Roomba / iRobot is years behind the Chinese companies. We just got an Ecovacs X1 Omni - a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station. We fill a clean water tank & empty the dirty one about once a week. Floors are spotless - huge difference from static cloth mopping bots.
Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works. Roborock and Ecovacs products launch in China 6-12 months before their US launch. By the time Roomba has a decent mop bot, the X2 or X3 will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.
EDIT: commenters are asking what works offline from Roborock / Ecovacs. For the self-cleaning-mop generation like the X1 Omni:
- Roborock obstacle avoidance is local, but works better with cloud.
- Roborock can be controlled by a local home automation server without internet access.
- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.
- Ecovacs control requires cloud.
I remembered these stats from a Youtube video that I can't find; probably in my partner's history since we watched reviews on the TV together.
I picked the X1 Omni over the Roborock because it has superior mopping performance on tile floors, but I think both would be good options. It seems like Roborock is more privacy compatible.
Yeah I went from a Roomba 960 (2018) to a Xiaomi Roborock S7 and in my research it was eye opening to see the level of tech difference between the two, even the modern Roomba is using a vision only model, and poorly based on reviews. For the same price, Roborock has Lidar scanning, AI obstacle avoidance and mopping. The thing is, it actually works in the Roborock, it can even spot cords and other misc items around my house and avoid them entirely.
Additionally since it maps using Lidar it completes a complete cleaning of my living room + kitchen area in 22 minutes, whole house in under 40 minutes. That is with it covering literally every square inch of carpet & tile instead of going around in random patterns...
As others have said, suction isn't as good as a regular vacuum. But what makes it great is it can do its thing while I'm away. I'm quite lazy and hate vacuuming, so there's no way I'd do it manually more than once a week. But the bot does its thing daily, so my house is generally cleaner. It also has a rotating brush that makes the carpet much fluffier than the regular vacuum, and seems to be better at pulling out hair.
Navigation-wise it's not too bad. I have to remove wires, socks and similar from the floor, or it WILL get tangled. The only thing which is a bit stupid is that it doesn't seem to know its height, so it can sometimes get stuck under things. But I've put some 2 mm wood blocks under that shelf, and now everyone's happy.
I feel like the major consideration is: do you have kids or pets? Then get one. Otherwise, probably not worth it.
If you have small-ish kids, you end up vacuuming everyday one way or the other. A Roomba's a decent stand-in for that. When my kids aren't at home, I mostly get by with my stick vacuum. (There the battery-driven ones really are nice.) With the stick vacuum it doesn't tend to leave my cables and rugs in random places, which makes the daily non-kid-time vacuuming similar levels of effort.
I assume pets are a similar deal, though I'm not a pet person.
One thing that hadn't occurred to me before getting the Roomba is that it vacuums a lot of places I wouldn't regularly get to on my own (e.g. under the sofa), and there's some benefit of having a cleaning session frequently that gets to a lot of those places that are otherwise hard to reach. But again, with kids not at home, I run it about once a week.
I'm genuinely curious about the mopping ones since I don't mop often, and always like it when I do. ;-)
Regarding pets: I decided to give a cheaper Eufy RoboVac model a try a couple years ago to help keep things under control with a dog in the house. The maintenance on it to remove entangled dog hair was just too much in the end. Sure, manual vacuums have a similar problem but seem easier to maintain. The RoboVac had no computer vision (local or cloud) to help with obstacles, but that wasn't really as much as an issue as mechanical failures.
Yes, this is why my Roomba doesn't get much use anymore in our house. There's always a loose toy somewhere. We have to have the kids pick up all the toys first before we can vacuum. At that point we end up using a Miele canister vac instead. We can see what we're about to vacuum up. It ended up being the better purchase over the Roomba.
I don't usually let it go in the kids room unless it's right after they've cleaned. The main problem areas in the apartment are right in front of the door, where they take off their shoes (so much sand, always!) and under the kitchen table. And from my messes: in the kitchen, from cooking. Those are the areas I was vacuuming most days by hand before. Again, the main problematic things for me are dragging around cables (from my stereo) and moving rugs, but those aren't more than a few seconds to put back. It gets stuck on something else maybe every 2-3 runs.
My experience with a couple lower end ones and a sheddy dog is that they work well for what they are. Don't expect magic. Expect low effort daily maintenance cleaning that keeps things spiffy. Maybe the higher end ones are significantly better? My bet is that the cleaning isn't all that different since among a product line they largely use the same chassis--there is only so much sweeper/suction/storage they can have.
The one upgrade that would be useful in retrospect is electronic fencing, but it isn't a big deal.
We have a 120qm2 apartment, 2 cats, 1 dog and a child. We couldn‘t live without our Roborock S7. It runs everyday and sometimes even more. No big issues, vacuums, mops, would buy it again in a heartbeat.
I have the S6 and it's so friggen useful even if just for the cat hair. The little mop addon is solid too! I just spray areas that have some sticky / dried on goop and it handles the rest.
I have 2 of them, a 2-3 year old Xiamoi S5 and some way newer Shark. The shark is frustrating to watch, it bangs into things constantly and doesn't give up. I have to go fix the Shark all the time because it drove over or into something, for instance I have a very low TV stand with open drawers, and it will try and try until it drives right in, and then gets stuck. So I have to have a lot more boundaries with the Shark than the Xiomi. The S5 is pretty impressive with its tech and I'd only buy a xiomi at. this point.
With that said, NEITHER are a replacement for a real vaccuum. I would only recommend them for wood floors to pick up pet hair and things like that. I'm really, realyy disappointed with how they work on carpet.
The xiomi is also a lot more powerful than my Shark.
If there's some vaccuum bot that can almost take the place of a real vaccuum on carpet please let me know because I don't vaccuum enough at all.
Unfortunately I also have halfway carpeted stairs and I need to get some sort of vaccuum that isn't miserable to use on stairs.. Please dont carpet stairs. I have a really nice Shark big vaccuum but its not fun to do stairs with it.
> If there's some vaccuum bot that can almost take the place of a real vaccuum on carpet please let me know because I don't vaccuum enough at all.
If that one famous vacuum-repairman AMA on Reddit is to be believed, even most home upright vacuums don't produce enough suction to properly clean carpet. No way they're gonna fit that much power in a little disc-shaped, quiet robot.
Right, but without enough suction it's just not going to get any of the dirt down in the carpet, no matter how many times it goes over it. It'll just get light stuff that's right on the surface. Shitty upright vacs (so, the vast majority of upright vacs) sometimes try to make up for this with really aggressive brushes, but that barely helps and is really bad for the carpet—I don't think Roombas have enough room or power to even try that inferior work-around, let alone to generate a strong enough vacuum to really clean carpet.
That might be enough if the carpet starts relatively clean though - most of the deep down dirt gets pushed down through repeated use - stamping around a carpet with muddy boots will definitely ruin things quick but if you're conscientious about usage you're usually leaving surface level dirt that a mini-vacuum can scoop up if it's run frequently enough.
Roombas or similar things definitely can't keep a rug clean forever, but I think it's fair to say they'll make the times you need to get the heavy duty pet vac out less frequent.
We have a Roomba, though I think it's back in its box in a cupboard now. In the end it needed so much babysitting that I gave up and bought a cordless stick vacuum. That is the best home appliance purchase I've ever made. The lower hassle of not needing to extend and roll up the cord compared with my older vaccuum massively outweighs any benefit from the Roomba. Grabbing the stick, quickly buzzing it around for a couple of minutes and putting it away again is far less hassle than babysitting the Roomba.
We've got cats - and we just invested in like four brooms for our small condo - if you see some fur accumulating you can sweep it up before it becomes a gigantic rug of cat fur.
I'll usually sweep our main hallway twice a day which is a nice two minute brain break from work. As someone with ADHD working these sorts of chores into a very frequent and regular schedule is important or nothing will ever happen.
I've got a relatively old Roomba. It's pretty great. Yeah it gets stuck on stuff when the kids leave things on the floor. Yeah the docking isn't super reliable. But... it's a level of passive, continuous cleaning that just makes everything easier around the house. I will definitely replace it when it dies, and spend more money on a better one.
I got a lower end one on sale and even it has made a positive difference for us. We vacuum less often, but the floor is noticeably cleaner.
My wife was positive we’d be vacuuming just as much, insisted it was just a novelty, but we went from pretty much daily to weekly manual with the bot running daily.
Probably obvious but we realized letting it run in the evening after dinner while we clean made the most sense. You wake up to a clean floor. Prior to that we had it running in the middle of the day while we worked. Effectively it never seemed quite as clean.
Doesn't really get stuck (only time was when it "found" a fallen t-shirt behind a cabinet).
They do clean well for me, as long as I do it regularly. If I don't do it for a week it needs a second pass. But how much you need depends on external factors. Literally external, like how much dust gets in from outside.
Mine handled carpets well. IME of course. I didn't had pets when I had carpets, but at least with wooden floors cat hair gets cleaned fine.
Only caveat is if you have levels in your house you have to bring it up and down stairs but that's not asking much.
Thanks for the link, that looks like it'll fit the bill whenever I scrounge up a vacuum.
Although I think trying to convince vendors they want less data seems a little naive. More likely they'll lock out work like this entirely to make sure the free floor maps of your house (and schedule, and pet presence, and...) keep coming.
> More likely they'll lock out work like this entirely to make sure the free floor maps of your house (and schedule, and pet presence, and...) keep coming.
If your Roomba is rooted, then can't you disable OTA updates to prevent them from doing this?
I mean for future products. I'm not sure they'd care enough to patch up previous hardware. Just my personal opinion based on hardware manufacturers in general though.
I have an S7 and it’s been ridiculously stupid. My old Roomba was less aggravating. The S7 takes 50 minutes to clean 800sqft, always gets stuck in a high rug or chair support. Frequently gets tangled on cables and toys. I can clean tht floor in 10 min with a stick vacuum. Anyone wanna buy an old S7? Barely used, frequently kicked.
The only annoying Xiaomi moments are when it recognizes a sock as dog poo then refuses to do anything in that area (or I couldn't figure out how to reset it). Ah, and it constantly gets stuck on bar stools pedestals.
Can confirm, source: me, cat owner - had to take apart the Xiaomi / Roborock S5 (surprisingly easy), clean it up from cat vomit and also clean the living room entirely...
I've owned Neato, Roomba and Roborock. Hands down Roborock is what I recommend people to buy. Neato had such a great leg up when it first came to market by having the first, and best, Lidar implementation - but their product was marred by horrible customer support, batteries that are garbage and just general failures of hardware that are impossible / too expensive to fix. By the time I gave up on Neato I had 4 of the same robot that I was piece parting out as components died (again and again). Talk about a company that banks on eWaste to keep the sales cycle going.
I'm thankful Amazon bought Roomba - one less reason to even consider them as an option considering all of the current gen vacs are sporting onboard cameras + CV (poop avoidance, is that really a huge concern?).
