According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a]
Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too.
The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots already inside people's homes and offices.
More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.
I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced.
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I guess Rodney Brooks got busy with other interests, and whomever ran things didn't realize that Tim Ferris is full of shit.
It was extremely frustrating to watch these assholes destroy the company right from the outset. All they needed to do, was to slowly walk forward and iterate with improvements.
The only surprise in this news is that it took SO LONG for them to dismantle the company.
I do not think it's appropriate for an organization holding this much deeply personal data can be sold to any foreign entity.
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.
So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.
But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.
I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors.
I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project.
In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.
> If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
Isn't it more like "if society has time to think about and can afford those qualities"?
If most folks out there have limited finances (CoL-relative, of course) and are just scrapping by, they'll buy the cheapest thing out there that just does the job (vacuums) and tend to ignore any extra luxuries, even if those would be more economically advantageous long-term (repairs/maintenance part of the TCO). That's simply because of the focus - it's more on the account balance, due bills and next paycheck, than on the implications for a more distant future. Crazy volatility and all the global rollercoasters like pandemics, wars, and all the crazy politicians around the world doesn't help regular folks' sensible decision-making at all, of course. The more stressed one is, the less rational they act.
People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.
>People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.
The focus, thanks to years of advertising, is shifted towards features, new features sell, quality doesn’t, so to keep the price point and “innovate” manufacturers need to lower the quality knowing that a new version will replace the device soon, most consumers see this as normal so when a poorly designed and cheaply made thing for what there’s no replacement parts , no repair info, no software/ firmware fails is just an excuse to purchase the new shiny iteration with all the the bells and whistles (and AI!, copilot toaster!) wich is gonna last les than the previous one but now needs an “app” an activation and a subscription for the premium features .
Having done the hardware game, it's not so much the clones that get you, it's the VCs/shareholders.
You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.
Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.
So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.
You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.
I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.
This isn't unique to China, it's just the nature of modern manufacturing. The only reason China stands out is because we offshored our manu there, so it's where we see it happen.
I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products.
The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US.
But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.
While those patents are not enforceable in China (unless equivalents were also filed in China -- unsure if they would be worth much) they would be when imported to the US. This is one of the reasons the ITC exists, and it played a prominent role during the smartphone patent wars. So at least the US market would be protected from knock-offs.
The smartphone wars were fought among tech giants, not capital intensive hardware startups. The problem with patents is that you need to already be financially successful enough to file them, able to pay to protect them in court, and can float your company's operating costs long enough to see them enforced and rewarded, which may take years.
Yes and no -- filing patents is quite affordable (probably outdated info, but I recall average costs for drafting and filing was ~10K / patent, most of the costs being related to the drafting rather than filing.) Compared to all the other capital investments required for hardware startups, these costs are negligible.
But you're totally right that enforcing them is extremely expensive, slow and risky.
That said, Roomba isn't exactly a startup but wasn't a tech giant either, and did enforce their patents often.
And especially against imported infringing products, the ITC provides a much cheaper, faster mechanism to get protection via injunctions.
That's why the ITC is so relevant here: it is relatively quite speedy compared to regular patent trials, and have the power to issue injunctions against imports (which is partly why it was relied on a lot during the smartphone patent wars.) So you may not collect damages from Chinese companies, but you can completely block their infringing imports into the US and deny them US revenue.
> If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.
That's an opinion, and not one I agree with.
If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades.
Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example.
It's asinine to think you can outsource manufacturing of whatever object to some other company in another country, but that no one on the planet can make the same thing because "the idea is yours".
> Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire.
What happens at expiration is an important and intended feature of patents. They trade a legally guaranteed headstart against the requirement of publishing your methods for your competitors to learn from.
Coasting on their patents is exactly why iRobot went bankrupt. If they had a proper incentive to continue innovating, they might be around today. Instead, the patent system incentivized them to erect a tollgate and snooze away in the booth next to it.
Zhaoxin makes X86 and countless make ARM and RiscV chips. SMIC being a foundry.
> The Chinese Microsoft?
Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance.
>The Chinese Boeing?
Comac makes passenger and Chengdu fighter jets.
>The Chinese NVIDIA?
Huawei makes AI GPUs.
>People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world
Considering the US never had its industry blown up in any war and could reap the benefits of 150+ years worth of stability, higher education, skilled immigration, compounding wealth, and taking over the vacuum and brains of Europe's post-war industrial powers, that's not really something THAT impressive.
>and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
If it isn't halfway trying, why does it feel the need to sanction or ban chinese competitors?
>> US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government.
> Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA?
Where are the new ones?
Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing.
> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.
> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world
Manufacturer of what, exactly, though?
What do you export? What do you sell?
Food? Nope, illegal in most of the world.
Cars? Nope, uncompetitive in most of the world. "High end" American cars lack even basic features fitted to poverty-spec cars in the EU, like heated windscreens.
Computers? I'm typing this on a computer assembled in Scotland onto a Latvian-made chassis using a Chinese-made motherboard populated with Korean memory chips and an Israeli microprocessor.
What does the US actually make and sell, any more?
> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
The real whole shtick is run economy in closed cycle to keep currency weak. Or the good old 1930s trade bloc economy. They're not just good at optimizing costs, they charge appropriately in CNY and inappropriately in USD. Workers don't care about obscene undervaluation in USD so long that they have bacon on the table after few hours of work.
It's not that rare that Chinese products are sold below cumulative costs of Western equivalent products and services, let alone prices. Chinese(<-substitute this with appropriate East Asian nations past and future) economy just isn't coupled well with the rest of the world that USD converted cost calculations would work. This in economic theories is sometimes explained as exports of starvation and/or overproduction, but IMO that make less sense when they've been doing it at scale of multiple decades.
The craziest example of these is Chinese PCB prototyping services: as cheap as $2 per 5 pieces with $5 extra for complete assembly and $15 shipping. $5 each would be darn cheap in the rest of the world, even $50 each for the board and $150 per assembly work would not be so absurd. There's just no competing that.
* built a lithium refinery
* produces its own battery cells
* makes its own motors and drivetrains
* makes its own car seats
* owns and operates a fast-charging network
* sells direct, bypassing dealerships
* offers insurance integrated with vehicle data
* develops its own autopilot AI
Great point, and to drive it home -- TSLA is the only competitive non-Chinese company in the EV space. You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms, considering the whole U.S.-Taiwan stranglehold on chip mfg
> You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms
Except it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.
Tesla was very popular in the Chinese market and globally, including in markets where Chinese EVs aren't banned, until literally this year, which I'd argue is due in part to the trade war.
> I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
I think there are a lot of different reasons:
1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll even throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.
2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US anymore.
3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.
>I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.
Just post your ideas to crowdsource websites and wait for the aliexpress clone to appear, zero r&d costs, zero dev and manufacturing/qa! That said, Taobao and Ali are so full of bizarre products (transparent rubber domes to be able to type with 5cm long nail extensions), it will be a challenge to stand out
They could improve the design and get people to replace their machines with the improved ones, repeat and repeat.
Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
> Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
Cords suck. So I bought a cordless vacuum, and was able to vacuum more. But I also needed a mop because vacuums don't do well enough on my laminate, stuff still gets stuck on. So I bought a cordless mop, so I could map more. This worked great for awhile but...
But it turns out if I did my vacuuming and mopping every night, I could keep my floor in better condition. I don't have time for that, but a robot from Eufy does and doesn't cost much compared to how much I would benefit from it.
Luddism on HN is a bit weird, but I get it, some people don't see the point of automating these tasks because their lives aren't complicated enough yet (e.g. they don't have kids, or have lots of free time and energy to spend on house work).
Cordless is nice until the batteries won't charge anymore. Or the charger stops working. Or you forgot to charge it and now want to use it. Or the charging connector gets worn and unreliable. Then you have an expensive battery replacement or other repair or (more likely) you just replace the whole device because it was made to be unrepairable, and now you have several pounds of plastic and e-waste to dispose of.
Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.
If the batteries don't work anymore, I buy a new vaccum. My Dyson was last updated in 2020, it is 2025 now, so I think it is working out? The charging dock works great for not forgetting to replace it.
I guess this is how people felt when they moved from wired phones to wireless phones?
> Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.
And dragging the cord around, and having to plug out and re-plug the cord in again because you want to do a different part of the room.
I'm also a Miele canister vacuum owner, and everywhere in my house where I vacuum is within range of a wall outlet. When I'm done, the cord retracts into the vacuum so I don't need to wind it or stow it myself. I guess, for me, that takes care of the issue to a great enough extent that I just never saw an advantage that justified the expense?
If you are ok with it, I think that's fine. Cordless to me is a huge productivity boost since I can just pick it up and vacuum whenever. I think most people see it as a huge win, but I haven't conducted a formal poll or anything.
Having a robot do everything is just another step in the convenience direction. It is great if you have expensive floors that you want to maintain on a daily or bi-daily basis.
> They could improve the design and get people to replace their machines with the improved ones, repeat and repeat.
> Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
This strategy has limits, and I think iRobot hit those, and they didn't didn't lower themselves to switch to the second strategy of selling cheap unreliable garbage (at least not before 2019, which was the last time I bought a Roomba).
> The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
I'd dispute this in this case: Roombas may not have solved the vacuuming problem for everyone, but they solved it for me (at least), and they were built pretty well (reliable, modular & reparable design, etc.).
> Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
1. I've got both, and the Roomba works a lot better than not vacuuming with the canister vacuum at all. It doesn't frustrate me, and it took far less time to Roomba-proof my home than vacuuming it every week for a year.
