earnings "began to decline since 2021 due to supply chain headwinds and increased competition.
"A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns."
After 35 years, iRobot reached a "restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny." Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganised company... The plan will allow the debtor to remain as a going concern and continue to meet its commitments to employees and make timely payments in full to vendors and other creditors for amounts owed throughout the court-supervised process, according to an iRobot statement... he company warned of potential bankruptcy in December after years of declining earnings.
Roomba says it's sold over 50 million robots, the article points out, but earnings "began to decline since 2021 due to supply chain headwinds and increased competition.
"A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns."
Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score:5, Insightful)
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He does say 'gyna a lot.
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Well done, Senator Warren. This is definitely a better outcome.
If only someone could have predicted this.
Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score:5, Informative)
It also looks like the sale is basically formalizing their plan to gut themselves [irobot.com]. Shockingly enough; firing everyone you can and switching to rebadging stuff from an ODM because that's cheaper puts you in "what would you say you do here?" territory pretty quickly.
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Yes, horrible Amazon - they see what customers are buying and produce a competing device at a lower price - those bastards!
You seem to believe that Amazon should be a neutral marketplace and never offer its own products, amiright? Amazon, just like your local grocery store, convenience store, etc. is allowed to offer house brand items that compete with others that want to sell their products at the grocery store, convenience store, etc.
If, after 35 years iRobot couldn't beat Amazon at making robotic vacuum
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You didn't learn from Microsoft's Borgification of competition.
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> just like your local grocery store, convenience store, etc. is allowed to offer house brand items
If there were only ONE grocery store brand in the area, it would be a problem.
Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score:5, Insightful)
offer house brand items that compete with others that want to sell their products at the grocery store, convenience store, etc.
There's nothing illegal about a grocery store developing, marketing, and selling its own brand of corn, soda, cereal, etc. and nothing illegal about Amazon doing the same. BUT, that's not what Amazon does. Amazon:
A) Carefully tracks sales of all products to see where it could compete and steal your sales
B) Copies your designs - even trademarked, proprietary, or otherwise protected designs - sometimes even making a 'deal' with your same supplier
C) Buries your product behind pages and pages of "sponsored" products unless you pay the extortion, er, "advertising" fee to make it nearly impossible for customers to find your original product
D) Uses its immense size and power to exploit any successful product selling on its site for its own benefit, destroying the small, independent companies it claims to support.
I would never sell on Amazon or enter into a legal agreement to deal with Amazon, but for many companies they have no other choice and Amazon exploits them in ways that your local grocer and convenience store could never fathom.
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No they don't. They do one of those things, and when they do them they do not shake down your product. There's a reason you find their products next to yours rather than suddenly seeing yours buried on the bottom shelf.
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Basically expressing my concurrence, though I think the full story is more complicated than that. Not just the house brands, but the manipulation of the secret ranking algorithms to put the most profitable (for Amazon) products at the top.
For example, why would Amazon care if some company sells you (via Amazon) a huge piece of shite as long as it produces the highest payback for Amazon? In the case of house brands there is actually some reputational risk if they cut the corners on quality too deeply, wherea
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AMZN should have got them so they can waste more of their money; that would be just.
This IS the better outcome for consumers. nobody should buy their pet shit spreader.
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This IS the better outcome for consumers. nobody should buy their pet shit spreader.
Do you even understand what happened? iRobot went bust, and rather than hand over their IP and customers to Amazon, it got handed off to Chinese creditors (their manufacturers) so now iRobot vacuums will still be on the market, (still selling their products, the "pet shit spreaders"), only the data they capture will be in Chinese hands, the profits will be in China, and the US workforce will be decimated.
Re: Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score:2)
While I know China is illegally enforcing their human rights violations in the rest of the world, I'm not affiliated with China, do not plan to travel to or through Chinese controlled territories. This mean that China has little to no potential leverage over me.
I can't say the same about US, or European, entities so I find the privacy violations to be a lesser risk with China.
I'm quit conscious that data in China will possibly leak, but I have worked at enough tech companies to know that security breaches a
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When was roomba made in the usa?? replace our MBAs with their MBAs? don't care. Going Chinese might lower credibility of the failing product that was less innovative than American auto companies. As for privacy, there wasn't likely going to be any either way and for now, I'm more concerned about Amazon invading Americans' privacy.
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Well done, Senator Warren. This is definitely a better outcome.