I've had great experiences with the Xiaomi products I've bought (34" monitor, earbuds, security cam, air purifier, soundbar). They are popular here in Thailand and at a really, really great price point
The Roomba j7+ cord and object detection is working well for me, although it's (probably) more expensive than the Chinese offerings. Regardless, it was a huge step up from my precis Neato Botvac connected (which was probably 5-6 years old though).
Wow, those both look incredibly slick. I've got a cheap like $150 chinese vacuum one and a mopping one but I might have to upgrade if they ever die. So do they actually handle floor vs carpet sweeping/mopping, don't get stuck on stuff on the floor, refill/empty, and you don't have to change the mop pads each time?
That is wild as that basically handles all the prep I have to do for mine. Albeit, 1000-1500 is quite a bit more.
I own a Xiaomi Vacuum Robot and that is by default very much not local only. However there is a project [1][2] to hack some of those devices and make them local-only.
With limited functionality they work of cause without app and cloud connection.
Thanks for this, I had a pending action item to look for something like this for my robot.
On a spin-off topic from this project: it says on his website
> The Apache-2.0 license is a very permissive license and a lot of work is being shared for free here, so I trust people to not take advantage of that and sell Valetudo; especially not as their own work.
Please don’t disappoint me. Thank you.
I really don't understand why people pick licenses that specifically allow for things that they don't want to happen. It's specially baffling when the author is clearly aware of the limitation!
they work locally(local network via app or physical buttons) unless you want to use it remotely via internet. The annoying thing is that it still forces you to "create an account" when you set it up. This was not required 4 years ago but it's required now.
Absolutely agree. The lack of LiDAR (or equiv) seems to really hamper iRobot's effectiveness - I had an iRobot i7 and its mapping/pathfinding was ramming in to things at near top speed and ricocheting off the walls.
They also still sell vacuum and mopping* robots as seperate units which just drives up the cost. My old setup of the two robots took somewhere on the order of 5-6 hours to do a ~100m2 apartment.
I moved to a Roborock and then Dreame bot (someone really needs to talk to Xiaomi about all the sub-brands :P) comparitively, they both took around 1.5 to just under 2 hours to do a much better job.
I actually felt huge guilt selling my two iRobot's to someone, wanting to tell them they were complete junk and they were wasting their money.
*There is always mixed opinions on mopping effectiveness, but the iRobot roll-and-spit model of mopping is truly horrendous.
Based on the comments here I did a quick look at Amazon and was surprised to not even see a single vacuum only robot from Evovacs. At least not prominently showcased.
Why are there only mixed models and what are the benefits?
If I look at my place the ground floor is tiled and the top floor is all carpet.
That means I would need two vacuums anyway as they haven’t learned yet to climb stairs.
Why wouldn’t I want a vacuum only model for upstairs?
For downstairs the universal model is great obviously. But upstairs?
I know there were a lot of simple vac only bots in the roborock line up. S5 and similar the mopping funciton is a small pad that you manually wet and it drags along behind. It kind of sucks but if you were in the market for just a vacuum, you remove the bracket and it's fine. The robot has no knowledge of the mop as there isn't a tank.
The S6Max that has a tank, you can also remove (easily, two button clips) and it'll not attempt any mopping feature. It also supposedly doesn't squirt water on to the pad when it knows its on carpet, but at some stage you may be dragging a mildly damp cloth on to the carpet. (was never an issue for me, the pad was never that wet that you could reasonably detect it on the carpet)
Overall mopping with drag-behind pads is pretty... opportunistic? Its not great and you'll be in a position where you have to manually mop. Many models are switching to the spinning buffer pads which is a much better solution (that's the Dreame W10) but it refuses to do carpet. So its always a matter of finding a model that fits your use case.
>That means I would need two vacuums anyway as they haven’t learned yet to climb stairs.
Many allow for multi floor mapping on a single bot, but stairs will always be a problem for the Daleks. :P
I don't understand this, I had a Neato before I switched to iRobot and the lidar just seemed to be the worst idea for a home environment.
On an almost weekly basis it would fail to start because it would think it was moved if something just moved a little bit nearby or a cat just happened to be sleeping nearby. This generally forced me to remap
Then it would constantly get lost and be confused about what room it was in. Seemingly for the same reasons of things moving around.
A home isn't a static environment and a camera just seems much more efficient. Not that a camera is perfect, but at least a camera can account for things moving around were lidar cannot.
Or was this a case of Neato just not being good? The lidar issues was why I went with iRobot. It was a worse vacuum but if it actually works consistently than I can just have it run more often.
I've a Xiami / Roborock S5 for almost 5 years now (give or take a few months) and their LIDAR implementation is absolutely genius - no issues whatsoever, no matter what gets moved around or not...
Must've been Neatos implementation i suppose...
On top of the really top-notch LIDAR the S5 is beautifully engineered as well - basically everything is a module (i.e. wheel+motor) which is plugged in and secured with a few screws - really good repairability and also spares are available (needed so far: 1 LIDAR motor, 2,50€; 1 resettable fuse for charging).
I have been eyeing the new Roborock S7, but that has both lidar and camera I think.
Interesting that others handle this better. I had heard great things about Neato before so that's why I went it. But it just ended up being more frustrating and not worth it.
I would not complement S5 that much. Mine can never return to the dock alone, which is pretty basic - it knows where it is, but tries to move there from a weird angle, repeats this few times and ultimately loudly fails. Also, it always gets stuck on dryer rack.
The engineering on the modularity is neat though, I agree.
> Or was this a case of Neato just not being good?
I think this is a software issue with Neato. My previous bot was the cheapest Ecovacs with LiDAR and vacuum base station, and it could adapt to furniture movement, large boxes appearing and disappearing in the living room, etc without too much trouble.
LiDAR (on the Ecovacs bots) does struggle with mirrors and floor-to-ceiling windows. Even the X1 Omni is convinced there's another room "inside" the large mirror I have in the living room. It's okay though since I just draw a no-go zone or no-go lines on the map wherever there's something odd.
Really the best results will always use sensor fusion - LiDAR mapping + camera object avoidance + physical bump sensor seems to work pretty well on the Ecovacs bots. I love the improvement in cable and shoelace avoidance since upgrading to a model with vision.
> but at least a camera can account for things moving around were lidar cannot
Why do you say that, am I missing something? Surely both technologies are able to keep "looking" as the hoover moves around, the lidar ones surely aren't doing a single analysis and then not checking again?
Others have mentioned that this may just be a problem with the Neato software.
The issue I was having with the neato is that is exactly what it was doing. It would come off its dock, do a scan around it. And if things were too different it would go back to its dock and complain that it has been moved.
So I had to find a place that things never moved, but that proved difficult. Even small things like the trash can shifting or books on a shelf shifting seem to throw it off.
I finally got to the point that I basically tricked it with blocking it from seeing certain things near its dock but that is less than ideal.
Now once it did that initial scan it seemed to be mostly ok, but it did seem too often get lost near my computer where the chair often moves. It would constantly tell me it was lost and I had to pick it up and put it back on the dock. Or my favorite was when it seemed to try to dock on the other side of my home.
My feeling (and has been confirmed by the iRobot) was that at least a camera with decent AI could account for a moving object vs most other things being the same. It is far from perfect, but compared to the Neato the camera has been leagues better.
I am very curious though how other Lidar system handle this since I would assume that there is a lack of data available to identify a change in environment vs a moved object.
That does sound shit, sorry you've had that experience!
But I believe lidar should be able to do the same as a camera in terms of real-time updates - from a tech point of view it's just a different type of sensor to a camera, there's no reason (other than difficulty/cost) why lidar robots can't be constantly scanning & understanding the difference between a chair that you've moved since 5 minutes earlier and a cat that keeps moving. Both camera and lidar products can be made dumb enough to fail badly, or smart enough to do a great job. After all, self driving cars have been demo'd using full lidar, it's not like that technology itself takes hours to image a room.
Of course i can only talk about my Roborock S5, but that one handles each and any changes in the environment flawlessly.
While cleaning, you can watch it on the map (in the cloud/app as well as when rooted on the local webserver) and can see it constantly scanning the surroundings and things appearing when they do.
I once saw an object "appearing" when there should've been none when i was out, when i got back home it was my cat that wanted to roadblock the Roborock, laying on the floor...
I have a neato and yeah, I think its neato's software. Its chock full'o'bugs. It routinely loses network connectivity and has to be rebooted to restore it. Of course, support will blame signal, but I've had that issue too and the behavior is different. A dead spot will just lose signal until it moves past it and gracefully recovers. This causes a weird error beep and then it doesn't recover.
Beyond that, I've had it vacuum a floor twice. When it finished, it showed the space twice, because it became disoriented. Basically, it didn't just think the room changed shape, it thought it doubled in size!
I've had it get lost because it thought it was on the opposite side of a rectangular room from where it actually was.
They never update it to fix these things and, IMO, haven't shipped a truly new product in several years. I'm not shocked that a lot of other lidar-based products have surpassed them now.
What you described is completely unrelated to LiDAR, and could just as lazily be implemented with a SLAM based vision stack. LiIDAR and vision based systems make 3d measurements of what the sensors see, whenever they look at it. What's done with those measurements in software isn't related to the ability to collect the real-time sensing of those distances.
Once my i7 has generated a proper map, it will will slow down when it approaches known walls, or even places where obstacles have been several times in the past. It will need to bump into the obsticle or wall to confirm its position though.
It does use a mostly predictable back and forth pattern, taking note of areas with walls/obstacles, and after the main sweeping it will combe back to go around the obstacles, and finally (optional) do a sweep of the walls. Then it moves onto the next room.
The system does have limitations. For example, if it needs assistance in the middle of a clean job, after you fix it, there is a reasonable chance that it will do dumb stuff afterwards, like missing a large section of floor. (It seems to even know this, but have problematic coding that prevents it from doing the right thing).
But yeah, I'd not call the mapping good, just acceptable.
There are other annoyances like the i7 battery being so small, especially since they have a giant battery compartment. Like seriously big enough like ni-cad batteries battery of equivalent capacity. But they only offer a slightly larger capacity battery as part of their Costco exclusive model, and try to lock out third party batteries. The net result is that even when brand new, it could not quite do a single floor of my house in one go, needing to go recharge for like 40 minutes before it could do the last 10 minutes of cleaning.
The app is not very good. It does not even do some basic things like prompt the user for regular maintenance periodically based on number of hours used.
The floor maps in the app are weird. For example, on one of my floors, the online map decided that the entrance to one of my rooms was on a completely different wall from where the entrance really was. It thought the actual door was just a wall. However the actually mapping data on the robot was just fine. It knew where the door really was, and never tried to drive though the wall where the online map though the door was.
You are absolutely right, but I’m not sure I want to have a free roaming camera and LiDAR sensor from a Chinese company in my home. Absolute piss poor track record of data collection, I’ll happily stick to my roomba. It’s definitely semi dumb but it’s predictable in its quirks. It’s also repairable with copious supply of original parts. Note also that they still innovate, including the self empty bin that actually works, which others have now copied. Just sayin’.