2. I agree with the IP address thing, but I think at only got added when they attempted to "get people to replace their machines with the improved ones." I have a couple of the older models that have no network connection (and had no plans to buy more due to the unnecessary network requirement).
The promise didn't pan out for us. You have to prepare and cordon off the floor, and the unit gets stuck half the time. Somehow it's exactly the right height to get wedged under furniture.
My wife got one to try and automate away the vacuuming. We went through the same thing, and it still needs to be babysit anyways. For the sheer amount of time and frustration of basically all robot vacuums, it has been easier to just get a nice Kenmore upright bagged vacuum and do it yourself anyways (and the results are basically always way nicer).
We've had the Chinese dreame with valetudo (so fully disconnected from the cloud), it works honestly very well. Doesn't get stuck, avoids my son's toys rather effectively and just works. I run it when we leave home.
There's honestly no reason why roomba didn't make something equivalent to the dreame, they could have competed with the Chinese manufacturers on feature and by allowing users to easily disconnect from the cloud. They didn't because the company was completely mismanaged and their products barely evolved.
I'm pretty optimistic about biped robots for this. Either you buy or lease one and a cleaning service teleoperates it, or subscribe to a cleaning service that drops it off and teleoperates for a few hours a week. Suppose it could even walk itself to the next customer if close enough.
If a wheeled low-profile vacuum that stays in a room is too hard to deliver, surely we can fix it by making it walk around and grasp a vacuum cleaner and walk between houses.
I remember the "upgrade for pets" option, which... didn't work. After buying the maxed out version I realized that the product simply had a long, long way to go - but iRobot did nothing with it other than launch new segments like "upgrade for vision based mapping" etc.
They were saying that whoever was running things at Roomba must have been duped by the 4 hour work week bs because nothing was getting done. Specifically whoever took over operations, planning, and product improvements from Brooks.
Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government. The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders (e.g. Meng Wanzhou, Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried, Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom, etc.).
> Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government.
You're making zero sense:
1. I predict there will be no change in the US government's access as a result of this.
2. I don't think Americans are so indifferent to their own country that they'd prefer a situation where an adversary country gets handed an intelligence asset. I mean, hypothetically, would an American prefer US trade policy be set that in a way that disadvantages American workers, because some politician got blackmailed because of something his Roomba recorded?
> The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders
3. The Chinese government has been going after people in the US. They've long been engaged in industrial espionage, but there's also their "overseas police stations" (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65305415). It's worth noting that US citizens can have a Chinese origin, and I doubt the Chinese government would suddenly become uninterested in a dissident once he got naturalized.
I'm not sure how useful of an intelligence asset a map of my house is, or pictures of me in my boxers on a saturday morning. I'm also not sure why you think they weren't already just buying this information from iRobot.
> I'm not sure how useful of an intelligence asset a map of my house is, or pictures of me in my boxers on a saturday morning.
Seriously, who cares about you or your house? Why do you think your personal example is the one to reason from?
iRobot sold 50 million robots, lets conservatively say 10% of those are internet connected and still in service. That's 5 million households. There's probably quite a few people in that 5 million who have something going on that Chinese intelligence is interested in, even things that may affect you personally, if indrectly (if that's what you care about).
> Again, I don't know why you think China wasn't already buying that information from iRobot before it went bankrupt.
Come on, do really you think iRobot they sold data like that to third parties? Like user-identified floor plans? Camera images from inside people's homes?
> Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.
When Twitter had its recent VPN reveal, what actually took me by surprise was how many divisive accounts weren't from China or Russia, but from regions of the world like Turkey, India, Africa, and South America. Sure, they could be spouting divisive politics to push an agenda of someone who is paying them, but the simpler answer might be that they spout divisive politics because it earns them money in terms of advertising dollars.
And that's the real problem, IMHO. The subversion of democracy isn't happening because of China, Russia, or any number of adversarial countries, but because our social media companies don't care enough about our country or the people living inside it to meaningfully crack down on ragebait engagement farming.
The general thing about state actors is that they have every incentive to have a dossier of compromising information on every foreign national regardless of current relevance, for potential use in the future. You could, for instance, someday be in a position where you have privileged access to data that becomes relevant to them, and thus your history becomes useful.
True, but the US has a long track record of pursuing both foreigners and citizens—through prosecutions, extraditions, sanctions, or asset seizures—often years later and regardless of nationality. In practical terms, the risk of being targeted by the US for breaking a law is far higher than being blackmailed by a foreign state like China. The consequences are asymmetric as well: blackmail usually amounts to little more than embarrassment, whereas being pursued by the US government can carry lengthy prison sentences or worse.
This is not to mention that the US also engages in data collection for coercion purposes.
State actors also have finite budgets and do cost/benefit analyses. They don't really gain much for creating and maintaining deep dossiers on hundreds of millions of random foreigners.
and then list out examples that the US targeted which includes a US citizen, also while ignoring that China goes beyond its borders to target their citizens?
Both countries routinely act this way because they have the power to do so
Since this can be a significant security issue for the state, why doesn't the government sponsor a security audit of the software. Does it upload the data or everything is done on the device? (Also, will have to keep up with the updates)
The NSA has a bad historical reputation for this sort of thing - intentionally weakening crypto standards to make things easier for themselves to break, while keeping them "strong enough" that other agencies outside of NSA/GCHQ/GRU can't. The Crypto AG scandal [0] was pretty bad, with Clipper/Skipjack & Dual_EC_DRBG [1] being more recent ones. The NSA could do what you are asking to do, but they probably won't let us know what the really bad holes are because they want to keep using them.
Because regulation is bad, according to the current executive?
Politics aside, the FDA applies a very generous amount of regulation (mostly justifiable), not sure we want to pay multiples for our consumer electronics, as it (mostly) shows acceptable behavior and rearely kills anybody.
It is bad. Regulations have been historically hijacked to benefit corporate interests. See Intuit and tax policy for example.
Voters on the right naively thought he'd work to fix it. (Wrong!) But it is very much bad for a very large number of issues. Maybe next executive will fix it? (Wrong!)
Ironically we bought a Roborock (Chinese brand with close links to Xiaomi) and didn't connect it to the internet (checked this would work before we bought it).
If you don't want the scheduling and other app features, and are happy switching it on when you need it, it works fine.
Motivation for an offline one was more than just cameras, also that it wouldn't be bricked by an update one day, but still...
The inside of a lawmaker's house? A general's? A CEO's? Why would anyone ever want insider information, including possible blackmail evidence, from them?
People like that have a cleaning service, they don't do their own housework. And ironically, the cleaning service is far better equipped to plant surveillance devices or exfiltrate information than a robot vacuum gadget.
Also I would assume it's a lot more dangerous and expensive to send someone in when you can just put an innocuous robot into a room which has cameras and microphones that can watch + listen 24/7 and auto-recharges when the battery is low (unlike surveillance devices).
Let's just say a family member has a very important and somewhat secretive job. The most classified meetings don't happen in our home, of course, but for a state adversary even small clues can be what's needed.
(So why get a roving camera in the first place? We judged that one from a historically and currently aligned state would be safe enough, even though it's not ideal.)
Why would the Chinese government want to regularly launch cyber attacks against US infrastructure, except it's been happening for years? US security companies and governments have been defending against it for years and have even cataloged the state-sponsored attack groups.
Blackmail for one: "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....". That will work on some people, discovering extramarital affairs, or proving you know intimate details about the inside of someone's house, along with threat of physical violence will work on others. You just need to be sufficiently creative. You can parlay the successes from one target to the next: "I can get both of you divorced unless you install the rootkit on your work's network"
I will reference a quote I originally heard on HN years ago, though: the audio surveillance is magnitudes more valuable than the video.
Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough, but when people are having sexy time, they are not really likely to be running the roomba. Having that thing running is the opposite of sexy. When the thing is parked on the base station, it is facing the wall. So exactly how frequently do people think a roomba is running to be capturing all of this explicit footage?
To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some of these examples are just bat shit crazy well beyond paranoid
> they are not really likely to be running the roomba.
You seem to assume that they have somehow physically disabled access to any kind of remote activation. That seems extremely unlikely given the overall selling points of the roomba.
The roomba doesn't have to "run" in order to be using its microphone, which as noted is likely the more valuable data acquisition source here.
Maybe read the comment I was replying to before replying with something unrealted? "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....".
Turning on a microphone is not going to capture the required pics for this blackmail campaign.
Its a numbers game, and what I described is just a sketch. Combine it with geo-location: select all roombas within 50mi of washington, DC and run all these various playbooks on it, eventually you'll find something.
Yes, that's deliberately missing the point of what was said though. We know the vacuum is using the camera (when equipped) while the unit is running. Go back and re-read what I wrote to see why this is not the same thing.
I don't like this kind of surveillance any more than anyone else on HN, but we get this here all the time. People make these posts that X leads to Y and jump way over the details. Sometimes X does lead to Y. Other times, it's the Underpants Gnomes: There's a big "???" step between X and Y that people don't like to take the time to articulate. This is how conspiracy theories take hold--you ignore the ??? and just assume "Of course X leads to Y! We all know it!"
HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.
Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.
We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.
Yes? You also have several cameras and microphones in your pocket, and probably wearing more microphones on your head at various times of the day. And so does everyone around you.
GP is correct. "Roving camera/microphone" -> ??? -> "harm". What is "???" and what is "harm" specifically, and how the former leads to the latter, in specific steps?
Why are all us HN old timers in here arguing about this
I thought this was settled
People are walking around with self spy devices and putting them everywhere and giving all their private data to corpos.