Even if what you say were true, it is a better outcome. For the end user there is more competition rather than Amazon owning fucking everything.
Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are several PRC companies that have overtaken iRobot in this field. This is in fact one of the main reasons for its decline. You get a lesser product for more money because of the brand, and eventually customers left for better and cheaper options.
This field is actually a really good example of the "US invents, China iterates and EU regulates". US invented the robotic vacuum, but PRC iterated on it and made it much better. Hence iRobot's primary supplier being from Shenzhen.
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A good example ... except for the "EU regulates" bit. In this case it was US anti-trust regulations that knee-capped iRobot.
Although the EU may have regulated anyway if the Amazon deal progressed.
Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score:4, Insightful)
Facts. I used to have a Roomba for years, but as I live in Europe, it was getting increasingly hard to deal with modern features (like the self-emptying base which needs 120V power). I reluctantly switched to a Roborock when my power converter died, and just, wow, they're light years ahead of iRobot. I think iRobot has been coasting on its name for a while now.
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That's very distinctly not my experience. What version do you have?
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That may explain it. I have a Qrevo S, which is from 2024, while yours is from 2022. The only thing that it ever gets stuck at is one spot where, from under the couch, it can see out the ground-level window, and get stuck between the couch and window ledge (not actually stuck, just confused), because the LiDAR sees out the window. And I fixed that just by setting a small exclusion zone there. It never "gets lost" - maybe your house has some vast open spaces that it can't handle? But the LiDAR seems to se
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If I remember correctly, consumer models tend to have very limited range of LIDAR in the tower on purpose for large manufacturers that have separate consumer and industrial models. It prevents consumer versions from being used in large commercial spaces instead of much more costly industrial versions.
It's a product segmentation issue. You can generally get around it by putting some object in very wide open spaces that lidar can track within its limited range.
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Firmware updates after "basic functionality is robust" are nonexistent in my experience. For everything but maybe the most expensive modules.
Notably it's commonly recommended that you use double sided tape for small rugs that get moved around by the vacuum. They cost pennies at pretty much any website selling accessories for robotic vacuums.
No idea what's up with your gym equipment, but general recommendation is that you put as much of the stuff strewn around the floor on mounts, chairs, tables etc. Floor s
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Actually one more thing on the gym part. Most have large mirrors that go all the way down. These utterly confuse lidar guidance. The easy solution is to cover the the bottom part of the mirrors, so that lidar sees it as an obstacle, rather than thinking that there's free space there going all the way to where it reflects the beam.
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I used a Roomba for about 3 years. It was pretty good, but I with the following caveats:
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It's not a good example of "US invents, China interests, EU regulates".
The fundamentals of the visual map building that these cleaners rely on voices from these two papers:
https://scholar.google.com/cit... [google.com]
https://scholar.google.com/cit... [google.com]
You'll more they both come from within the EU (at the time).
Of course they built on other work and were built on by other work from around the world.
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Modern ones haven't built a map visually in a long time (if ever). They build it from sensor fusion of lidar (mounted in lidar tower on top of the unit), IR mapping using grid projector and camera mounted in front and on the right side, and finally kinetic bump sensor in front and on the sides.
Maybe some original iRobot built on basis of visual mapping.
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Modern ones haven't built a map visually in a long time (if ever).
The early ones certainly did, since cheap lidar sensors only became available recently. I'd be surprised if they weren't using range and vision fusion because relocalisation and loop closing is much easier with vision than with range sensing.
The internet says that lidar is newer and better, but vSLAM is still more popular for cost reasons.
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If instead of "The internet", whatever that means, you go to pretty much any store that sells large amounts of robotic vacuum cleaners, you'll quickly notice that all of the most popular models sold are lidar models. Because of just how fundamentally awful the early non-lidar models are in navigation.
It's easy to tell because lidar versions have the lidar tower on top.
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If instead of "The internet", whatever that means,
Are you really that stupid?
you go to pretty much any store
let me introduce you to a thing called "the internet" when you can visit stores from the comfort of your chair.
you'll quickly notice that all of the most popular models
Ho do you gauge popularity? Seems there are both kinds on sale, with LiDAR ones being more expensive, on the whole.
sold are lidar models.
You said they don't use lidar, before. Now you're saying lidar is more popular. Please make up you
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1. Sit down son. I'm about to blow your mind. infowars.com is "The internet" and really awful source of information.