This is exactly my concern. Imagine a DoD contractor with a remote-controllable, lidar+camera (+mic?) equipped robot based in the USA's main rival country. Does that seem like a good idea? Should we put a fleet of Chinese robots in SpaceX's facility? Lockheed's? Why not?
It's not just "Murica first". If these were European companies, I'd jump ship very quickly to an iRobot competitor with a superior product, thanks to EU's data collection laws and USA's OK relationship with EU. But they aren't, they operate in a regime where questionable data collection is the norm and theft of IP is called "R&D".
Yes, Amazon will use iRobot to vacuum more data than dirt, but at least they are part of the US and EU laws. They provide gov services for a ton of US DoD/NASA infra! China could and would just thumb their nose at us without much concern.
I'm less worried about what a Chinese surveillance device will do in my house than an Amazon one. Only the latter has the ability and history of turning over data to those who can arrest me.
One concern people should have about foreign tech spying on them is the possibility it undermines the stability of their jobs.
Let’s say it exfiltrates data that eventually allows a foreign competitor to build sophisticated metallurgy for turbines. It’s not like all foreign countries eagerly hire foreign talent, moreover it puts domestic expertise at risk as well as all the collateral subcontractors and suppliers… so, yeah, super metallurgy-guy's job may be secure (can get hired by the foreign competitor), even if the company collapses but not the jobs of 10,000s who work for suppliers, etc.
As an editorial, I support almost everything EFF and related orgs do, precisely to reduce the fear of US spying that makes China look like a better option (What a state of affairs!)
It seems your actual complaint is that if US Law Enforcement decides you are a target of interest, they would think to go to Amazon and Amazon's reputation is that they'd cooperate in handing over data, whereas the LE officers would neither bother to ask, nor expect cooperation from the Chinese companies.
The Chinese (or anyone) can certainly turn over their data to people who can arrest you, if they decide you are a target.
Chinese companies operating in the US still have to abide by US laws, so they are under the same jurisdiction that compels Amazon to turn over data to law enforcement. If Chinese companies don't comply, they get kicked out of the market.
China could easily turn that data over to American law enforcement if they wanted to see a person they considered a threat to them arrested but that person was outside of their jurisdiction.
It has not happened, does not mean that it could not happen. Chinese companies are automatically more cooperative than us companies because they are trained to cooperate in their home country already.
But so far I suppose the indigenous big tech spying apparatus has been effective enough to not need foreign operators help.
But the former is acquiring information that may lead to them blackmailing you and/or your loved ones into spying against your nation, which may lead to more than just an arrest.
Why does it have to be either? My comment was merely about leak of data to China. Whether it is non-existent or not is something I'd rather not find out.
It is after all a personal decision and to each their own.
The bar for China successfully leveraging some damaging information on a US citizen in the US is pretty high. Meaning they have to have something very damning against a person in a position of interest. Not impossible but narrow.
The bar for leveraging general information about a regular US citizen in the US by a company like Amazon or the US government is very, very low. One thing I see happening really soon (if not already) is such data being used by medical insurers to algorithmically decide your coverage and rates. Or for authorities to use to establish whatever pattern they want that can be damning even if circumstantial.
Looking around, all of this already happens in the US even without the help of an extra massive data collection net. From companies like Google or PayPal algorithmically locking you out of your critical digital identity, your paid services, your money with simply a boilerplate "sorry not sorry, don't let the door hit you on your way out", to authorities stealing all your neighbors' smart doorbell recordings to see what you have been doing and Stingraying the hell out of everyone on the off chance that they're going to catch the person they're looking for. Anything that makes that easier or opens up more avenues to do more of that is definitely going to be used (and abused) as such.
Had the same thought. Don't know what data iRobot collects, but perhaps its telemetry includes square footage of your rooms / house? (Amazon can use that to determine how wealthy you are). Attach an echo on that with microphone and camera, and the iRobot could even sneakily follow you and spy on you - Alexa always with you in your house, anywhere!
With Alexa, there is a manual hardware switch where you can turn off the microphones. With Echo Show, there is a manual hardware shutter for the camera.
I'm not sure if that is the answer to privacy concerns, but at least it is there.
When it comes to patents, I'm fine with that. Our system of patents has become a significant encumbrance to innovation and is causing US companies to fall behind.
> You are absolutely right, but I’m not sure I want to have a free roaming camera and LiDAR sensor from a Chinese company in my home. Absolute piss poor track record of data collection
I am not sure if Amazon is more trustworthy than that.
I mean there are countless documented situations where U.S. law enforcement has dramatically overreached or misstepped, and personally, I’d prefer people who have cameras and microphones in my home to require the U.S. judiciary to review some facts and agree to issue a warrant for any access. Amazon doesn’t meet this test and so this acquisition likely means we’ll be parting ways with iRobot equipment in our home.
I guess you could say my threat model is not “the United States is my adversary”, and more that I appreciate some checks and balances being present on ‘local yokel’ police departments which are empirically not always doing the right thing (especially where oversight is low).
Yup, that was my thinking, even if the Chinese company owns the data, they wont be sharing that with the PD or NSA , etc... if they are, then really doesn't matter who owns your data.
I don't really want continuous surveillance of the interior of my home by any company from any nation. There should be some places where you get to just exist without being monitored.
So far my solution has been just to make sure everything is disconnected from wifi. Not so sure that will actually work for that much longer, if it still does at all (cellular, more extensive mesh networking, etc.).
I think that places in the US will start having to push for the right to turn off and disconnect (yeah, shades of Max Headroom here).
But what is the difference, is the track record of a democracy less grim with your privacy? " Amazon admitted its Ring security cameras have sent recordings to police without the knowledge or consent of the people who own the cameras.
Responding to an inquiry from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Amazon said in a letter dated July 1 that it has handed over private recordings to police 11 times in 2022. The company said it was complying with an "emergency request."
I guess is better to have a device that will share your data with domestic entities that actually spy on you and harm your privacy. If someone
"has to" own my data, I prefer that someone to be in another jurisdiction.
Is there a tangible difference between chinese and american companies when it comes to privacy? It seems either will sell your data to the highest bidder.
How easy are the Chinese models to repair? I can't speak for iRobot's mop bots, but the older model vacuums were insanely easy to repair. I had a motor die on one, and it was about ten phillips head screws to get to it, remove it, and pop in a $10 replacement. I was amazed to see a modern consumer item that was so easy to repair.
Of course, this is a model I bought used almost ten years ago. Not sure how similar current models are.
I can only speak about the Roborock S5, but I assume the newer ones are fairly comparable.
I once had it give me an error that the main fan (for suction) was broken. In this case, there was a small particle lunged into it, so it wouldn't spin. All it took was a little wiggle, and it spun again.
It's definitely more than 10 phillips head screws, but less than 30. I guess it depends which part broke, but I had to disassemble pretty much the whole thing. I can promise you that my repair skills or experiences are very novice, but I managed just fine. Had two screws left over after putting it all back together as is tradition, but I suppose they weren't mission critical, as this was like 3 years back and Dobby is still cleaning like a champ.
Like half a year ago, the LIDAR broke. Ordered a new one on amazon for 20 bucks, unscrewed now about 28 screws and exchanged the broken part. Put it all together, again tossed away a screw that left me wondering where it belonged, and it still works to this day.
This was a very long way of saying "Roborocks repair fairly easily, and there are numerous tutorials online."
Edit: BTW, Dobby has been cleaning for almost 500 hours now. At that price point, there is no cheaper hourly cleaning staff :)
I also have an S5. Had a LIDAR that wouldn't spin. Paid 15€ or so for an identical part on Amazon. It took 5 minutes and a single screwdriver to swap it.
At 5 minutes you were really quick! For me it was probably like 20-30, but like I said: it's not necessarily something I'm skilled at. Either way, repairs are fairly quick and easy!
I recently went from a Roomba S9+ to a RoboRock S7 MaxV Ultra and it was like night and day. The RoboRock has not gotten stuck on a single cat toy, cable, or sock yet. It doesn't bump into furniture repeatedly. It is considerably quieter. I feel like it is the first time I can actually safely start running a robot vacuum while not at home, and not worry that I'll come home to a robot tangled in some random object.
How does it avoid cables? I have an earlier Roborock version and while I love it and will defend it until the day it dies, I've found that cables are the absolute nemesis. Does your version have computer vision?
Pretty sure my version is a standard RoboRock S7, only with the "Ultra" base that also cleans the mop. I might have lucked out with the cables so far. Fwiw I do try to clean the floor of clutter a bit when I know I'm going to run it, but it has still encountered charging cables etc during the run. It's just taken a picture of them as "obstacles" and gone around them.
The part that makes it more expensive is the "Ultra" base. The unit itself with an equivalent base to that of my Roomba is about 200 USD less expensive than the Roomba where I live.
I sincerely desire to avoid having a mobile, internet connected device that equips many sensors and cameras in my home that is designed, manufactured and supported by a Chinese company.
Yes we totally can. Honestly, the idea of telemetry is general enough that it can and should be legislated. At the very least products should advertise that they produce telemetry when connected to the internet and have an option or have to distribute the knowledge of how to disable it.
What I don't understand is how iRobot, once an iconic innovator, could move so slow and innovate so little that Roborock, a company founded in 2014, could beat the shit out of iRobot.
We went from a "dumb" Eufy RoboVac 11 to a Roomba i3+ EVO 3550 and I honestly wish we stayed with the Eufy or done more research. I just assumed Roomba was like the gold standard of robot vacuums. Its had so many stupid issues including randomly lighting up and making sounds at night which wakes me up since its in our bedroom. I haven't talked to their support because honestly I'm sure it'll be like all other consumer electronics and they'll just waste my time running through BS troubleshooting steps and not actually fix anything
You can turn off the lights in the app. This was annoying me too. They added it as a feature recently. I think the idea is that you know your Roomba is docked correctly and charging if the light is flashing
I can second this. Roborock was already years ahead when we bought ours (3 years ago?) and when I look at what their latest models can do it's pretty clear that Roomba forgot to invest into new technologies.
Maybe they are buying the brand, more than the tech. I bought an amazon basics vac for something like 60 USD which just stole the design of the latest cheap vac, so presumably can plunder the more advanced models too, once the market is ready for them.
What about effectiveness of the vacuuming? That's where Roomba is superior afaik, and the feature is pretty essential since you buy them to clean floors and carpet, not to delight you with the smoothest navigation.
Does it still double as a poop spreader or did they finally add a sensor for that?
As a former roomba owner, the issue I always had was that it was pretty terrible about coverage. The random walk it did often left large areas vacuumed as it had no sense of where it had and had not vacuumed.
Your information is many years out of date. The latest model maps your house (and has been doing so for a long time), uses a camera to identify and avoid obstacles including poop, and automatically empties its bin.
It’s crazy tho, even the cheapest roborock w/ LiDAR smokes every roomba out there. It’s hard to justify the more expensive models unless but the advanced feature sets are tempting.