That’s not new, we know it happens, we know companies use “anonymized” data for advertising. Its in public records for large companies balance sheets and there are thousands of data brokers who live exclusively on this data.
There are multiple compelling and popular documentaries about this.
They were so proud of how they were one of the early ones to move their entire manufacturing process to China. Sorry, they always (could have) had a camera in your home
Well, I hope you learned your lesson and now won't blindly trust any corporation again, but rather demand open code and full control over the device you bought.
Especially if it is a moving camera in your home...
At least in the US, the Chinese government realistically should have been the least of your worries. What's China gonna do, if they caught you reading the Quran, or snorting crack? They could livestream your marriage proposal in WeChat to a billion people and you wouldn't ever notice. Meanwhile Snowden revealed, covertly watching random people through webcams is a leisure activity at the NSA, a national institution incidentally sharing jurisdiction with you. And evidently, your wife's death in a car accident may become a trending video at Tesla headquarters, while they deny your claims for a lack of such evidence.
> demand open code and full control over the device you bought
What do we do with companies/products like Tesla, short of shutting them down? Fully open code and absolute full control seems like it's going too far. Idealistically I like it, but practically I can't see it working.
I was making a point about trust, not what to do about it. If you are American, you should worry about Americans spying on you, as that actually could have consequences for your life and there is well know evidence and a legal foundation to justify such worries.
As non-car owner, I also dislike the Tesla cameras around me. Maybe one solution would be to not have fucking cameras everywhere, if the owner's exclusive access can't be guaranteed, abuse can't be prevented and legal consequences are not enforced. Maybe there should be standards and certification.
Back when Amazon was going to buy Roomba so they could use the cameras to sell us crap and/or sell the feed to law enforcement, I unplugged ours.
They were unimaginably unreliable compared to our older Roombas, and I was kind of shocked how little we missed them.
Anyway, I looked into getting a secure (or at least not malicious) alternative. At the time, the best bet was to get a Chinese model, then MITM its connection to the cloud + run your own server locally.
At that point, I realized it was less effort to just manually vacuum the house and moved on. I'm certainly not the only one, given the size of the modder community for the Chinese competitors.
Now, I wonder how far the modders are from buying a handful of commodity components + just 3d printing the rest of the robot, since that's less effort than dealing with enshittification.
What is not for sale today, can be for sale tomorrow. Even Apple and Alphabet, should their leaders see greater market value in selling data rather than not selling it.
At this point I trust the Chinese government way more than almost every US tech giant.
I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.
But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.
As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.
Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.
This reminds me of the line from "Jackie Brown": "You can't trust Melanie. But you can trust Melanie to be Melanie".
I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.
I disconnected my Roomba from the network right after programming its schedule. It still works great, following the same schedule for 7 years.
I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.
If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
> Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
Most people don't have the required knowledge to make an educated decision about whether to care. In fact, most people are not even aware of the question, let alone have the knowledge, let alone caring, let alone making a choice.
I don't think there are tens of millions still in use.
Unless you design your house and buy your furnitures taking these roomba into account, they get stuck nearly every where or at the first sock left on the ground by someone in your household. They have a number of wearable most owner will not even want to replace and will start being inefficient rather quickly. Add to that some battery wear and I don't think there is a lot of +5y old devices in the wild.
I and most people I know went back to regular vacuum cleaners. The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house. Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them and cleaning the bathroom and toilets correctly are both much more time consuming and annoying jobs.
> The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house.
Hard disagree, because vacuuming is something you often need to do daily. Spending 10 min/day becomes over an hour a week. That's a significant chunk. If you have smooth floors, running a Roomba kind of becomes a no-brainer.
On the other hand, I only need to dust once a week, and that takes all of 10 minutes. Cleaning the bathroom is similarly once a week (assuming you wipe/brush the sink and toilet bowl as necessary after use).
Reducing vacuuming time, to me, is the #1 thing you can do to save cleaning time, if you live in a Roomba-compatible space.
If you get a robot that automated it you'll feel the difference. Floors get a lot of dust. Especially if you have pets but even without.
I would not personally vacuum daily but having completely automated, vacuuming and mopping, every day has produced wonderful floors. Less work than what we did before too.
There's no germs involved here. Dustin on the floor is dirty socks, and you can peel crumbs and other things under foot under foot. It all goes away if floors are cleaned daily.
I agree with this take, it has been my experience as well. The robot vacuum isn't there so you never need to vacuum, the robot vacuum is there so you can have decently clean floors daily and only need to do the deeper cleaning once a week or so.
But I also get the difficulty when you have a space with lots of larger debris around. The robot vacuum was excellent before kids. Now with little kids that will leave toys and other obstacles all over the place, it requires diligence to pick up after them (and work to teach them to clean up their toys and socks) to ensure the vacuum can be effective.
A lot of people probably bought them for the novelty and then decided they weren't really all that useful for their homes and lifestyles. At least that's what a number of friends have told me. Cordless stick vacs also came in and made a lot of vacuuming jobs quicker and easier.
>Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them
With furnishing optimized for dust generation (less materials where the dust-shitting microbes live, like material curtains) and daily Roomba runs (plus eventual air filter running in the background) there is very little to dust off of surfaces. If there's little dust on the floor, it doesn't get kicked up and doesn't land on things. Ergo - Roomba makes dusting easier.
Keeping a basic air purifier (i.e. fan strapped to HEPA filter) at low power but constantly on would also help with the dust problem, I believe. There's not going to be much dust on things if it gets sucked out of the air before landing on things.
Yeah - they don't work well at all. And work from home is definitely incompatible with roombas. Those things are loud and run for a long time. Both ours are in the storage room collecting dust.
I am one of those weirdos! I bought a roomba in 2015 and it's still going. Second battery, sixth set of rollers and brush, god knows how many filters. Mine's also a dumb one: no wifi or pathfinding, just boring old "drives around until it smacks into shit" navigation.
I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
I used to have a similar dumb one (Roomba 860 if memory serves) and it would take the same path over and over again in certain corners of my house, which meant my carpet ended up with unsightly wheel tracks on it from the repetition. I don't think it did a very good job vacuuming either, no matter how much it ran, a normal vacuum would always pull a boatload more crud up.
It's an interesting idea but it just didn't work for me and I wouldn't consider buying another.
It's not for hardcore use for sure, not a replacement for a proper vacuuming. I use it in my office/part of my basement, it gets the vast majority of stuff up and keeps the cat hair under control.
I don't know that I'd buy another, especially because the new ones creep me out with all the cameras and such, but as long as I can keep this one running, it does a good enough job.
I worry a lot about privacy in general but its hard for me to figure out the danger posed by my roborock. I suppose it has the floor plans of my house and knows we vacuum on Saturdays. It doesn't seem to know if the object passing by is me or my cat.
Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets.
I think this is the wrong mental model (attempt to articulate threats from a specific information leakage). The problem I have with this approach is that it ignores "sensor fusion" by treating each leak as independent and defining threats as "things i can picture happening".
I think the correct mental model for this is "leaking bits". Leaking bits is bad, it doesn't take many bits to uniquely identify you and you're also not able to anticipate how those bits might be used in future or correlated with other bits.
Just stop leaking bits when you can avoid it. Then you don't have to mentally model every threat you come across
One of the more tractable examples here is the information what cell towers your cell phone is connected to. On it's own, it doesn't tell you that much.
But if you have this from 2-3 people, you can start inferring if they are meeting sporadically, meet a lot, possibly live together.
Or, if you add information about the services in the vicinity of cell towers, you can start deducing changes in a persons life. Suddenly the phone is moving more, to places with a doctor nearby, a gynecologist nearby, clothing stores, furniture stores, ... eventually a hospital. Start mixing in information about the websites they visit...
This incremental discovery of information about a person is surprisingly powerful depending on the data you have and hard to predict.
I agree with this completely. I feel like my phone is leaking so much sensitive information about me in so many ways. And it has access to my location, my communications, my finances. And it is hard to turn off. I can turn off my vacuum cleaner for months if I want. I can't turn off my phone or the computer in my car.
I guess that's why the vacuum doesn't worry me. The phone really does.
The concern - for you, maybe nothing. However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us" (trying to capture private conversations of politicians. Or it could do the same for vacuums located new military bases or corporate headquarters. With transcription software and AI, it could simply record and transcribe every conversation it hears and look for important information or mentions of key phrases.
> However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us"
The old company could have done the same thing. I recognize that China is a u.s. geopolitical adversary, but when it comes to politics domestic adversaries are just as ruthless.
> The old company wasn't a domestic political adversary
That depends entirely on the politics in question. It's well known that corporations are willing to abuse their power for political ends if it serves their interests to do so.
In a scenario, where the US and China go to an actual shooting war, moving a couple million high-energy-density devices near the most flammable object in a houshold and purposefully setting the device on fire would be an interesting new variety of shock and awe. Not too new actually, thinking about the mossad pager attack.
Your current device won’t do it but Wi-Fi can now identify people, and because it’s able to penetrate flesh it can identify people by skeleton so that it can’t be hidden by clothing. That’s separate from WhoFi being hard to identify peeler from gestures.[1]
This could be a future where your home devices sell what you look like to data harvesters who can then see you appear in shops which run the same scanners, even through walls where there’s no cameras, connecting back to the person who lives in your house near your future-vacuum cleaner. Even if you leave your phone and devices behind and pay in cash.