2. Sort by "popular/most sold" in your favorite store. Almost all of them have it.
3. Sit down again son. I'm about to blow your mind again. "Exception that proves the rule".
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Robot vacuum cleaners - meh (Score:4, Interesting)
I've owned two robot vacuum cleaners: A Roomba about 10 years ago, and a bObsweep now.
They're both kind of crap at actually cleaning well. And I can vacuum my entire house with a regular vacuum cleaner in about 15 minutes, so it's not like they're really major labour-saving devices either.
The bObsweep does have a wet-mop attachment and I do use that on a fairly regular basis, because it does a decent job of mopping the floor. But overall, I don't think these machines are worth it.
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If you have nothing but a single-floor structure with wood or tile, and no pets or long-haired people, and don't eat where the vacuum is supposed to go and no muddy shoes or feet, it might work for you, but this is probably not an average dwelling.
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And no carpets (though that's implicit in your "wood or tile") and no door steps and not many chairs or not many things at all in the house. Also you mentioned no pets, I can confirm it does not work well with dogs nor cats (dogs because they get easily get muddy, and cats because of cat litter).
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The camera is how the mapping works. It's pretty hard to do a good job without one of those.
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Mine automatically goes to higher suction levels on carpets (it recognizes them automatically, and I can set it manually in the map too if I want), and can cross pretty much all thresholds.
There are actual ramps designed for robotic vacuums if you have ramps or shallow steps so it can cross them. They're really cheap too.
Higher end units have rotating mops that can deal with mud, and they also now have forward facing cameras with object recognition that works quite well on things like animal excrement.
No id
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You can get a highly rated one which mops, avoid objects fairly well, can find your pet, maps your house, cleans just particular rooms, etc. for less than $150 now.
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Yeah, my Roborock has rotating mops, and I can say with 100% certainty, I haven't lived in a cleaner house since I moved out of my OCD mother's place as a teen. You could eat off that floor.
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I wonder if I'm much cleaner than I thought I am, because I'm yet to encouter problems with my low end cleaner. It sucks up everything, it has pretty much the lowest end mop variant that is good enough due to the way vacuum's routing will drag it over every spot at least twice.
Pretty much the only thing that needs attention after it's done is corners and a few places with plants and wiring on the floor that are set as no-go zones.
Re:Robot vacuum cleaners - meh (Score:4, Insightful)
Vacuum Wars.
https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-... [vacuumwars.com]
They test the various robots and some are reasonably good at the pet hair situation.
That said, the huge innovation in robot vacuums came out of countries where they have few carpets, and they like their floors really, really clean: Japan and Korea. China has taken it over, but the cultural influence from those two countries where you sit and sleep on the floor is huge on these devices.
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Pet hair has never been an issue for me with robots. My long hair always is. It's way longer than any pet's.
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When I run either the Dyson or Shark uprights, they pick up enough hair that the Roomba missed so that they too have to be emptied after each use.
I also have a long haired chihuahua, who is old and deaf. The Roomba does not run unless we're home and he is off the floor.
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The problem with iRobot specifically is that they stopped innovating and improving their
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I've owned two robot vacuum cleaners: A Roomba about 10 years ago, and a bObsweep now. They're both kind of crap at actually cleaning well.
A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.
When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, it's obvious they aren't going to be capable of generating anywhere near the same amount of suction as a vacuum powered by the mains. That's even assumin
Re:Robot vacuum cleaners - meh (Score:5, Interesting)
They don't generate the same kind of suction. They're a different beast, but they work great.
The reason these are good is that they are smart. They vacuum every day. They roll over the same spot multiple times if the spot is really dirty. They yes, blow their whole, battery doing half your house, but then they go back to the charger, recharge, then start from right where they left off and finish the job. They have built-in mops now that work better than your powerful vacuum because whooshing air power just cannot compete with electron attraction (water on a pad which actually rubs on the dust, that is).
And they may not do a great job of vacuuming up when you spill a bag of flour on the floor, but they blow you away in terms of keeping your whole environment a LOT less dusty and your floor, generally speaking, completely free of hair, dust, fibers, bits of plastic, etc.
I recently suggested that my exercise place get one. One day I came in and was using a machine where you face down -- I knew right away they'd gotten a robot. The floor no longer had that dull look of a very thin layer of dust. The owner was really happy with it. Modern vacuums don't get snagged on cords, scoot around machine legs, under machines, and don't get bored -- they clean every inch they can reach. And they do it every single night while you're gone, in the dark, without you having to remember or do work.