That's exactly what makes this a good acquisition, right? Roomba has the brand/trademark recognition in the US and solid marketshare but a stagnant product, which iRobot apparently does not have the expertise needed to keep improving. For Amazon that should be a pretty straightforward technical/ML problem to solve to get back to the forefront of where Xiaomi, Ecovacs, etc. are.
> will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.
I can't even get a chicken waterer to work for months at a time, no way I'd let a robot access. Even so, is it so bad to let China take the lead, western design can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back!
> can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back
You can clone the design if there's capital left after consumers have been buying the competitor for years, but can you clone the manufacturing process or price as easily when you're years behind?
We see with Qualcomm CPUs and Android phones - the internals are still a few years behind iPhone after about a decade, and Apple still takes the lions share of profits in the phone market.
What’s the repair story? I have one of the earlier vacuum Roombas (620, bought 8 years ago, before most advancements happened), and I can still find both 1st and 3rd party replacement parts and repair almost everything myself.
I have a Roborock S4 and I love the thing (though I want to upgrade to a mopping one at some point)
But on the S4 I find sometimes it underperforms with navigation: it ends up relying on the bumpers and it smashes into table and desk legs even though the lidar should give it a heads-up (the legs are visible on the map it creates).
I'm wondering if it updates the map as it cleans but only _uses_ the updated map once the current clean is finished. Hmmmm
> Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works
But then maybe that's where the synergy is. Amazon is probably ahead of everyone on the planet with machine vision. They have the Amazon Go shops, and nobody else has anything that comes close. If they take iRobot's robotics knowledge and couple it with their own machine learning expertise, who will be able to compete with them?
It had better be truly amazing, it's 4x the price I paid for my old Roomba 780 many a year ago that did a decent job of it until it died after 5-6 years of service.
Do you know how they work on tile? I see everyone recommend for wood flooring, but my house is mainly a textured tile. Things like a regular vacuum make loud clanks rolling over and between them. Wondering if a robovac would even work, or get stuck, or just be obnoxiously loud rolling around. Anyone know?
> a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station.
And here I am using a broomstick 5 min every day... I feel like we're going to hit the great filter pretty soon
> We just got an Ecovacs X1 Omni - a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station
Well for 1500 Eur it better does all of it and even more
Does mop pad really work? I only have roborock with no fancy mop pad cleaning base station but ignoring that all it does is dragging a wet cloth around. I don't see that helping much
My previous bot was a "wet mop pad" Ecovacs model without any of the bells and whistles, and it was pretty worthless. I got the X1 Omni specifically because it has dual rotating scrubbers, self-clean/dry, and self-fill. Night and day difference. I feel like I could eat off the floor every morning.
Does the list of obstacles these things avoid include pet accidents like poop, cat puke, etc? Cause we have a pukey cat and a robo vac might make things much much worse.
It will steer around the rug automatically I think, and you can mark the rug locations as no-go zones or no-mop zones. The Roborock is better for mixed floor types because it will actually raise the mop up to vacuum in no-mop zones. The X1 needs to have the mop removed manually to do a vacuum-only pass.
So what if China knows what’s in your house? If American companies know what’s in your house the government can ask them for that info at any time and as Amazon has shown they’ll give it up without a warrant. The Chinese government isn’t coming to my house and I doubt Chinese companies are dealing with the us government like Amazon is.
How does that compare to the Chinese government having a map of your house at all? Honestly though, if the livestream was only viewable in China I’d be fine. Certainly much more comfortable with that than it being viewable in the us.
I mean not trying to start a flame war, but everyone is
praising how great roborock is but the reality is, most of Xiaomi/Roborock technology is stolen/reversed engineered from Neato. Chinese robot vacuum would not even be close to their current capabilities if it wasn’t for the LiDAR on the XV11. If you look at the tear down from the first couple gen, the PCB and components were exactly the same compared to Neatos. (I owned both Neato and Roborock vacuums).
I was at iRobot for holiday season 2003; 1st gen Roomba was out, MANY of the returns piled up along the hallways of HQ.
One day the "director of sales"? walked into the standup meeting like Vince McMahon into the arena and slammed down this robot onto the coffee table that was a pitch-perfect copy of the Roomba, except it was tea green and had more colorful LEDs and sounds. "F this and F that" like we had any ability to stop that from happening. I did the teardown and it was a near-perfect mechanical copy like somebody walked the molds across the street. The PCB was different where they chose cheaper connectors. It was way prettier looking IMO. What they couldn't copy was the logic; the SW/uC was handled through a different chain so unless you literally stole a pile of programmed parts, you'd be on your own. The Roomba development team consoled themselves that the performance of floor coverage of this knock-off was worse than the original...but to be frank, both were only useful under limited circumstances that I found nobody I knew had. I'd have better luck with an old sweep-broom.
As an intern, those returns piling up were so they wouldn't get resold elsewhere or scavenged. And there were a LOT of returns; its a complicated design with a LOT of cables and connectors and some marginal components going out of the expected tolerances. One of my jobs was to strip out the batteries, lay these robots out in the back parking lot, and using a pointed steel rod, 'spear-fish' them to render them unusable. To make my work quick I'd aim for the 'brain' - the middle where the case was thin and I'd bust through the microcontroller part of the main PCB. Aim, 'crunch', make sure I 'killed' it, and then fling it into the dumpster. Nearly 20 years on, I fondly remember thinking 'I can't believe I get paid to do this!'
From what I can tell, Chinese companies will freely steal technology from other countries and companies, which is obviously frustrating and not great, but then they relatively quickly start exceeding the technology they stole, quickly adding features not present in the original products. So it's a bit dangerous for American companies to sit on their heels saying Chinese companies are stealing. Yes, they are, and it's frustrating, but then those Chinese companies add features at a rapid pace that the American companies can seemingly not keep up with.
I'm not sure how many Chinese HN users we have...but I'd personally love to see them chime in occasionally on this topic.
My personal experience/conclusions drawn from business, experiences in grad school etc. (so obviously not worth much and poorly sourced from a data perspective) are that certain seemingly obvious concepts like "cheating" or "stealing" are just fundamentally understood differently and not ingrained in a Western compatible way culturally in China. There seems to be deep differences there that manifest in all kinds of ways.
Bunnie Huang [1] has written/spoke on this topic. I think he mentions it in the Shenzen documentary [2]. Quote from the documentary page:
> We examine the unique manufacturing ecosystem that has emerged, gaining access to the world’s leading hardware-prototyping culture whilst challenging misconceptions from the west. The film looks at how the evolution of “Shanzhai” – or copycat manufacturing – has transformed traditional models of business, distribution and innovation, and asks what the rest of the world can learn from this so-called “Silicon Valley of hardware".
I'm not sure it's part of personal or societal culture. The Chinese people I know, granted who are all highly educated and also some of the nicest people I know period, do not abide by this culture of stealing/copying and find it as frustrating as anyone. So in my opinion, it's more of an economic and possibly state-driven culture.
"Stealing" and "cheating" was also the US way before it became the top dog. Intelectual property on patents has always been used as a tool for the current world powers to try to cement themselves as permanent world powers. But it doesn't work, other countries are also sovereign, and they don't have to respect US laws made to create US monopolies.
Most of the accusations about IP theft don't even involve actual registered IP. The fact that users on HN repeatedly fall into this pit shows how much the discussion has deteriorated on what's supposedly a platform less saturated with junk info like mainstream forums.
I think if a culture finds out that doing a particular thing benefits it greatly, and that it cannot be punished for doing that thing... it will do that thing.
This idea of "cultural differences in the idea of stealing" is a bit silly. It's based on self-reports of the people who are stealing, and making massive amounts of money from the theft. Rationalizations, in other words.
In all honesty, if I could "steal" from a culture with a far superior level of technology without repercussion, in order to sell products mainly within my own culture, I'd do it too. It's still a benefit to the whole group, isn't it? The same story plays out every time this power dynamic comes up, and in far more varied patterns than people talk about (e.g. Japan "stealing" transistor designs to start its electronics giants, with the cooperation of a few Americans but still against moral values).
On this note it’s always useful to reflect upon the era where the US also had a cultural acceptance of “stealing” technology from the UK, since America wasn’t always such a tech leader.
Also the story goes that the Wild West was so famous for not enforcing Edison’s patents, an entire industry formed to take advantage: Hollywood.
No sane human being would willingly step into an openly hostile environment to share their genuine opinions when there is a very obvious risk of being dehumanized, dismissed, and viciously attacked with but not limited to slurs and abusive wording, Chinese or otherwise.
Every major English-speaking social media/web forum has been embroiled with open hatred towards everyone and everything Chinese regardless of context or politics for more than a half decade by now.
In Chinese culture, copying (I would not use the word "stealing") symbolizes respect for a product and has roots in Confucianism (however, let's avoid potential exploitation of this). But don't forget that Americans behaved similarly in the 19th century [1], and Brits did the same to Dutchs. So I guess this is a common pattern for raising powers.
This pathetic point always gets brought up when talking about China's IP theft, but it should be telling that it is literally one individual from 200+ years ago who is always mentioned.
What did he do? He worked in a factory and memorized details about the machines, and then went to America and rebuilt them.
Is that what Chinese companies are doing? Do they get someone hired at the company, who then memorizes things, and then goes back to China and rebuilds them?
No one would care if China was operating the way Slater operated. That is common even with Americans moving from one American company to another. What is not common is directly stealing designs and schematics and billions of bits of other information through nefarious means, by breaching a company's cyber security or infiltrating their supply line.
The truth is, Chinese companies don't have any need to directly copy Western designs, certainly not anymore. They have the factories and ecosystem to rapidly design and build new products with a high level of quality and precision.
I wanted to work in the US designing hardware with my Computer Engineering degree, but I couldn't even find a job doing that. Now I'm in B2B software like everyone else.
In a lot of cases, Western companies go as far as outsourcing the entire design process to China. Entire consumer product categories are just white labeled Chinese designs.
We are long past the point of China doing some crude copy and pasting. It isn't Soviet Russia making exact copies and producing poor quality facsimiles. The West needs to stop thinking of China's economic might as something that was only acquired by "cheating."
This is where we are at: Huawei has better image processing software than Apple. Roborock has more features and a more intelligent robot vacuum than iRobot. TikTok is better than Instagram or Facebook. BYD sells more EVs than Tesla. Which Western company makes an off-street EV utility vehicle with a dump bed, air conditioning, and infotainment like this one?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bixJDOH864U
This isn't really at all about China "copying" or "stealing" Western IP, because Chinese products are quite often better than Western ones at lower prices.
The idea that China isn't its own R&D powerhouse is, at this point, an insult to the individuals who are creating all of this stuff.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery is the go to argument here? And it wouldn’t be complete without 200 year old whataboutism. I am unimpressed.
Perhaps because there has been nothing worth stealing there, and hence a culture of “stealing” never appeared. This might change of course, if/when China starts pumping out radically superior products.
Sadly I think this is just encouraging US companies to make products that phone home, and require a service contract. It's much harder to copy that part, and more lucrative.