The historic privacy we had by virtue of things being physical started to fall slightly with writing and post which the government might intercept, further with telephone calls which the phone company could intercept, further with radio which could be hidden in one room listening, further with CCTV to CRT screen banks and no recording, further to purchases by credit card, then suddenly in the 90s to cellphone tracking and mass internet use, then the 2000s with Bluetooth beacon scanning and CCTV recording to disk and online purchases and unencrypted chat programs, faster in the 2010s where so many people upload their photo streams to Facebook which does face recognition on who is in photos and who is attending events, location tracking apps (all of them asking for that permission), to smartphones tracking location for live traffic and live store busyness ratings, and Hey Siri and Alexa and all the fitness tracker apps, and Ubers and video calling proxies through Microsoft and Google servers, cheap IoT CCTV left open to the world, car license plate tracking cameras…
“What is the concern” - is there really no concern?
Do you think the Chinese government would ever have reasons to "ask the company forcefully" to take pictures and/or record audio inside specific offices and homes?
The broad concern that some people have is misplaced (China doesn't care about the average American home). The narrow concern is extremely plausible: that China would happily use it to target dissidents for example, or people that have fled China for various reasons. We've seen how aggressive they are over time in targeting those people, including physical kidnappings in the US and elsewhere.
The acquisition of iRobot should be immediately blocked on national security concerns. China would have no problem doing the same if the situations were reversed.
If it is a practical view of privacy, like the "I don't want others to know I have foot fetish" kind, or even typical operational security like not letting others know you own something valuable, then the concern is most likely minor. In fact, it may be a good thing that the data goes to China instead of in your own country, because there is a border somewhat protecting you.
If you take a more general approach of just making less data available about you on the internet, for things like targeted ads, AI, etc... Then US or China shouldn't change much and you should avoid connecting your robot to the internet in the first place, most work without it for the simple "clean" function.
Now if you are a US citizen and a patriot, then yeah, it matters.
I’m curious about this too. I’d worry about a local burglar having this information, but what can a Chinese tech company do with this data that I should be concerned about?
First, just the evergrowing tracking of everything, it's just unwholesome in general.
Second, why assume a random Chinese tech company will manage to keep this information to themselves? I wouldn't exactly bet against some terabytes of videos appear on some torrent indexer. Now, combine with modern AI tools for sifting for what you are interested in, and it might hit closer to home for someone.
What I don't get is why people buy robots that carry microphones, lidars and cameras AND connect to the Internet.
I don't really care if the camera is American or Chinese, I just don't want a camera/mic in my home that I don't control. And yeah, the smartphone counts but it's a lot harder not to have one.
Assuming an efficient market it'll eventually be sold to a local burglar. Also, I imagine ICE might be interested in a list of homes where something besides English was spoken. Also there are those email scams that claim to have video of you doing something embarrassing, but usually don't. Given the trajectory of AI, their claims might start being true.
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict what new information can be derived from the combination of different datasets collected from your devices.
I know we have older models for upstairs and down, and saw a newer one with camera at a thrift store. It could have been a different brand, but I saw camera facing up at about 30 degrees and thought to myself, nope. There are reports of it sending revealing pictures I read, and am quite happy that the bump and go ones keep down dust and fur overall. Most of my wifi gadgets have cameras not moving on their own.
US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire.
From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more.
You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.
It is, because Apple's privacy stance and record are known. What do we know about this Chinese company, besides the fact that it is beholden to a government that does not care for privacy?
Apple's record is complying with a majority of government requests for customer data.
Not to mention its CEO manufacturing and gifting on bended knee a custom 24-karat gold Apple plaque to a federal government leader that does not care for privacy or foreign customers. That sent the message internationally, loud and clear.
Apple's policy is to submit to nearly all requests made by the federal government, though they get substantial credit for resisting some requests. This of course depends on the decisions made by current leadership, which can and will change (while the phone in your pocket remains the same).
The problem is that not all governments constrain themselves to only use requests and/or allow companies to challenge said requests. And that's at least what you get dealing with Apple and the USA (most of the time).
There are tens of much more successful robot vacuum companies. You do not buy roomba because of their capability in making robot vacuums, that already drove them bankrupt. If all you wanted was the brand name, you could have bought just that. The valuable asset here is the large number of products in people's homes which can now be monetized.
Let's put aside whether you can trust apple for a moment.
Where the hardware comes from is much less of a risk than the fact than where the locked down firmware and software comes from.
Yes the west's over-dependence on Chinese hardware is a liability, but what's easier? Compromising hardware or compromising software? If you don't know, I'll tell you, it's the latter.
Which is why the parent said "for anyone outside the US". Of course for anyone in the US, at least Apple is a US company. But that only works for people in the US :-).
Not the OP, but I understood it as "anyway we're screwed, and if you're okay with the company in question being in your country, Apple is okay only for people in the US".
Definitely not all live and functioning. In fact I suspect less than 10m are actively used. It is a company that has been around for years and it has run into sales issues that last few years with competition and their products have tech product lifespans of around 3 years I suspect.
Personally, I have a Roomba I bought in Jan 2019 that's still doing just fine (So 7 years now).
Most of the parts are pretty easily replaced (genuinely pleasant surprise, as an aside) and the company stocked most replacement parts for a long time - I just checked again and I can still get parts for my model (I-series) incl batteries, wheels, brushes, filters, etc. Which is less than it used to be, but still enough to keep mine rolling around for another 3ish years without any likely problems.
And that's outside of the whole "unofficial" replacement parts ecosystem that popped up online.
3 years doesn't track with my experience on this one. I'd bet it's 5 to 10.
---
For context, Amazon tried to buy them for exactly the same purpose ~2 years back (home/house data) and failed to get EU regulatory approval, so scrapped the deal.
I'm not thrilled to have ownership transferred to another company (I was also very unhappy to hear the Amazon rumors back then) and I think this is a pretty clear risk.
Even if a user is no longer using the device, Roomba still likely has plenty of data about their home floating around.
> Most of the parts are pretty easily replaced (genuinely pleasant surprise, as an aside) and the company stocked most replacement parts for a long time - I just checked again and I can still get parts for my model (I-series) incl batteries, wheels, brushes, filters, etc. Which is less than it used to be, but still enough to keep mine rolling around for another 3ish years without any likely problems.
I've never owned or really used a different brand than roomba (I've joked that I've owned 4 roombas, but never purchased a single one...) but I fully agree that the modular nature of their parts replacement is a super welcome thing. The fact that the electrical contacts are all just sprung into each other, and each component is basically designed for near-minimal replacement overlap (not replacing things that are not broken) is something that I would LOVE to be implemented in more things. I always assumed that it was this 'forward thinking' design that a) Likely added a bit to the cost of the brand b) Likely didn't assist with future sales from breakages, etc.
Out of the 4 I've acquired over the years, one has been stripped of parts and discarded. One is relatively in that process, and the other 2 are happily (?) doing the different areas of my house. A few amazon batteries later (Which I originally only charge when I am home and able to check on them, then place faith in 'not burning down the house') and everything is hunky doory.
Also, they have been around so long, there are a boatload of 3d printed replacement parts floating around that can be quite useful if one has a 3d printer.
I've always held them in pretty high regard for repairable tech.
That was kind of my point, I don't buy any of these surveillance appliances.
But answering as a hypthetical roomba owner: As I am from the EU, this new ownership would actually be better for me. The US already mandates spying with devices like these, and has been caught multiple times doing so already. It is also known to share info with the domestic services, the latter point not being true for China.
the US does not mandate spying with roombas -- wtf are you smoking?
China absolutely shares info with all of its national police services, intelligence services, and military. Depending on the company these PLA may literally own some / most / all of the organization.
I am not in the US or China, and on balance I am less worried about the Chinese blowing my house up, but don't pretend they're nice, or that they're your friend. I don't want them having my data any more than I want the NSA, Research & Analysis Wing, or the NK Reconnaissance General Bureau.
You have the Stored Communications Act, the Patriot Act, the Cloud Act, FISA, and so on. Most of which don't require warrants if it is about non-citizens. Which is then shared, through Five Eyes and similar agreements, with foreign countries, so a workaround for not needing warrants in the target country. This is what I commented about, data sharing with the services in my country. Of course Chinese intelligence agencies will share info with the Chinese police, but they don't share with police in the EU.
Again, the root problem of course is that there is any data to share in the first place.
As an American, I'd much rather a Chinese company have data on me than an American one.
The American government and FBI and police don't have access to the Chinese company's data. But with a subpoena (and sometimes just with a friendly ask), they sure do have access to an American company's data.
Now if the US is at war with China and you're a politician or in the military, then of course get rid of every device in your home and workplace from China that could be used to spy. But if you're just a normal citizen worried about your government collecting information on you, it seems preferable to stick to foreign companies, like Chinese ones.
Yeah I think a lot of privacy advocates like to pretend they are some high value target. A nation you don't live in, that has no use for information about you is collecting information on you. What is the problem that wasn't there before? I can at least understand a principled stand of not wanting cloud connected cameras or microphones, but the China hawking is just ludacris.
It really depends. Where I live there is a large Chinese expat community, including many democracy activists from Hong Kong, Falun Gong practitioners, anti-CCP critics, and other expats who left China out of fear of persecution. They do have legitimate reasons to worry about the Chinese government tracking them down[1], and now they have to worry about whether their friends who invite them over for tea have a Roomba at home.
But if you live in an area with little exposure to these communities, I doubt the Chinese government would care about your private information.
But no matter who I am I certainly wouldn't want North Korea to have my private information, because they'd have no qualms about finding ways to use it to empty my bank account.
The US is the biggest world wide surveillance state by far. If you don't worry about that why would you worry about NK a country that has 0 soft power and will have 0 impact on your life whatsoever. At that point I'd give my data more willingly to Russia or China, at last it would equilibrate things a bit
I've been buying Roombas since the very first one (I've had four), but stopped buying them when they started including internet connectivity and cameras.