Your comparison to plug-in vacuums is like saying a napalm bombing run just doesn't have the stopping power of a 38 special.
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That's what's driving the recent increase in asthma: a more aseptic environment.
I ate dirt as a child, and I almost never get sick. My wife lived in a pristine environment and gets sick at the drop of a hat. These anecdotes are examples that are backed up by reams of rigorous science, some of which was done by a friend of mine, looking at the rate of respiratory illness in Papua New Guinea populations pre- and post-westernization. Their conclusion: we would be healthier if we lived with dirt floors.
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Watts aren't the key to good cleaning. Japanese brands make 300W cleaners that do a better job than 3000W European ones.
You need something to lift the dust off the surface and into the air stream. Basic vacs have little brushes, but you really want moving ones that sweep and beat, lifting dust away from the surface.
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There's 3kW European ones??
I though they stopped selling those decades ago. It's been 900W for nearly a decade now.
I've got a 1200W wet/dry extractor and it's noticeably more powerful, but those pro ones aren't domestic vacuum cleaners so they are exempt. It's also easy excessive for domestic vacuuming though you can use it for that if you don't mind a huge, heavy and noisy machine with excessive suction.
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Before 2013, manufacturers used engine power as marketing term so power tended to be high, I think mine was 2200 W. Then the EU mandated efficiency ratings and people started to choose based on ABCD categories instead of power. Then also the eco-design regulation came and EU mandated vacuum cleaners to do be below 900 W anyway. https://energy-efficient-produ... [europa.eu]
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There used to be, then the EU rule came in, but with an exception for special purpose vacuums.
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Sitting on my kitchen table right now is a drone pack. It's 57,5Wh, smaller the batteries of most modern Roombas. It's 50C - thus it can output up to
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The EU regulated high power vacuum cleaners maybe 10-12 years ago. At the time, loads of people were up in arms about how we weren't going to be able to clean our houses properly. The news had pictures of people piling big, inefficient vacuums into their cars the day before the ban came along... and so on.
What actually happened is that manufacturers just made their products better. If previously they used 3000W to do something, they did the same using half that - through more efficient airflow, filtering or
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A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to.
Yep a great factoid that belongs in the era of incandescent bulbs. The idea that a "real" vacuum cleaner needs to max out the outlet is right up there with the idea that a "real" car needs a V8 engine, and a "real" wife belongs in the kitchen.
The only vacuum cleaners that max out a residential outlet are those rubbish ones produced by companies who stopped finding ways of improving the vacuum cleaner 50 years ago. A real vacuum cleans, and there are plenty of modern vacuums that are battery powered that can
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I had a fairly early generation Roomba (500 series, I believe), and it was pretty brain dead. It had a bad habit of trying to eat cat toys and getting stuck on stair ledges. Which was annoying, because they were supposed to be smart enough to avoid those things at that point.
I tried to avoid the 1st generation bugs, and still got screwed on my purchase.
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The Slashdot story link is to:
https://www.msn.com/en-my/tech... [msn.com]
The freemalaysiatoday is a channel (?) here -- I guess the source of the story. I almost looks like an ad since you have the sidebar on the right that has links to the freemalayasiatoday website. So I guess this is kinda a "news by tertiary source situation". FreeMalayasiaToday republishes a story by Bloomburg, and MSN picks it up from FreeMalayasiaToday.
Will existing Roomba units keep working? (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's probably not known yet, and will be figured out during the bankruptcy proceedings.
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Because they were a crap company (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason these guys failed is that they were not a good robot maker.
Their original robot defined the market in the US. They were not the first, but they were the first in the US. However, as the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese robots developed robots with room mapping, lidar, remote control movement, object avoidance, etc., iRobot kept selling the same thing -- random walk robots you did not want. The only thing selling Roombas was brand-recognition.
Why were they not developing their robot? Because they were busy trying to get military contracts to make battlefield units. hustling to be in the news/trade-press for battlefield robots (and generating a lot of buzz there) while their bread-and-butter vacuum robots got more and more out of date.
When they finally improved, years later than anyone else, they'd lost their brand's good reputation -- it was like starting again as a new company, and the people who knew about room-cleaning robots didn't trust them anymore. And they were generally always behind in the tech, behind in the cost-per-unit of production, not bringing new benefits/ideas.