Just look at the tear down videos on the XV11 compared the any roborock tear down. I would link you the XV11hacking site but seems like it’s down. It had everything from firmware to schematics that hobbyist did in the early 2010s since it was the cheapest way to get a 2D LiDAR (pulling it from a the vacuum itself).
You said they were "exactly the same" circuit boards. You're saying you were able to make that evaluation using multiple tear-down videos that weren't doing a side-by-side?
I'm not the GP poster, but doing a visual comparison, if you've got chips of the same size and shape in the same places, and the same passives in the same places, and the trace routing is also visually the same between them, wouldn't you feel that's pretty definitive?
And it's quite disingenuous for IT people to make a fuss about it. EVERYTHING in tech started with some sort of piracy, of music, of web content, of videos, of books, of hotels, of taxis, it's persistently the right strategy. And that's good, the world can't hang onto gatekeepers forever.
It matters because people who take risk and innovate should be rewarded. When that fails, theres no point for anyone to take risks and release new products.
The result is also all of the innovative product ideas that never see the light of day because two weeks after launch there’d be a Chinese knock off on the market for half the price making it impossible to recoup R&D.
That’s a big reason behind the push to SaaS and server based solutions.
What about copying someone else’s design, making minor improvements (often regressions due to incomplete RE), and having a lower cost basis sounds like innovation to you?
well, i guess it depends... there are cases where something is totally copied 1-1 then maybe costs cuts are in labor, or they are in quality
in the case of worse quality, wouldn't the market just filter out such inferior products via competition? same with labor practices and bad pr from that.
additionally, if the 'minor improvements' are what people want (sometimes as a trade-off to quality) then thats what the market has signaled it prefers...
if the originating company doesn't meet that preference or demand, why should some admittedly state-provided protection (some might say monopoly) of intellectual property be able to protect them from competitors who will?
Facebook stealing from snapchat. Youtube stealing from instagram who stole from tiktok , stealing from vine etc etc. I don't think it stopped other people from taking risks.
This is the moral theory behind patent laws, and I’ve never seen definitive evidence that it actually helps, and a lot of examples where IP law completely hampers innovation or at least adds layers of bureaucracy.
I’m glad we don’t have to deal with this issue as much in software. I can’t imagine that a world where all the companies actually tried to enforce their software patents would be better for anyone but the lawyers.
As a consumer, I don't give a damn about these companies copying each other, I just want better products. But yeah, if I worked at iRobot I would be annoyed.
I shouldn't be commenting this deep into flame but...
That's a demonization argument. If anything china-related is bad ipso facto, then I suppose discussion ends where it starts. What comes after "tyrannical, genocidal, geopolitical rival" in a sentence doesn't matter.
If talking IP/Patents... I think the american position is somewhat blind. Consider:
(1) Patents are a recent invention, not a longstanding or inevitable institution
(2) There are some decent (IMO) arguments for patents being bad in general, economically, technologically and morally.
(3) China has been forced to adopt this "western" patent system, under which it owns almost no patents. They play very loose with the rules, but they still exist within that legal framework.
The US' no. 1 priority in trade deals and foreign policy generally was and remains patent enforcement, US-like contract enforcement and other commercial law stuff... "Governance" is the categorical euphemism. The US is as serious about this stuff as China is about Taiwan. China, and almost every other country abides it, whether or not it's compatible with their interest, values, etc.
(4) Those American companies made those investments, and have enjoyed the returns. They knew the rules going in and chose to comply over decades. Are they US companies? Aren't they "global companies?" That's the approach the US itself has been evangelising for 40 years.
Is the "fair" scenario you imagine a world where US companies produce their products in china, without local technology transfers and spin off industries? That's total nonsense, and outside the (advisable) scope of a legal system to enforce. US companies take the lion's share of profits, offloading the high turnover, low margin sectors... Like the Apple/Foxconn thing. Well... everything has consequences.
You really imagine a world where china builds all the vacuum cleaners, but can't build vacuum cleaners by itself?
Exactly, our patent system is causing innovation in the US to happen on a cycle similar to the life of the patents themselves. Things don't progress until the patents expire and other companies can copy them (see also, the segway mess, electric unicycles, onewheels, or... vacuums).
It isn't at all obvious that patents are more helpful than harmful in this space.
China is a totalitarian state—the Chinese government can coerce its corporations to take any action for any reason at any time. If the Chinese government is an enemy of the US, and Chinese companies function as an extension of their country's government, then we must treat those companies as enemies. The people who work in those corporations are mostly average Joes like you and I, but the CCP can harvest their organs at any time, so we are forced to be wary.
>That's a demonization argument. If anything china-related is bad ipso facto, then I suppose discussion ends where it starts. What comes after "tyrannical, genocidal, geopolitical rival" in a sentence doesn't matter.
Yes, we shouldn't be supporting China in any way. They are an enemy and don't share our values, and it's an unfortunate consequence of poor policy that we do business with them at all.
You know what the US also had in the 1800s? Slaves. Doesn’t justify for anyone else legalizing slaves in this day and age. That’s why whataboutism is a fallacy.
Past history is not a moral argument.
Sure it isn't if it doesn't suit you, very convenient. Yet we live in very world completely and utterly in pure 100% mathematical way defined by only our past.
All the crap happened/happening/will happen in middle east and africa? Consequence primarily of european colonialism. Sure we can argue that enough time has passed, entire generations. Yet the places are as fucked up as ever, I would argue even more so.
Or you can explain this to germans who as a nation are still traumatized by what their ancestors did in WWII (shows how decent the core/soul of that nation is... imagine russians in similar situation, they would just blatantly lie about it and imprison/disappear anybody saying differently, like ie Katyn massacre).
Past is a moral argument, like it or not. It isn't a tool to justify anything and I am not commenting on current topic of intellectual theft (which is a rather pointless tea time effort) but ignoring it won't you any good since you won't be able to grok why people or nations behave as they do.
Not sure how I’m deciding certain standpoints when it’s convenient for me. There’s a big difference on acknowledging the past as a understanding of where we are today compared to justifying your actions of today morally based on the past decisions of others. The difference is this, “People in our past did some really shitty things, we acknowledge it, and it put us in our current position” vs “Someone in the past did shitty stuff, so it’s totally cool for me to be equally shitty”. Once again, your argument is textbook whatsboutism. Why
it’s a fallacy is because all your examples is trying to deflect your moral deficiencies on the basis of others. The conversation should be steered to on the morality of IP theft. Not whether others have done it or not.
I’m curious what you consider a legitimate moral conversation to look like. When I hear that I think “philosophy before 1800s” where you can appeal to moral absolutes via God (yet still end up in unsolved debates. It seems even harder today.
Basically every culture has had genocidal endeavors. Does this mean we can justify genocide currently, or in the future? Me thinks not. Do you want to act morally now, or use some past action as an excuse to not do the right thing?
That type of engineering that Compaq performed was very specific clean room reverse engineering or clean room design, which is specifically designed as a defense against copyright infringement because it relies on independent creation by going off the specification (in Compaq case the Bios specification) and not the original design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Right, and that's where I question whether the "clean room" is something that is morally necessary.
If it's okay to copy something in the legal way that Compaq did it, why is it not legal to skip the clean room and just copy a design?
I don't mean espionage and actual stealing of code/schematics (I don't think many Chinese companies engage in that, contrary to the perception). I mean, the company buys the product, inspects it, then copies it.
If Compaq had done that directly, it would have been illegal, but the outcome would have been the same as the clean room design.
I question the merits of having that level of copy protection where reverse engineering is only legal in a specific and arbitrarily convoluted way. To me it seems like that idea might encourage monopolies and higher prices for everyone.
Because going off IBM's design would have been illegal. It's one of the most famous and well documented reverse engineering projects ever, and they had no copies of the IBM Bios in their clean room because otherwise it would have been illegal. That's literally what clean room reverse engineering means.
Why does large-scale corporate IP theft matter? Well, for one thing, I can't imagine the next Neato being willing to invest in all that R&D if a chinese company is going to rip it off and sell it for peanuts, just so the internet can say "wow, this chinese product is amazing, and I don't know why corporate IP theft matters!"
The risk of someone ripping off your idea, designs, etc. has always existed, exists now more than ever with the internet, yet it doesn’t seem to stop people with ideas from trying to take those ideas to fruition.
I’ve never talked to any rational person with an idea they were passionate about who said they weren’t interested in continuing with it because someone else might steal it.
Then you've never talked to any VC or angel investor.
A primary concern of any investor is whether you have a defensible 'moat" for your product or service - can you make something that will then have a high barrier to entry of competitors.
If you cannot articulate how you will have reasonably solid protection from patents. copyright, or trade secret practices, good luck getting investment.
Your only strategy will be to somehow make & stock ready to ship as much of your easily copied product as you can before promoting it, and hope your promotion, marketing, and initial sales are a huge hit BEFORE some Chinese rip-off artist starts marketing it on AliBaba in single-digit days. I've read of cases where people had their product literally found for sale on Chinese sites before their first marketing & customer shipments started, because the design was ripped off from the factory.
The only reason engineers in the US adopted "clean rooms" was to circumvent copyright law, not because they simply weren't willing to copy IP from their competitors. US companies still invested heavily in R&D. Maybe Chinese companies will do the same?
It's a free market. There are plenty of companies investing in R&D even after knowing that there is the possibility of copyright infringement. There is still a huge upside in developing these tech.
The companies knew that copyright infringement is a possibility when developing the tech. They knew the reward was still worth it despite of that.
I am not getting anything designing work for you. On the other hand I can launch my own side projects. I know that if they are any good people are going to copy and start rip offs. I am willing to take that risk.
Amazon Robotics has been actively poaching talent from iRobot already, but I think it's probably a little of everything: talent, data, and the bump they can give to iRobot sales.
The schema of your property is already publicly available in home schematics records, and they already have your address to look up.
I think Occam's Razor applies here. iRobot is a profitable smart home product maker, their revenue/profit has continuously grown, and their IP + talent will allow Amazon to expand into other smart home verticals.
It’s not the home layout so much as the habits that data uncovers. Access to peoples homes is the holy grail and especially so in amazons case. Whereas the Alexa gives Amazon audio from inside, and ring gives them video and audio from outside, this would take things a step further.
You have the obvious data like in and outs, bedtimes, house schedules (kitchen to living room, living room to bedroom, bedroom to bathroom trips) but it can also get more granular and even more so with LiDAR and image recognition. Imagine a vacuum that knows which brand of shoe you wear and size of feet you are, which can then identify if a new pair shoes up on its next scan (same size? Oh this person bought a new pair of shoes. Different size? Oh this person is potentially in a relationship now.)
These are all key data points which Amazon drools over.
The locations of walls and doors, yes. Your furniture and other stuff, no. Having a "man on the inside" able to tell whether that third bedroom is being used as an office or a nursery could be of value to a company deciding whether to advertise child care products or office supplies. Hell just giving a heads up that a household is in the market for a big ticket item like a couch could be quite valuable.
If home schematics were actually a thing they cared about (and I'm skeptical of even that premise), then at Amazon's scale, they could make it easy to achieve at their scale.