That was a total dealbreaker for me. No vacuum cleaner needs that.
They made the devices. I would say its fair to assume they already had access to the data if they needed it. Other than the fact they legally own it now I don't think this makes much difference from before.
Why are you concerned about china having access to this data anyway? I'm far more concerned about how much access the US gov has to this type of data. They can easily use it against someone in the country they control if they want.
American tech companies have already built an apparatus of mass surveillance that works hand in glove with our government to violate our constitutional rights on a regular basis.
But it turns out that an economy based on rent extraction and enshittification can’t in the long run compete with one based on a real economy of industry, agriculture, and public services.
We should have privacy laws including mandated user control of user data. In my view, scaremongering around China just demonstates how uncompetitive the US is, in the long run. We should set our sights higher than merely begging to trade one form of technofeudalism for another.
what is in between a disc shaped robot vacuum and an android walking around with a broom? there's no obvious path between those two designs. the answer is all the growth iRoomba needed and another $10b.
the problem with disc shaped vacuums is adapting your whole home to make their labor saving make sense. not maps or china or all this other bs.
It's not exactly the missing link, but a lot of brands have started adding features that could be seen as in between, like a little robot arm to pick things up, and little "legs" to go up stairs.
I take it you also believe then that every third person on the planet has an iphone, yes?
(Apart from the innumeracy, also the gall to still launder this type of conspiracy theories in 2025, after the entire world can see you now for what you really are. Mindbending)
Well, not to worry. The Biden Admin FTC and the EU ensured this outcome in the interest of making sure consumer rights are protected. Therefore, consumer rights must be better protected in this scenario.
I appreciate the alarm. However, I don't know if we should feel China having this is less safe than an America, European, or other country. I think we have seen that whatever alleged rights to privacy and data protection we have are becoming more-and-more meaningless as the corporatocracy of the US manifests itself more.
I mean to say, this should not be any more alarming than if, say, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon bought Roomba vs. any random Chinese company.
I say this not to say that China has no human rights issues to worry about, but rather, that the US and other Western countries have just as many concerning human rights issues (including privacy, freedom of speech suppression, and police state) that we're just more familiar with and used to, compared to the Other that is China.
100%. Amazon actually has a sizable robotics presence in Boston. It would have been great for Boston job market and there are actually a handful of companies based out of MA including BD. You really need a cluster of companies to strengthen an industry. I mean see biotech in Kendall if you need an example.
Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.
Five years ago you'd be called sinophobic for suggesting we do something to stop bleeding industries to China. (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.) Yet we already saw how this had happened to Canada with Nortel, etc.
China wants every industry it can have. If we give up technological salients, we won't be able to get them back. China has so many advantages - manufacturing, chemicals, materials, electronics. They now have better experience than we do with design and engineering.
The outcome of this happening broadly and at scale is that high paying US jobs will disappear and the country will slide into economic stagnation.
You wouldn't hire a robotics or mechatronics engineer in the US. There would only be small bespoke jobs. The vast majority of supply would come from China where everything is both vertically and horizontally integrated. Cheap, fast, better. These career sectors will shrink and atrophy. There won't be enough talent, jobs, or pay to support building new companies, meaning we're dead in the water and that industry is dead to us.
We need to do something fast. It'll be gone within a generation if we don't.
I don't have anything against Chinese people. I just want America to dominate or be competitive in enough key industries to keep us all employed and growing. For our own economic security and insurance.
Opposing one purchaser does not imply supporting another purchaser. I don't know the details of this specific transaction, but I would guess the Chinese buyer does not have the same market power that Amazon does, so isn't running afoul of antitrust law. It's also possible Warren is opposed to this purchase, too, but no longer has the influence to stop it.
> Opposing one purchaser does not imply supporting another purchaser
Opposing the merger in this case necessarily meant embracing iRobot going out of business. Their financial position was clear, and no one else was in that business vertical but iRobot and Chinese companies. So either iRobot folds and the market is owned by Chiense companies, or iRobot folds and its IP is bought by Chinese companies.
> but I would guess the Chinese buyer does not have the same market power that Amazon does
In home robotics? They own the whole market.
> Warren is opposed to this purchase, too, but no longer has the influence to stop it.
Warren is too blindly ideological and frankly stupid to have pieced this together.
She should be, honestly. To me as an American, China has a better reputation than Amazon. Of those two choices, I'm happier with this outcome than giving even more stuff to Amazon.
As an American with a strong personal interest (kids) in keeping the country strong and competitive in the future, it seems bizarre to cheer for our largest adversary to gain advantages over us.
I also would have preferred to keep it in the country, but the fact is that Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is. Hence "Of those two choices... I pick China."
I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.
See downthread comment[1], and please keep in mind the context of this conversation is specifically, "Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans than China is".
Chinese doctrine explicitly has labeled America as the enemy for 10-20 years, with a goal of taking a democracy by force (after crushing dissent in HK and taking it over earlier than promised), and steals the West’s IP, and manipulates American businesses, and is actively committing a genocide for the past decade.
That's all pretty hand wavey and abstract, not very convincing (for example, I'm pretty sure China is not committing a genocide in the US, and Western IP law is arguably not worth much respect anyway). I'm not saying China is without problems, I'm just saying they're less harmful to Americans than Amazon is.
You’re claiming that documented and active IP theft and anti-democracy and enemy-action doctrine is handwavy and better than a tax paying business that supports democracy and that is not trying to undermine the west? You’re wrong
I similarly can't understand how you can look at the US over the last 10-20 years and think the US's biggest threat is some country on the other side of the planet who makes the stuff that we ask them to make, and not the billionaires and megacorps who control every aspect of our economic and political system which directly lead to the situation we are in now. The call is coming from inside the house, man :)
Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future.
So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.
There are threats from without and threats from within.
China isn't going to physically invade the US. They want to take our place as the world's cultural leader and relegate the US to approximately the current state of the UK.
Companies like Amazon want to increase the wealth of the owners at any cost including domestic political capture. They would see the country being run by oligarchs like Russia.
To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company. They bring in Chinese products by the boatload, warehouse them here and offer 2 day shipping. That's virtually their entire retail business and value proposition. It's a slightly curated selection, easy ordering and fast shipping. You can buy all the same stuff for less at Ali Express if you don't mind waiting 3 weeks.
I don't mean to make light of what Amazon actually does. Their logistics are incredible. But, really, that's what they are. A logistics company. Your money still goes to China and you pay more so an American company can get their cut too.
>"To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company."
Have you actually used AliExpress? I use both Amazon and AE, and the former definitely offers a lower-deceit, easier to use, and better customer experience. Amazon powers most of the web, whereas AE regularly has massive bugs (I was completely unable to sign in for over a month due to a UI bug last year).
I want Amazon and Google to be broken up, but not in this category or along with these lines. This wasn't going to create some household appliance monopoly. Amazon has plenty of competition, and Roomba was already behind the curve.
Now America is out of this market category. A category we invented. This felt like our last toehold in consumer robotics.
There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents.
Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop.
It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector.
Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's Game of Thrones production costs using unrelated business units, market those movies and shows for free in the Amazon app, on their website, emblazoned on their delivery vehicles and on every item of packaging. Other companies have to pay hundreds of millions to match this. There is eyeball opportunity cost for consumers, and Amazon is flooding the zone with their free wares. This is a markedly unfair advantage.
Amazon moves US union jobs overseas and trains up low cost crews in Eastern Europe. They buy up once successful studios on the cheap because they all tried to catch up with the stupid steaming game.
Theatrical box office receipts are the biggest revenue driver for studios by a wide margin. Individually, studios could have countered Netflix and Disney by pulling licensing. Amazon in the mix threatened this, because they had existing content licenses and also controlled home media releases. The studios felt cornered by tech giants basically salting the earth. They had to give up healthy Box Office proceeds and exclusivity to chase streaming and defend their access to eyeballs as best they could.
You've heard of Disney eating the mid market film? Amazon ate everything. It left no oxygen in the fish bowl.
Amazon's entertainment business needs to be spun off.
All of that can be true and completely unrelated to Roomba. Nothing should have prevented their purchase of iRobot. That was insanity.
The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half.
The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.
In the theoretical limit, a single monopoly owns and dictates everything. That's bad.
In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. The platforms themselves barely innovate, yet they rake in enormous revenue streams by taxing all other participants and being the central connection point for all economies.
Is it healthy that we only have two smartphone providers? That they can extort every industry - including crazy unrelated industries like fintechs, automotive, various entertainment industries, etc.?
Is it healthy that the "URL bar" now means Google search in 95% of the panes of glass humans use to access the internet? That a search for a company's products are now a competitive bidding zone where every market participant is taxed on basic branding?
Healthy capitalism should be brutally competitive. It uses regulation to ensure companies do not grow too big to escape evolutionary pressures. Google, Apple, and Amazon ought to be sweating - not sitting by the pool, relaxing. And they certainly shouldn't be able to become invasive species in other markets when their entry amounts to dumping.
I love capitalism. A healthy dose of antitrust regulation makes it more distributed and less antifragile. It makes sure lots of stakeholders can pursue lots of objectives rather than concentrated labs that are merely the lavish luxuries of titans. It prevents laziness and ossification by forcing everyone to be nimble.
I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.
The emergence of a totalitarian state compared to a liberal democracy (for all it's faults and current state due to voters making bad choices) is so much worse for everyone in the world. Us included
Maybe instead of ad-hoc fear-driven interventions in the market when Chinese companies do too well (TikTok), US should have some general data protection laws, and not allow making surveillance devices that are locked-down and serve their corporate overlords?