Sound familiar? Sound a little like Toyota eating Ford's lunch, so Ford gave us the Pinto?
iRobot might be missed as a name, but you didn't want their vacuums anyhow. And that wasn't because of state-sponsored competition per-se, it was because they were a complacent do-nothing company, when it was critical to evolve.
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Reminds me of Mozilla and Firefox. Management needs attention span meds.
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iRobot was not about Roombas. That's what their consumer robots were known for, but it was more of a side project.
They're main moneymakers were robots for the military - bomb defusing robots were something they were known for.
Their random walk consumer robots were good because they were cheap - and they worked well enough. We set a bunch up when we had dogs and they kept the shedding down.Basically we just set them up and let them vacuum while we left for work. it made the weekly vacuum much easier when the
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As per Wikipedia the iRobot military robotics were sold to equity fund "Arlington Capital Partners" in February 2016.
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Didn't innovate (Score:4, Insightful)
The Roomba they released 20+ years ago is the essentially the same as their latest models. If they were going to do that, the least they could have done was innovate on price reduction/cost.
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When the merger with amazon was proposed (Score:2)
there was all sorts of pearl clutching about one lesss competitor and Amazon mapping your house
Now there is one less competitor anyway, and a chinese company is mapping your house
How's that working for y'all in the USoA?
Moral of the story, sometimes, a merger is the lesser of two evils.
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I mean, you still have to buy one of these things in order for that mapping to be done.
However, if you are concerned about people being able to find your real address, that horse left the barn long ago.
If you own a smart phone, there are plenty of 3rd parties that know your location and a bunch of other meta data. Heck, even without a smart phone. For example, if you have a unique wifi SSID name, chances are good that someone else has already logged the name and tagged the geolocation (https://wigle.net/).
They rested on their laurels (Score:2)
I used to have Roombas. Which were autocorrected to Roombad. I had 7 of them in my lifetime. They did a fairly poor job, often getting stuck, and requiring a lot of manual maintenance.
I redid 4000 sq ft of floors recently. I purchased 3 Narwal Freo - X Ultra, Z ultra, Z10 ultra. They almost never stop. And they mop. If one of my cats pees on the tile in the bathroom, it swallows it. The remaining Roombas were all dropped off at Goodwill last month.
another corporation ruined by classism and greed (Score:2)
they started off well but became just another classist and corporate rip off
there are better robot vacuums
35 Years? What's the story behind that? (Score:2)
I always assumed it was a startup. Was this an older company that pivoted into vacuum cleaners?
they were left behind by their own choices (Score:1)
For years they adamantly insisted they didn't need to upgrade their room making and navigation tech while Asian companies hungrily iterated improvements.
When other companies integrated vacuum AND mopping tech, Roomba refused because they'd rather try to sell you 2x separate $200 devices.
This is simply a case where an early leader got it's head so far up it's own ass it didn't realize it was being left behind. Or rather, it saw all the signs and insisted they were wrong.
Oh well. Evolution requires death of t
Why maping (Score:2)
Maybe it's me who lived in apartment with much simpler floor plans than everyone else, but I never saw the need for room mapping and navigation.
I've always use the randomly going around and bump into things models, and they have always been good enough for the daily cleans in house with cats.
I really don't care how silly they bump into thing as long as they keep the pet hair low in their daily runs.
What I do care about are the batteries, but luckily after-market LiIon batteries that integrate their own BMS
Re:Why maping - quicker so quieter (Score:1)
I like the mapping ones solely based on being around when they're running. Less time running is less noise.
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They had a patent on the two counter rotating rollers. No offers of a product with LIDAR, perhaps based on price. Patent ran out and they're now toast.
I've got one of their newer combo units that also mops. Used the mop just once. Meh. Still use the vacuum ability.
I was always embarrassed how long I could stand there and watch them decide where to go next however.
I wasn't impressed with mine. (Score:2)
It's sad to see someone go from the top of an industry to the trash in a few short years.
No funny? (Score:2)
Disappointed there is no funny here. At least someone could have posted a link to their favorite video of a cat riding a Roomba. Or some story about the funniest thing their Roomba has eaten? Or maybe an AI joke about Grok hacking into and taking over all of the Internet-connected robot vacuum cleaners?
Still the Chinese Hoovered up the brand name (Score:2)