It is a totally different proposition to go and often manually lookup and harvest building floorplan data from town/city archives than to passively collect the same data floorplan data generated by devices in their ordinary operation.
The former is not scaleable in any reasonable way and every operation is an ADDITIONAL cost, whereas the latter is generated for the products' main purpose and you merely add some storage for the harvested data. Moreover, the generated data will be much more up-to-date (plenty of renovations or updates happen without building permits, legally or not).
My robot vacuum sits docked away from me, on a separate floor, during the day. It runs at night time and I never see it. It's connected to its own IOT network. How would it know how many people live in my home and when I'm not there?
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it's only a matter of time until Amazon's data is leaked and sold on the black market. Correlate house layout, number of residents and their schedules, plus income bracket (from another source, possibly also from Amazon), and it's a blueprint for burglars looking for an easy score in an upper-middle class neighborhood.
People who rob upper-middle class homes are not going to do so because they have a house layout in advance. They're just going to rob the house. And anybody who goes to the lengths of buying Amazon data on the black market is not going to be interested in stealing people's laptops and jewelry.
I think that's a bit naïve, considering how common it is to see modern tech and basic/traditional crimes intersect - from ATM card cloning, to using Tor+cryptocurrencies for buying drugs, car key fob hacking, etc.
Sure the people who currently buy data on the black market won't all start robbing houses, and the people currently robbing houses won't all start buying illegal data to help their burgling.
But as long as the economics make sense (and it likely would - once someone has a bunch of useful data that they want to sell illegally, they'll lower the price until it is worth being bought by people), some burglars definitely will start adding more intelligence to their planning including using black market data leaks for picking houses to target and for how/when to rob them, what items to look for, etc.
And potentially you also get other people for whom burglary wasn't a feasible option before, but combined with this new tool might be. Personally I'm not going to become a burglar for ethical reasons, but for the sake of a hypothetical let's pretend that I have no ethics whatsoever and think that stealing is a fantastic idea as long as I can avoid getting caught. I still wouldn't rob houses, because it would seem like quite a risky way of making money, and with each big risk taken there's a fair chance of not even finding anything particularly valuable once you've broken into a house.
But if I could buy data leaks that I trusted which told me which houses to rob to find the best ROI items (high value, easy to carry, and maybe even located thanks to the camera of a robot vacuum), and also told me when people would be home and would be asleep.... well maybe my hypothetical no-ethics self would still find a better crime to commit, but it'd be a hell of a lot more tempting to become a burglar than without all that data!
Do you really think there haven't already been crimes committed that involves basic dumb theft but where the targets were chosen based off a leaked list of car purchases, or jewellery shop customers, or...? And not just in the era of digital data theft, go back a thousand years and I'd assume there were some "crimes of opportunity" committed not on a whim but thanks to planning enabled only by the studying of information they shouldn't have been in possession of.
You don't need to go to the black market. You can look up the property at the county (or whatever) clerk's office or look at satellite imagery and get a pretty good approximation.
A ton of things are public information to a greater or lesser degree whether you like it or not.
Not to mention the location of valuables, security cameras (other than Ring, as they can just turn those off), any security dogs or cats. How do you think Jeffrey Beesoz got so rich?
It's also possible that iRobot owns patents related to technology Amazon is planning to use. Besides brush/cleaning-related patents, iRobot owns the rights to several techniques used to map and zone a space.
Looking at the reviews for spare parts for my model i7, i hope amazon gets rid of the crap replacements, but equally lowers the extortionate prices on the official, various, eu website(s).
Apparently iRobot is going to Amazon Devices and not Amazon Robotics, but who knows if they'll silently transfer a lot of that knowledge/talent after the acquisition
Warehouse automation is a completely different ballgame to consumer, though.
If an Amazon warehouse can replace a $20,000/year human with a Kiva robot, they're happy to pay $10,000 for it. Consumers, on the other hand, would find $500 on the steep side for a robot vacuum, considering they'll also need a regular vacuum to cover the stairs and so on.
Consumers' price sensitivity is why Roomba spent years with a plastic product navigating at random by bumping into things and relying more on a brush than a vacuum.
I once attended a Foxconn seminar presented by Jay Lee where the topic was "dark warehouses"; certainly wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has a strong desire to reach that level of machine autonomy in their own warehouses.
I've always wondered how iRobot hasn't been more successful. They have a cool name, brand recognition, first-mover advantage. It's been nearly 20 years since their IPO. I would have expected by now that robots would have taken over more household cleaning tasks, but it doesn't seem like the technology has improved much in the past two decades.
I gave up on my roomba because it would always get stuck in something before it could finish cleaning. I now use a Dyson stick vac.
Leaving specifics of Roomba vs. competitors aside, the basic concept just doesn't work well in a lot of situations. My house ends up having a bunch of cords and clutter. And even on the "single level" ground floor which is fairly open and fairly heavily trafficked, there are a number of small level changes between rooms because of additions over time.
I'm with you. I considered a Roomba a few years back but came to the conclusion that a Dyson cordless vac essentially solved my problem by making it trivial to spend a few minutes pulling out and running a vac as opposed to hauling out a canister vac between housecleanings.
My brother, on the other hand, has dogs and has a newly constructed single level house that they keep pretty free of clutter. A robo-vacuum works pretty well for them.
Newer robots from companies iterating on the technology, like Roborock, can detect cables/shoes/stuff left on the floor and just drive around them. They're a lot better than what Roomba is selling, and much better at dealing with the average home. I've been really impressed with ours after having a similar, frustrating experience with one from iRobot.
This is accurate. Their competitor, the Ecovacs Deebot, just push an OTA update making cable detection way better. In a way the previous comment encapsulates all the misconceptions about robovacs. I was recently surprised to learn how good they are because my only basis for comparison was my friend's failure of a Roomba that's always getting into shenanigans.
Right–that's what I found so weird about the Amazon acquisition of iRobot is that Roombas are clearly a few generations of technology behind their competitors like Neato, Ecovacs and Roborock...but they must have a bunch of similar technology currently under development and on the way to market. What Roomba does have is name recognition, which seems to mean that most people think that robot vacuums aren't very good–I suspect Amazon sees they get tons of sales on their platform, has a good R&D team/patents, and smells an opportunity to own the space by pouring money into it and helping them compete (and, of course, putting them to the top of Amazon results, as they always do).
I've always felt like these products were mainly designed for people who live in single-level small-ish apartments, but then it's confusing because manually vacuuming those isn't very hard either. I just don't understand the market.
It's for wealthy people who have large homes with large open spaces. People who have enough storage that they don't have clutter on the floor.
I grew up next to a neighborhood of 5000sf+ homes, and I never saw clutter in any of them. Some of them had house cleaners, but even the ones that didn't, they had storage everywhere, so everything got put away. A Roomba on every floor would be perfect for them.
I moved away before Roomba existed, but I imagine a lot of them have it.
I have a large home with large open spaces and little clutter on the floor. But I'd need something like 8 Roombas to cover it all because of the changes in levels, doors that are normally closed, etc.
Also, as a semi-wealthy person with a large home, I hire people to clean it including vacuuming, and I don't need an annoying robot roaming the house to do it.
I'm sure there's some correlation between wealth/space and lack of clutter. But my observation is that some people are just much more inclined not to leave a lot of loose things either on floors or table. I'm pretty sure I could have a house that was twice the size and it would still look very lived in.
It's mostly my kitchen/dining room/"mudroom" area that can use regular quick vacs between full housecleanings. But looking right now I have some shoes and other things scattered around and it's literally about 3 minutes to do a touchup with my Dyson stick vac which has been great.
Yeah I had a Roomba 10 years ago. It was starting to age a bit (still working! but would always get stuck). So I was thinking.. it's been a decade.. time to buy a new model, surely they improved!
Nope, nothing is better, absolutely nothing. The "AI" (if we can call it that) to vacuum hasn't improved one bit. It somehow seems so suck a lot less on the carpet than the previous one. It's somewhat better to manage my cat's hair, but that's about it. Sure now I have wifi on it, to re-start it because it often stops too early before it's done. But nothing, no improvement in 10 years.. in ROBOT TECHNOLOGY!
Same experience. Bought a Roomba in 2008 and didn’t like it much. Bought another in 2021 and was shocked at how little it had improved in that time. It’s better, but not by much. And clearly behind the technology in some of the Chinese vacs.
Their robots started to suck after a while ! They are more interested in extracting more from their customers than creating better robots. Best example is their mopping robot that they try to market using a kind of "subscription" model with proprietary pads. The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release.
Their mopping robot was an extreme letdown. We bought the nicer one and it has such a tiny tank that it can't clean my downstairs without needing refilling halfway through.
Plus any cleaning solution besides theirs breaks the robot.
Plus the cleaning pad it uses to mop needs to be replaced after every run
Plus it's a lot more aggressive than the regular roomba and slams itself into things, knocking all kinds of things over.
The cleaning solution is very expensive. The pads have DRM and are very expensive. The robot is very expensive.
Thanks to all it's drawbacks it's not really able to be automated. So you wind up with a mop that you still have to manage, direct to run, and feed expensive soap and cleaning pads. In reality, I have the robot, and it's been plugged in for 4+ years and probably not been ran for 3+ years.
I have mine dry mop to keep the dust down rather than wet mopping every day. It's much less work than wet mopping, I just need to change the pad once a week.
It still takes a long time to mop and gets stuck more often than my i7 but it's mostly hands free.
I will keep the roborock for a while as it seems to be mature enough and checks all/most of the boxes. I sold the old robots for 59-60% of their value. The reasons for my upgrade path was: better nav, mopping and self cleaning.
Roborock does all 3, the 3rd is not perfect so I guess I will upgrade it once more (after 2 more iterations to make sure they fix properly)
It's a funny joke if you're making a pun on its vacuum function being "sucking", but if you're just using it as a joke that applied to Microsoft then you're not using the pun and just making an almost-joke of "their product is bad".
I wonder how much of it is also people like me. I work in tech, but I despise single-purpose household "gadgets." I have a vacuum cleaner and a set of working eyes. I can clean the floor in 5 or 10 minutes, rather than having a "robot" roaming the room randomly, bumping into things, and making noise for an hour. When I'm done, I store it away in a closet and don't have to look at an unsightly lump of plastic parked in a charging station. Bottom line, these cleaning robots don't solve any problem that I have, and they make my home less enjoyable to be in.
The technology has come a long way in these years and the modern models are pretty good devices. I use a Miele canister vac for the deep cleans but I also have a Eufy and a Roborock robot vaccum, one does the random bouncing and the other uses LIDAR to map and clean intentionally, and they're both great. I run them several times a week and the amount of stuff they pull out of the carpet, rugs and off the hard floors is incredible. I would never bust out the Miele several times a week.
This is a simplistic view of IP theft. The Chinese are much more advanced. Steal from Roomba at the beginning. Surpassed Roomba? Steal something from BMW that's secret Lidar navigation work. Steal something from Samsung for circuit design, steal something from Tesla, steal something from Mobileeye, etc.