Amazon isn't on your side. They would have sold this access to China if they could make a buck on it.
No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America.
The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but that ship sailed here centuries ago) but they do send vans to harvest the organs of dissidents. And Google “persecution of Uyghurs”.
They’re not a benign organization just because they shoot less, they just get shot at less.
My dude I spied on the Chinese for a decade I know more about the Chinese than you’ll ever understand
Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist.
However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you include the global war on terror and the modern prisoner slave market encoded into the constitution (13th amendment)
If you wanna go all the way back to the cultural revolution then absolutely fine but my argument there is going to be that’s no different than any of the culls that the United States or any other country have done. So they don’t get a pass but they aren’t worse
Ultimately all you have to do is put up the “death toll” from state action both inside the nation and outside the nation to compare numbers. I’ll let you go ahead and do that exercise.
No that the communist party has only ruled in China for less than 100 years but the same structure in America which has been completely depraved since the founders of the country were alive and actively shaping the politics of the US is coming up on 350 years ago.
I mean for Christ sake we bought the southern United States from France in order to maintain our slave plantations as the French were getting rid of all their slave holdings worldwide. And then after the Civil War which was supposed to solve that ethical burden they completely gutted the entire process of reconstruction in order to prevent the full completion of it because the population was so racist they did not want to do it. As a black person in America I will tell you the slave population in jails is higher than it ever was anywhere else.
If that’s not a disqualification on its own of any type of ethical foundations I don’t know what is.
Hard to tell if someone is ignorant, not bright, or a CCP propaganda bot these days, but anyone who thinks the Chinese government is preferable to Amazon is one (at least) of those 3.
No county matches the depravity of the U.S justice system? Other countries (china for example) have reeducation and labor camps. The us has its problems, and we should make things better! But it's incomparable, china actively imprisons political enemies, puts Muslims in "reeducation" camps, and has an iron fist on free expression.
Maybe there's a 3rd option... like encrypt the footage in a way that it can't be accessed en-masse without passwords?
Like imagine if the US government gave a warrant to apple and said "Give us all iphone pictures from this area on this date"... they'd presumably say "We won't because we designed it so that we can't."
Amazon wouldn't have kept the manufacturer alive by making Roombas better, but by making it more expensive for other manufacturers to sell their vacuums through Amazon.
This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.
It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.
Ford themselves said they need to stay in the Chinese car market no matter what - not because they think they can win in it but because they can't compete anywhere if they leave.
The one tech area the US is most definitely ahead is AI - both software and hardware. The US will be ahead as long as China does not have access to EUV manufacturing yet.
IMO, the US business industry has become over-financialised to the point of self-sabotage. R&D and capital expenditure are seen as "bad" things to have on accounting statements. Combine this with Jack Welsh type CEOs who do everything they can to cut out "costs" on financial statements and you get organizations like GE turned into (badly run) banks.
Cisco is now essentially a publicly traded PE firm that buys up other companies to milk dry. Most internal development is outsourced by suits far removed from any qualifications on quality.
We all know the foibles of Boeing, where accountants made the final calls on everything.
The only innovations the traditional American car companies seem to be able to focus on is how to make cars bigger to increase margins. It's ludicrous that it took a new company (Tesla) to make electric cars available.
I could go on. This is not to say that other countries (including China) don't have their own issues with their business climate, but the United States has an environment where some of the smartest and best paid people in the country are working their asses off to find out better ways to show ads (Google/Facebook).
That's ultimately what you get when you have a system that 1) has most of its money held by the retirement/pension funds of a generation that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth and 2) has incentivized returns to those institutional investors at the board and c-suite levels of most companies.
I mean if we're talking about generations that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth, then China is actually ahead of us there. Their birth rate plummeted below replacement well before the US's did.
Everyone acts like the C8 corvette doesn’t exist when they shit on American cars. Actually GM is an innovative awesome company.
The C8 has topped many “top car” lists since it came out in 2020. The reviews on it are universally excellent and it gaps pretty much anything that the turn-signal hating BMW crowd manufactures both in literal performance and in design.
Also there's no longer really any such thing as an American car. Everything now is some globalized mess of parts from brands here and there. Made in factories wherever is most financially convenient.
> American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.
Why does China have a bunch of electronics companies? Because people outsourced all their manufacturing to China. So all non-China has left, barely, is the hardware design. Cool, so let's outsource that too? So all non-China has left is, oops?
The bigger risk specifically with roomba may be that people who have connected their roomba’s to wifi and have their floor plans mapped and possibly in the cloud.
Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.
There's very low value to the Chinese state to having detailed floor plans of a random person's house. Or even a prominent person's house. A lot of this stuff is semi-public domain regardless as many real estate listings will include a floor plan.
> It is complacency or is China just accelerating?
Specifically in the case of Roomba complacency certainly played a role. I have one of their robots for several years already, and while it mostly works fine for my usecases their app is a complete mess. Sometimes the roomba has an issue and aborts a run but there's zero to no detail visible in the app as to why that happened. I seem to be unable to look at old runs, see statistics over time, basically anything that might be useful other than the bog-standard basics, and even those are lacklustre at best.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually reverse-engineered their APIs and made a better app on top of them; the app is comically bad with little to no improvement since I've started using the product.
China's definitely much more advanced that it was twenty years ago. The science, design etc. was much worse than the west, now it's on par or sometimes ahead.
Agree. I visited China recently and every time we ordered a Didi (equivalent to Uber there) we were surprised with their vehicles, we used to order “deluxe” ones and boy we got some fancy electric vehicles.
Just wanted to point out that Roborock is now in a similar position - they have completely slept on the roller mop trend - and meanwhile other Chinese manufacturers are building better robots.
There was an interview from a Chinese Founder and he said something that I think accurately sums up the difference.
US R&D may be on top in some areas especially AI or Frontier Tech. But it is at best 2x better than China. What sets Chinese companies apart they can have product from Lab to market and manufacturing at scale that is at least an order of magnitude faster than US, not to mention a lot cheaper.
Motorola Smartphone is now Chinese owned. I dont think people even realise it. Most of the Consumer Appliance from Washing Machine to Microwave are not just manufactured in China, the brand itself are sold off to Chinese companies as well. Toshiba Home Appliances for example. Even if they are not Made in China, they are made by a Chinese Companies in SEA Region.
For TV, most of the LCD Panel are from China. TCL and Hisense are not just copying but innovated with newer panel technology. CSOT Produce the Panel for Sony top range Bravia 9 TV. Inkjet Printing OLED commercially coming out this year.
Even Agricultural tech China is catching up, something traditionally US is strong in. And some of those results are coming in already.
There are a lot more in the pipeline they have been hammering for the past 10 - 15 years and they have finally coming out where most mainstream media haven't covered because they have no idea. I remember reading Bloomberg around 12 years ago saying Tesla Battery facility being biggest in the world and they have never heard or reported anything about CATL.
And there has been a lot more Chinese companies exporting directly. I am wondering if anyone have heard of a brand called laifen where it was massively popular on IG for their toothbrush a while ago. They called it how Apple would have design and make toothbrush. And they are using exactly the same Apple packaging box for their product as well.
Even Beauty products where it used to be R&D and manufactured in South Korea. China is now picking up a lot of market share as well. And it is apparent in Cosmoprof, largest beauty and cosmetics trade show.
Edit: I forgot to mention something I think is bigger than AI. But doesn't get the headline like AI. Robotics. Not only do I believe they are far ahead in Humanoid Robots, they are also manufacturing it better and faster and cheaper. They are already deployed in some places in production already.
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China has won. And they are not Japan in post WWII where US can force them give up certain things. Nor do they have a free flowing currency, arguably their biggest moat where the whole bubble may burst. Barring any black swan event China will dominate in nearly all consumer industries along with other adjacent industries. And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.
And I am writing this on the day they announced [1] Jimmy Lai was found quality under Hong Kong's National Security Law.
[1] Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong tycoon and democratic firebrand who stood up to China
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back.
Unfortunate in what sense?
And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.
The last 200-250 years seems to be an abnormal period in which China was not a superpower. Historically, China has always had 25-40% of the world's GDP. It's been so long that many generations have lived and died without seeing China at the top. I think it's kind of neat for this generation to witness it.
15 years ago I would've agreed. I saw SUVs with obvious BMW inspired styling cues that had manufacturers badges that were conveniently the same place and the same size as the BMW roundel. I saw Starbucks and Pizza Hut look-alikes. I saw the dismay on the barista's face when I ordered a coffee drink instead of tea. They regarded the US with a sense of awe. When I told my Chinese colleagues it was unlikely that the US would lead the way in nuclear power because only China could do it at enough scale to succeed, they were shocked.
Now the Chinese have their own expensive coffee brands. They even have what one could call private equity with Chinese characteristics: private equity in China is strategic, mostly minority stakes, and often behaves like late stage VC.
I'm not making a moral comparison here. The impact of bad PE deals in China is that an often technology oriented pre-IPO company goes bust, whereas in the US your local hospital will close. Make up your own mind which is worse.
Not to disclaim Britain's & France's atrocities in China - but blaming Mao's victory on those is simplistic at best. China is not a cardboard NPC village, where nothing happens unless the PC's visit and start pulling strings. And while various Chinese people may find it convenient to say "because $western_country did $thing", 99% of actual Chinese decisions are made from their own motives, for their own benefit, with minimal-at-best regard for Westerners.
>But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.
This is very insightful. But it's more profound than what's observed on surface. There was a chain of reactions along with many coincident events.
If we consider a collection of human bounded by different glues, i.e. tribes, culture, religions, ethnicities , political beliefs, cooperate, LLCs, etc., as a new form of creature superior to nature animals, then Chinese as a new creature is very special one. Maybe next to Jews.
The failure of Opium war and consequential changes caused a humiliation that created a special stress on this creature, resulted in a strong response which also drove many revolves inside China. Chinese elites seeking different solutions as reaction to those changes.
One big revolt lead by revolutionaries , the predecessor of the Nationalists who fled to Taiwan in 1949, overthrew the last dynasty of China. However it didn't address the issue of humiliation. The elites continue to seeking solutions while tried to reunite China. CPP was one of them.
After WWII, only 2 contesters survived. Another 4 years of civil war later, the Nationalist lost and Republic of China migrated to Taiwan. In 1971, ROC lost the seat in UN, CPP took over as the representative of China.
Both CPP and the Nationalists are nationalists , among others who lost in the history. The majority of early members of CPP, even strongly believe in the Marxist ideology, deep in their heart they are the same as the other nationalists even they hate and kill each other.
Marxism is a tool which is very effective proved by history, used by the unique creature called China to restore its honor and dignity, without the user of the tool even realizing it. Today it is called "Socialism with Chinese character", a heavily modified and unrecognizable version of Marxist ideology.
That's a little long version of
>that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949
I wish I have time to write a book about it as real long version after some time, maybe 10 years.
Yes, being able to pay wages that amount to slavery opens a lot of doors. There is a lot of positive Chinese sentiment on this website, much of it exaggerated, and all of their accomplishments pretty much hinge on being able to exploit their workforce, of which we just sort of wave our hands and dismiss it in these types of discussions.
Not to mention the blatant corporate espionage. They may have some of their own innovations, and I’m sure there are plenty of smart people there who, despite being oppressed, still find joy in building things. But let’s not pretend this is all due to excellence.
Why do American companies have to rely on artificial protections like IP in order to compete? Don't forget it's only "stealing" if you're culturally inclined to see IP as actual property, whereas in China the idea has long been that ideas are common good, even predating Marxism.
Not to mention that the US was notorious for IP theft until it would up at the apex of the international order. I presume as China becomes economically dominant it too will gradually shift toward rent seeking and patent enforcement.
They introduced more and more IP laws due to requirements from the WTO[https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/completeacc_e.htm...]. At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies, and now we're at the stage where there's essentially legal parity.
Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions. But now they're getting to the point that they can start to lead the conversation.
Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
> At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies
Funny how that works.
> Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions
Like making it mandatory to have a Chinese co-owner own 50% for all businesses created in China? I don't remember seeing that in the WTO rules.
> Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
R&D is very expensive and you want some protection for having borne that cost. If a competitor can just swoop in and clone your tech then they’re at an immediate, unfair advantage.
There is a huge difference between "some protection" and blocking the competition for many decades, because an incompetent patent office has approved many exaggerated claims, either about things that are obvious and well known by anyone in the field, but nobody was shameless enough to claim them in a patent before, or else about things that the patent filer is completely unable to do in the present, but they are claimed in the patent for the case when someone else will figure how to do them in the future.
Today the vast majority of patents are not intended for any kind of licensing and they might be even completely useless if licensed, but they are only intended for preventing competition in the market where the patent owner is active.
In order to be useful, a patent system should start to require again that the inventor shows a working prototype that demonstrates all the features claimed in the patent. Moreover, the patents should expire much faster, certainly not later than after 10 years from being issued. Perhaps a longer validity could be accepted for patents owned by individual inventors, but in any case not for the patents assigned to the employers of the inventors, as most patents are today. Also, patent owners should offer "Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing" (FRAND), otherwise the patent should be invalidated.
Patents aren’t the only means of copying something. I would imagine China has a very sophisticated reverse engineering skill set. Made even easier since pretty much everything is made there so if you want the specs of some component you can just call someone up.
The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US!
On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places.
Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things!
People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymore, and in the same breath get pissed that China doesn't kneel to our absurd IP laws!
The US COULD compete if we put building shit ahead of rewarding some shithead capitalist for someone else's work.
Except that you have the technical know how to keep advancing, and have already been producing them before they hit market an have been reverse engineered.
Also a lot of research is already done at, or in cooperation of universities, or with research tax breaks.
Let alone the fact that a lot of patents are absolute bullshit. There are patents on UI elements, even black rubber handles with a hand grip. Not white ones, mind you. It’s insanity and stifles innovation.
But if patents and trademarks and copyright are so incredibly important for innovation, I guess that’s why stuff like math and theoretical physics has the lowest amount of innovation, right?
Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
IP is an incentive to develop the IP in the first place. Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long? America and Europe have been creating and innovating for centuries and millennia. In recent decades China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West? What is the plan to surpass the West without someone else supplying the IP? Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done? Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
A key difference is that the West are liberal democracies and there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
> Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
No it isn't and this comes across as a straw man. Competing on price, build quality, distribution, aesthetic, service support etc etc are all very real.
> Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
How/why did we ever develop anything prior to 1710? And we can add first movers advantage to the list of "real" protections, as well as prestige, marketing etc.
> And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long?
Define superpower here? It seems to me that Western powers became global powers first because of colonialism, which A) was driven by materials not by IP, and B) caused direct harm to China.
> China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West?
Was China in a bad position before the Europeans arrived? Since the Opium Wars they've been forced to play along or risk being wiped out completely. Where could they be without the west indeed.
> Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done?
Haven't they? It seems that they are very competitive for a host of practical manufacturing reasons that could have been implemented elsewhere if there had been a will or long term vision.
> Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
Japan was completely neutered and propped up by the US for half a century while they "recovered." It's not a comparable situation.
> there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Is there? Did Britain become a superpower because of its free and cosmopolitan society? Is being a superpower our end goal?
> Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
This isn't an argument at all, just an ad hominem not in keeping with site guidelines. I'm happy to discuss but strawmen and as hominems are very off-putting.
That seems to be a problem with many companies. Chinese companies are innovating aggressively while others don’t. You see that with 3d printers where Bambu is kicking ass. I remember when GoPro did a drone and it simply wasn’t good. Or American carmakers are trying to turn back the clock on electric instead of embracing it.
I know people like to say that it is American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies.
This may be true in certain areas, but I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product all while the original company refuses to act.
Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads but I don't believe that's the only reason they are not competitive.
I generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look.
Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this.
Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets).
Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration).
„Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
Western politicians did it to us. China was allowed into the WTO but never held to any of the rules.
It is still treated with kid gloves by governments as if it were a developing country despite the fact that it hasn't needed such treatment for decades.
That’s an over simplified view of the world that completely ignores all the benefits of outsourcing our manufacturing to China brought. It may have been short sighted of us, and we may have over valued those short term benefits, over the long term costs, but it wasn’t a decision made by some shadowy group of “politicians”. It was a collective societal decision, to choose easy consumerism, cheap products, and rapid growth in quality of life, over the long term viability of societies.
But this story hasn’t ended yet, and China certainly isn’t treated like a developing country. It’s treated like a country that has a vice grip on our economic nether regions, and we really don’t want to make any sudden unexpected moves.
Those benefits were chiefly lower prices for the manufactured goods. But the Federal Reserve interpreted this as a problem per their mandate to keep CPI going upwards, and created a bunch of new money that went into asset bubbles. So the "benefits" to the average person also included housing unaffordability and the general financialization of everything. Viewed through this lens, it does not seem like any sort of collective societal decision.
iRobot hasn't got that excuse. They had market dominance and high margins for long enough that, had they retained focus, they could've created follow up products that would've made for durable, defensible market leadership, even if not every product was a success. I hope everyone is clear that that's the world we live in now <cough>Model Y</cough>.
DJI as consumer and professional drones seems like they‘re most certainly they are also an R&D leader given the fact that there are essentially 0 western competitors.
When it comes to more commodity tech, batteries immediately come to mind. Chins has spent years funding battery research and they are now the biggest supplier for LiIon batteries of basically all kinds. Solar panels seem like another example.
Every category I can think of where China is near-first there is some international manufacturer that has a better product.
Several areas where there are much higher volumes or outstandingly better value though. Things like automotive lidar, construction assemblys (like double glazed window units), consumer electronics like quadcopters.
I recently bought a handheld spectrophotometer for work (color assessment). The product from the leading US company (X-Rite) is ~US$15k in my market. I bought the Chinese equivalent for US$3k. Maybe if I needed guaranteed nine 9s of colour accuracy the US product would be worth it, but for 95% of users in the market, the Chinese product is more than fine.
I have a vague theory that China's massive home market of poorer people keeps the innovation going. There's always an upside for making something 1% cheaper and simpler as more people can buy it.
That gets mocked by rich people in rich countries in the short term but then leads to disruptive innovation from below, cheaper, simpler items growing and eating the market.
I think you are on to something. In the US I feel the focus is more and more on catering to the maybe top 20% who can afford to pay a lot more for things. There are less and less low end cars. Concerts and sports events are super expensive. New apartments are usually in the higher price range. No starter homes anymore. Instead of innovating, we just increase the price of assets.
BEVs most certainly aren‘t. Chinese EVs are strongly competing on price. Based on my own experience with them (n=4). They are very good as a EV, solid as a rolling smartphone, but not leading as being a car. Given the choice, I still would prefer a BMW EV any day.
However, batteries as a commodity are a good example where china is leading as volume and R&D leader
They are more than capable. I have just looked at what BMW, Mercedes and Audi have on offer. Then compare what Zeekr and Xpeng has on offer (7X, G9). Quality wise they feel the same or even better.