Also faster iteration. Back in my mechanical engineering days, we'd design prototypes and then have to wait months for them to come in (of course they were built off-shore).
Doing it onshore was difficult (few could handle our requests, or they were exorbitantly expensive and couldn't scale, and terrible quality control.)
Thus we'd take a long, long time to work out design issues. A Chinese company can iterate much faster because of this.
It wasn't just China. Roomba was really slow to move mapping technology into their lower end products. There was a lot of reputational damage done by making mediocre products their primary volume sellers.
The idea that they’ll have ring outside, a camera inside monitoring every movement is kinda nuts, and Alexa monitoring all audio is insane. We already know Amazon has a service to sell data to police. I don’t know what people will expect here.
It's plain not true, Amazon has shared information with the police, but they don't make money from it. It's also not large-scale with only 11 requests in 2022.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Amazon, no need to invent one:
> Ring says it will only "respond immediately to urgent law enforcement requests for information in cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person." Its policy is to review any requests for assistance from police, then make "a good-faith determination whether the request meets the well-known standard, grounded in federal law, that there is imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requiring disclosure of information without delay."
The original claim in this thread wasn’t related to adverts, it was that data was sold to the police. Isn’t the reality worse, they just give it to the police?
> Neighbors, which has millions of users, is advertised as a way to receive “real-time crime and safety alerts” from local law enforcement and other Neighbors users nearby. A Ring camera isn’t required to use the app. In cities where police have partnered with Ring, police officers have access to a special law enforcement portal, through which the officers can request access to Ring footage. They can choose a date, a time, and a location on a map, and Neighbors users with cameras in the vicinity are alerted.
>It's also not large-scale with only 11 requests in 2022.
We should definitely take Amazon at their word here. Such a trustworthy company should be given the benefit of the doubt. We don't need to be able to audit these claims. Amazon said it, and therefore it is fact!
It's interesting because I would totally go for that if I could run all of the services locally with some digital assistant AI to tie it together and manage them. It's tragic, really. The cool future I imagined is here but there is a catch. There's always a catch.
How long do folks think until this will lead to actual change within what's now iRobot? Am I naive to assume nothing really will change in the next year or two? I just bought this thing a year ago. It's frustrating to think it's now part of the Amazon data collection system.
I wonder if there'll be a way to sever the device from the cloud and use it through HomeAssistant exclusively. As far as I know it is running an MQTT server but I have no idea how much it relies on the cloud to function.
Absolutely every American company that get a legal request for data from law enforcement will comply. Small companies don't make the news the way Amazon does, but if robot vacuums have ever collected evidence of a crime, then I guarantee iRobot has been issued and complied with requests for data too. Police routinely collect security camera footage from small businesses. Nobody is immune to due process.
I have heard from a former irobot employee that they were besieged by the same issues I had while working in consumer robotics: endless priority changes and lack of long term product vision. This is why their lawn mower robot apparently failed to launch
I feel like if a company just focused on the basics (ie reliable cleaning) instead of a bunch of different marketing gimmicks, it will work out long term.
> focus on the basics instead of marketing gimmicks
This reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about Xerox[0]. After achieving market leadership in their industry, engineering at iRobot seems to have been pushed aside in the company's decision making process.
Is this a consequence of being a publicly traded company? After all, pushing consumables and subscription services requires less capital and makes more money compared to developing a better robot. The $1.7B exit seems like a good outcome for a stagnant (relative to its peers) company.
I ran into this issue even in a private company. Hardware takes a long time, and I think leadership doesn't realize how hard it actually is do get the basic functionality done RELIABLY. That is - having a demo of a working lawn mower / vacuum cleaner / whatever is fairly easy (I've seen Arduino based projects online), but having it work in variety of settings and conditions without user intervention for years takes a very long time to work out the bugs.
I think over time leadership gets frustrated with seemingly lack of progress on the foundation, while efforts to change the high level features (app, smart home integration, GPS, etc) distract from the core product. Just my 2c
Now we wait for the cameras and microphones. Gotta hand it to Bezos, they're building a solid fleet of home espionage devices. The modern trend of replacing everything with smart devices reminds me, ironically, of the movie "I, Robot." I wonder how long it'll take for a corporation to go rogue and lock the country down. Maybe not now, or even in 20 years. But they have a lot of power.
Imagine that. A corporate-run national coup, all thanks to people's laziness.
I just bought a roomba and was happy that they weren’t owned by Google or Amazon. This is unfortunate.
I owned nests before Google bought them and it was sad to both see their innovation decline (basically the same now as 8 years ago) and usability decline (forcing Google logins).
I’m normally skewering how Google manages their physical products, but Tbf Nest declined due to mismanagement by Tony Fadel, one of the founders. Google gave Nest tons of money which didn’t lead to anything major materializing instead of delay after delay.
Fadell left Nest in 2016. Maybe the early stagnation can be blamed on him. But Google has had the reigns for 6 years and nest has really not done anything substantial.
I have two Nest-E devices in the home and have not enabled Google login. If you can find the older versions of the thermostats, you can factory reset them, stick them on a guest network without internal access, and never use the Google login, just the old Nest login.
Not sure how long that'll stay like that, but it's doable at present.
Time to do what I did to every hardware product I owned which Google acquired: Rip it out, delete my account, and try to make my money back selling it to someone else.
I actually made a profit on both my Nest and my Fitbit so far! Though the Nest was from energy rebates before I resold it, and the Fitbit was from it's recall for burn risk... Recall paid MSRP, not the price I purchased it for.
On the one hand I am excited about this, on the other hand I am worried.
With Amazon's issues around Ring I am worried about the privacy side of this. So how they handle that will remain to be seen.
But I also see iRobot struggling with the innovation aspect on the home side of things.
Especially when it comes to the quality and price point of their robots compared to the competition. If amazon takes some of their more price conscious approach to iRobot (or more justified the cost compared to competition) I think that would be great.
Personally I went with iRobot for my last vacuum after constant struggles with lidar robots just being ineffective for home. They can't handle things moving around like they do at home. But I can't ignore that as a vacuum it is not as good as what I had before and cost twice as much.
FTC just blocked FB from buying a VR app. Will be interesting to see if this gets through. Very little roomba to maneuver in this regulatory environment. I'll see myself out.
We can only hope. The FTC and SEC have been largely absent in the 21st century. We need the CPC to start taking priority over stock price and the market.
That seems like a pretty arbitrary benchmark. (And I feel like you haven’t met too many econ grads if you think an econ degree is an instant ticket to knowing what you’re doing.)
Blocking the Meta Within acquisition is a worrying precedent because the app in question has a miniscule user base. VR just isn't that popular. I'm guessing they probably have 100k paying users, at most.
How can ownership of a product with 100,000 users (globally!) in a country of 330 million people become an antitrust question? FTC leadership's theory seems to be that VR could eventually become a giant market, and if it does, Meta might one day have a position that raises antitrust concerns.
But all this is clearly many years, even decades away. By the same logic, they can block any forward-looking small acquisition by any large technology company. And that ought to be a problem for the HN crowd because getting acquired by big tech is one of the primary exits available to interesting startups.
There's a lot of evidence that FB (now Meta) had a deliberate strategy of buying up smaller companies that could potentially become competitors early, when they had a small user base, to keep the market anti-competitive.
> getting acquired by big tech is one of the primary exits available to interesting startups.
Right, but the claim wasn't that it was bad for the capitalist class, and neither is protecting their personal interests the office's remit. Letting trusts happen is always good for someone, that's not a reason to allow them.
The startup ecosystem is one of USA's greatest economical strengths. Pragmatically, it's just completely puzzling to me what FTC intends to achieve here. Do they want less startups and less speculative R&D investment in America?
Because it seems like a bad idea for FTC to create these new arbitrary rules that will chill investment in startups, and the only purpose is to punish a corporation whose founder has been spending $10 billion annually on R&D in VR with no profits in sight. Why not let Zuck spend on VR? Most of that money actually flows back into the US economy. Meta becoming a boring dividend-paying corporation would be enriching the capitalist class far worse.
> The startup ecosystem is one of USA's greatest economical strengths.
Scaled up, this is only true because some of those startups grow up to be big companies that earn profits. The counter-argument is that if a large company is allowed to buy all of its promising competitors when they are small and inexpensive, our overall business ecosystem will get weaker in the future due to that big company not having to be competitive.
>The counter-argument is that if a large company is allowed to buy all of its promising competitors when they are small and inexpensive, our overall business ecosystem will get weaker in the future due to that big company not having to be competitive.
The better question to ask would be why the majority of founders decide to sell out to big tech companies instead of pursuing the long term vison on their own?
The answer to that question is pretty obvious - most people prefer a firm billion dollars now over the possibility of 100 billion in two decades, especially if they're not independently wealthy already.
The FTC can't do anything about human nature, so they're left dealing with the part of the problem they do have some leverage over.
> The FTC can't do anything about human nature, so they're left dealing with the part of the problem they do have some leverage over.
Even the part they supposedly have leverage over is debatable. The courts have already thrown out numerous claims against Facebook from Lisa Khan's previous lawsuits (albeit without prejudice). From this, it should be obvious that the FTC's powers of prognostication are limited. So much so that the arguments suggesting the FTC should be permitted to due process are mind-boggling to say the least.
Startups that exit into an acquisition by FAANG generally end up abandoning their products and hurting their customers. As someone who has been burned by this, I'd like to see this exit strategy become less common.
In the absolute marginal case of defense, I think FAANG is well aware of this rather than being fooled, but sees the technical skill and ability to go from design to ship regardless of how absurd that ship is. Both are useful for FAANG.
It's just a protracted interview process the candidate takes all risk and pays all costs for.
I'm not the other person, but in my view it's impossible to evaluate the full impact of an acquisition. What you need to do is envision futures where the acquisition does and doesn't take place. And then you have to be satisfied that in both futures, the market and customers suffer no injury. And then you have to justify that decision 10 years later to people who have the benefit of hindsight.
It's in vogue to criticise the FTC approval of the Instagram merger, for instance. The critics almost take it for granted that Instagram was going to grow by 100x over the next decade no matter what Facebook did. And that the FTC should have known this very obvious fact and blocked the merger.
And then this criticism-with-hindsight is used to criticise all past and future tech acquisitions.
That's what VCs do every day by picking winners and losers. Companies like Uber would not have made it (and still might not make it) without massive cash injections. In practice, how is VCs choosing winners different than the FTC doing so?
VCs are private companies which invest and manage private money and they are not regulating anything. FTC is a government entity which is required by law to regulate markets. That is my layman understanding. And there are hundreds of VCs so if one VC does not believe in your mission and vision find another one but there is only one FTC.
To be clear, this is an incredibly non-specific (neither her nor the merger in question) criticism, so you are proposing that no merger should ever be blocked for any reason?
Scrutinize big mergers don't block smaller acquisitions because you think you know that sometime in the future the smaller company will become big healthy competitor.
They think they know Facebook has the financial resources to buy out anyone with even a slight chance of becoming a competitor, and are leveraging that in an anti-competitive fashion.
>They think they know Facebook has the financial resources to buy out anyone with even a slight chance of becoming a competitor, and are leveraging that in an anti-competitive fashion.
Ofc they know it; Facebook/Meta is a public company with a huge cash pile and the pressure from investors to spend that cash is only increasing. They already spend billions for R&D just like their tech peers and the best way to spend the rest of the cash is apparently acquisitions.
Opening my first Roomba was a great experience. Once you open the box there's a paragraph saying how "this is your Roomba, enjoy doing what you want with it. There's documentation online on using the diagnostic serial port to control your Roomba". This and how iRobot still sells all parts for all of their robots all the way back to the original made me find them to be the better company even if their innovation wasn't as competitive.
Ah dang. Will make me think twice about updating my roomba in the future. I was already a bit iffy on having one. but with how the sensors are and the kind of company iRobot was, I thought I could live with it. And I'll definitely never buy an Amazon produced robotic vacuum.
Outside your home with Ring, inside our wallets with the credit cards, inside our home with Echo and now Roomba and then controlling it all with Alexa.
How far away are we from a future where Amazon uses roomba/alexa to inspect what we need, what we're missing, and then just ship it to us and charge it on the card?
using a Roomba to track inventory seems strange but the idea of automatically shipping me what I need instead of a time based subscription sounds wonderful
I had a roomba 10 years ago, before kids. With all the detritus that comes with kids, auto-vac was not a good option. Now that kids are older and we maintain some semblance of control over clutter I want to get one again. Any personal advice on what a good unit might be? Amazon or not.
Looks like their big robot round up is about 9 months old, but they have single model reviews as well.
Edit: A little bit on why I like this review channel:
A lot of gadget reviews I read nowadays about household products are like "I like this robot it did a good job cleaning. Sometimes got stuck but not too bad."
Vacuum wars is like: "I worked 500 g of fine sand into our test carpet and ran the robot for 5 minutes. It picked up 362 g of sand which is 32% better than the average for this category and the best of the current robots that I've tried. Now, on the artificial hair test, the rotors tangled after just 50g which is a poor result for this category... "
He's set up a testing suite. He runs all of the vacuums through it. You can compare the results. It's how reviews should be.
I use both Roomba and Roborock in my house. Unfortunately that will be less Roomba going forward as I'm soured on the Amazon ecosystem.
I wholeheartedly recommend the Roborock devices. They're exactly where they need to be feature-wise and their app is workably okay. Very high WAF guarantees they'll always have a spot in the house.
Is there a robot vacuum that has mapping but doesn't require an internet connection? I know there are some projects to trick robots into working without internet, but I'm looking for one that actually just works.
There are some models that don't require internet and just kind of bump around the house, but they don't work well for multiple rooms. Would be nice if there was one that didn't require a cloud connection that will stop working some day.
I'm curious what is the correlation of robot vacuums' quality and internet connectivity? Is this just for firmware updates or is there some type of near-real time processing for these done in the cloud?
It's a good question, and I'm not sure I have a great answer. I suspect the main motivator (besides the obvious analytic data) is offloading storage to the cloud.
I'm not a fan of Amazon or Chinese companies connecting things to the cloud that don't need to be.
What I liked about the Roomba brand is reparability. They actually make quite a few wear parts replaceable including wheels. However, I decided against for privacy as there was no way to block cloud access without losing functionality.
Since then I purchased a Dreamy Z10 Pro and have been very happy with a rooted and lobotomized from corporate cloud services using valetudo while retaining nearly all functionality and integrating with home assistant.
https://valetudo.cloud/
With 3D printers nowadays, community should pull together to create an open source robot vacuum. There are a few out there but they're more like personal projects.
Very frustrating that all these smart devices keep getting acquired by big data hungry companies. Ring, Nest, Roomba… I like these toys because… well, I like toys, but I don’t like the idea that they can change owner after I buy them.
With Ring, Alexa and Roomba and Prime, it's pretty mind blowing how much a single corporation can know about a person's home life. I'm sure there are lots of people who will be consumers of all 4 of these things.
When Vorwerk bought Neato, products went downhill. I hope - and assume with Amazons tech understanding - this is not the case here (Here Xiaomi has replaced most appliances, e.g. air purifiers etc. and will be our next robot too).
I haven't found a reasonable solution for multi-level dwellings; interested in how others address this. If you just have 2 floors, it's reasonable to purchase 2 of these bots; but if you need a third, it starts to feel excessive. In something like a townhouse, with several floors that are individually not that big, for example. Not to mention I still need to clean all the stairs manually, and those are by nature high-traffic. Do folks move their bot to different floors weekly, or something like that?
The police will soon appreciate access to an interior diagram of your house and the number of people inside, along with the exterior Ring camera video feeds. For public safety of course.
Satellite overhead imagery + actual windows would give the cops enough to go on.
Oh, and all the plans that are in the town hall.
And my lawyer has a copy.
A stakeout would give the number of people inside, as well as cellphone data a la stingray.
This is great. I was wanting to get a Roomba, but it's too costly in India (the model that has the automatic dust collection thingy)
With Amazon buying it, perhaps they will make it available widely here.
On an other note, the day is not far off when Amazon not only controls the distribution, but slowly gobbles up the production as well, leading to a idiocracy esque one corporation to rule them all.
I expect this is to gain patents/technology around making autonomous robots, so that Amazon can create a warehouse system similar to Ocado, where robots, rather than people, pick groceries.
And what makes you think Amazon doesn't do that yet? Kiva systems did what Ocado does now a DECADE go. Amazon acquired kiva systems (infact, Amazon robotics was born out of this acquisition) long long ago and I'm sure can do a lot more than Ocado does now.
Huh interesting to note that iRobot has a large Massachusetts presence. Another robotics acquisition from Amazon was also HQ’ed in Mass (Kiva). Interesting to see how far Amazon has expanded into the state (lots of AWS teams are based around seaport as well).
They're getting eaten alive by competition though. Their first mover advantage has largely dissipated.
Amazon might be able to give them exactly the kind of capital injection they need to get back in front. Alternatively, they might end up just becoming a brand sitting on top of an OEM.
I already wonder how people does accept alexa, google home, smart fridges, smart TV and smartphones overloaded with trackers. Now bots full of cameras and obviously connected to internet are coming.
I see it more like the consumerism culture alimented with strong marketing that convince people there's something to gain while occluding any downsides: any individual or collective loss.
Like the loss of privacy or the pollution caused by a gadget industry relying on batteries, plastics, consumed power put together, [...].
Marketing is a huge part of it as well. There are a lot of slick online and physical ads for these products. Heck, most of these devices were created by ad companies.
Here's a tangential thought I just had: One of the main selling points of robot vacuums is that they can work while you're away at work, so your house is magically clean when you get back.
Now that a bunch of people work from home, will the usefulness drop? If you're always home, when do you schedule the vacuum to run so it doesn't get in the way or make loud noises during a meeting? Or if you get the wet mopping model, when does it run so the floor has time to dry?
I WFH for the entire time I had my roborock. The sound is annoying, but I still run it every day. The main selling point for me is I don't have to vacuum.
I am really sad to see this. iRobot's support is second to none in my experience. Their new vacuum that produces maps of the house and has a base station with a bag has been a delight. The parts aren't to expensive, the service is good, and they constantly improve my existing bot.
All of this, I'm sure, will go out the window along with a fear that my house will not become a well of data.
My floors are usually full of pieces of paper,cables and various other itens that prevent robot vacuums from working. I have a roomba S9, but I never use it because it requires a ton of manual work and supervision. Instead I just hire a cleaner a couple times a month. Are there any robot vacuums on the market currently that can handle a lot of mess on the floor?
I am in the same camp, my roomba is collecting dust (pun intended) in a corner. And they are so noisy and take so much time.
From furnitures that aren't compatible to kids leaving socks on the floor or the gf laptop charging cable or ... these things get stuck all the time. I bought back a regular vacuum cleaner and mop manually. It is not that big of a deal. Actually the floor is the easiest and fastest part when it comes to cleaning a house.
Eufy, Roborock, and ecovacs all have models with AI-driven obstacle avoidance that seems to work decently. There are a good number of youtube reviews that compare them.
I really do hope the technology to identify (chemically) what it is sucking up is not available because I can only imagine what Amazon could do with that information (well, other that send it to police without a warrant like Ring videos).
This vividly reminds me of "The Washing Machine Tragedy", a story in the "Memoirs of a Space Traveller" book by Stanisław Lem. Highly recommended to any fan of house automation.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the CHIPS Act. It seems like a good time to look around and see if you can acquire a company and somehow capture some (or more) of that funding.
Depends which direction that revenue is going. Anyways multiples of profit is a better measure if the business is making money. After all you could have a multi-billion dollar company tomorrow selling gas for $1/gallon. but you'd also be losing $3-4 for every $1 you make. A pretty good analogy for many tech companies.
Amazon bought Kiva systems for 775 million a few years back to automate their warehouses with robotics. (the robots are the shelves...) I'm not sure how the automation is going, but they're definitely looking to automate as much as possible..
This vividly reminds me of "The Washing Machine Tragedy", a story in the "Memoirs of a Space Traveller" book by Stanisław Lem. Highly recommended to any fan of house automation.
I have never been satisfied with roomba (granted, i got the basic-level devices). They re just not good and it seems there's loss of otential there. I m thinking to get a cheap xiaomi to give it a try
I expect the Amazon version to require wi-fi or cellular, will have microphones and cameras for “Alexa support”, and will automatically submit the stream to the police of what the Amazon operatives, sorry “operators”, deem sketchy. Remember kids if you live in a state where “it” is not legal, don’t let this thing vacuum up your shake; that’s evidence.
What will The monthly subscription fee to store your vacuum data in the cloud cost?
Is Amazon in the position where they have so much cash on hand that the most promising short-term growth strategy is for them to aggressively buy new companies? It seems like this is a model of growth for over-expansion —- or world domination along the lines of tech-campus states in Oryx and Crake.
They have their fingers in so
many pies and realms of data that it seems like they are quickly becoming hegemonic data holders. They’re already expanding into healthcare, which chills me to my bone, beyond that they’ve basically covered every facet of the typical Westerner’s existence with no sign of stopping.
It’s high time for anti-trust laws on data, including the sharing and mass aggregation of data through and by intermediates.
Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works. Roborock and Ecovacs products launch in China 6-12 months before their US launch. By the time Roomba has a decent mop bot, the X2 or X3 will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.
EDIT: commenters are asking what works offline from Roborock / Ecovacs. For the self-cleaning-mop generation like the X1 Omni:
- Roborock obstacle avoidance is local, but works better with cloud.
- Roborock can be controlled by a local home automation server without internet access.
- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.
- Ecovacs control requires cloud.
I remembered these stats from a Youtube video that I can't find; probably in my partner's history since we watched reviews on the TV together.
I picked the X1 Omni over the Roborock because it has superior mopping performance on tile floors, but I think both would be good options. It seems like Roborock is more privacy compatible.