While I agree as a "complete car" the full package might not quite be there yet. But that is from a European perspective as they mostly are focused on their home markets. But this is changing. This is then simply iterating for product/market fit.
Personally I find the major problems in chinese cars are the software. That is the easy fix and they are getting closer with each iteration.
So much that today I would choose a Zeekr 7X but choose to postpone as the software was too annoying (adaptive cruise control, lane assist, sign recognition, auto brake, audio cues).
The big loss we have with EVs are servicability. But that is a universal problem with all automakers.
No, as someone in the western side of product development things. The problem is studied in the standard MBA course for Strategy, without even China mentioned.
First-mover advantage, which comes from R&D into new markets is short lived no matter what. It is critical for firms that hit new ground to find ways to continue to grow their position and market as soon as they can. Copy-cat firms always always come, even big western megacorps love to come in and push out the little western corps, this is typically what is taught in said MBA class. Depending on the market, making newer products that are cheaper is absolutely something a firm must evaluate if there is a demand for it that can be a position and a threat to them.
It's simply the song and dance of the business lifecycle. It's one of the many reasons why 90% of startups fail.
Pretty much every American company is just a bank with extra steps.
The big boys would rather own real estate and balance books than sink money into R&D. And acquiring companies is simply easier, and it's basically a broken strategy. If you just keep consolidating you just get a higher and higher valuation, while doing literally nothing.
> American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies.
Let's take Roomba as the example, because "innovate" does not mean what people think it means.
Roomba invented the consumer robot floor care machine and won the market early on.
Roomba's competitors innovated more (iteratively adding features) and Roomba has now lost it's independence.
See Blackberry, Motorola for some more recent examples. What the lesson is: there's only one way to go when you are #1 in your market category. You cannot allow gravity to work.
Yeah, "Chinese companies just copies" was 10-15 years or beyond. No way is that relevant now.
I've been wondering about why this is. With no evidence, I wondered if one of the reasons is the long term result of the many design and engineering graduates (I notice an incredible amount in the industry I work in) who were educated in the "best western uni's" and have now returned home and grown up.
They were a honeypot for said uni's for so long. But the end result may now mean they're kicking all asses in product markets.
It can't just be cheap labour ... or maybe it's the combination.
It is definitely still relevant. A friend showed me two products- one from a US manufacturing company he worked for, and one on alibaba- that were practically identical. One was designed and developed, the other an illegal rip off.
The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
I feel like there is a hypothesis that open source and open science has helped the West but the IP laws have slowed innovation whereas China is kind of an open source culture internally which confera an advantage.
While I would love to attribute it to their culture of hard work I believe the credit should go to the combined effect of poor choices made in the west. You cant begin to list our spending on bullshit directly nor instances of money intended for useful things that was lost in bureaucracy. China does this too of course but we are so much better at it.
> Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads
I think this, plus different attitudes to intellectual property are the two big reasons western companies can’t compete.
The general strategy for R&D in the west is to spend significant sums developing a new technology, then building an IP moat around it to prevent direct competition. Our IP laws make this approach viable, and it allows companies to develop something new, then exploit it for decades without needing to innovate further.
China on the other hand does not have this approach to IP. Copying is rife, even between Chinese companies, and generally the idea of being given a state enforced monopoly just because you were first is laughable. As a result, when one Chinese company figures something out, that technology, process, technique, rapidly spreads around the entire market, and all of the competing companies benefit.
This creates few interesting side-effects.
* One a ginormous ecosystem of basic parts and components that are basically common between all competitors in a market (looks at the LiDAR units of robot vacs). This drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players, it’s easy for them to get access to everything they need to build a “good enough” product, without having to do much R&D themselves.
* Two, it forces all companies to innovate and developer technology continuously. There is no state enforced monopoly for IP, so companies can only maintain an edge by innovating and advancing faster than their competitors at all time.
* Three, it’s makes a failure to constantly innovate an absolute death sentence for a company. Not just because they loose their edge, but because it takes time to rebuild the R&D skills needed to innovate as fast as their competitors. Once you start falling behind, you can never catch up, there is no space to financialise a company and sweat its assets. It’ll be dead before you got any return.
All this creates huge problems for companies like Roomba. They developed so very cool tech early on, but stopped innovating as fast, thinking they had a strong edge over any of their competitors, and solid IP moat. Unfortunately once Chinese companies caught up, and figured out how to get around their moat, its was impossible for Roomba defend against these new competitors. They were able to innovate orders of magnitude faster, because the environment that created meant only the fastest innovating companies could survive, they had huge momentum, and also a huge common core of shared components that had driven the cost of a basic robot vac to well under anything iRobot could achieve.
The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well.
I've owned a few 3d printers, including a kit printer, and the Bambu doesn't have any tech that other printers don't. They just always work well, and are easy to maintain.
Others are finally catching up, though. Snapmaker really scared them with the U1 (which is getting insane reviews), and Prusa has finally stepped up and started innovating again, too. The Centauri Carbon is another really good entry-level printer as well and it's eating into Bambu's market.
What do you mean they didn't innovative? The H2D and the AMS are new techniques and their latest release is certainly innovative with the 6 extra hotends
The H2D's printer/laser combo was done by Snapmaker before that, and the "2 heads" thing was done numerous times in many different ways before the H2D.
The AMS may not have looked exactly like that, but the same idea was already in place by Prusa at least.
Tool changers are not new, and the way that the extra hotends are held and dispensed was already in use in industrial machines. The "6 extra hotends" thing ... I'm willing to admit that might have been an innovation not yet seen in the 3d printing space, but BondTech announced their INDX before Bambu announced their solution. Both were in R&D for years before that, of course.
But Bambu was big and popular long before their current generation of printers. Only the AMS could be seen to contribute to their popularity, and again, it was because it works so well, not because it was a new idea.
"make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products." according to Oxford.
It's a stretch to me to think that "make it work reliably" is a new idea, and their products and methods were all already done by others, but less reliably.
Chinese companies don't have quarterly financial metrics to report to shareholders, which result in severe punishment if the "growth at all costs" strategy isn't followed. This means chasing quarterly profit over innovation, because it's much easier to milk an asset for as long as possible until suddenly it isn't and you're left behind. But that doesn't matter when the pressure is entirely placed on showing financial growth three months from now. Chinese companies are allowed to strategize for the long term, and receive assistance from the CCP to dominate foreign rivals.
They're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially.
We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years.
I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
You're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker.
The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.
Totally agree on those points too, but I think you're giving US companies too much credit when you say:
> playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years"
5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
Same for drones, and you know why? Because all of these civilian technologies can be easily leveraged for military... so a) they get the good stuff first because they're leading the sector and b) western countries buy their shit instead of making their own, which means we don't develop the tech and we effectively subsidise theirs
Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.
Anybody who played Doom, or Quake, or Counterstrike knows: if you are not moving, you are dead. And if you try to show a counterexample, and say: "Look, I'm not moving, and I'm alive all right", it's an illusion, because the rockets, grenades, nails, and plasma charges that will slay you are already in flight, you are just failing to see them.
Camping is a viable strategy in many Quake levels, and it is problematic to the point that many servers will kill you if you stay in one place for too long.
And if you look at e.g. https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ you can see companies like Dreame and Eufy coming up in the space. It's a really competitive market and these things are getting better at a very fast pace.
I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
There is also another thing where quality Chinese products are very cheap compared to western products. Since Chinese engineers are cheaper, they can live with lower margins on their products.
A roomba was twice as much as a roborock that was better.
Prusa MK4S is 720 EUR, the arguably better Bambu Lab A1 is 260 EUR.
It wasn't labor costs that made the Roomba twice a Roborock, but manufacturing costs. Roomba teardowns basically show that iRobot was just really bad at cost-optimizing their vacuums for mass production.
You can probably maintain your Prusa forever. The Bambu... not so much. It is a philosophy choice here and the 3D printer space is vastly more complex and nuanced for many users than an appliance that has one simple job. Yes if you /just/ want to print stuff and treat it like an appliance as a curious consumer dabbling in the space the Bambu is great. That was never Prusa's target. I don't think the comparison is very strong.
I've been happy with the Roborock but I did not expect it to match the cleaning levels of a human. I can run it while I'm not there or doing other tasks, though, and it does a good enough job until I feel the need to intervene.
When I was looking at getting one, the iRobot one took hours / days to map out a house and it needed the lights on to do that. The Roborock model could do this in 15 to 30 minutes, and it could do it in the dark because it used LiDAR instead of a camera.
That was several years ago now, and iRobot _just_ added LiDAR to their latest models.
I have a Roborock too. It is certainly good at quickly creating a reasonably accurate map, but it just gets stuck so easily. Things like going into an enclosed corner but unable to get out. Or going into a room, cleaning the floor just behind the door such that the door shuts and now unable to leave the room. I certainly cannot run it while not at home. It will just get stuck.
This is the cost of taking too much funding. Roomba could have remained a modest robovac company and continued indefinitely... they still sell millions of units. American corporate leadership in partner with VCs are chasing massive paydays and absolutely wrecking the companies they're running to do it.
Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down?
I've had my Miele vacuum cleaner for 15 years now, and I bought it second hand. I can still buy bags and filters for it, and when the floor roller piece broke (something heavy fell on it) I was able to buy a replacement one for cheap. I see no reason why it can't go another 10 years.
It feels like a very low probability that a robo-cleaner I buy now will come from a company that (in 10+ years) will a) exist and b) support 10+ year old vacuum cleaners.
I used Valetudo on my early Roborock model and it worked great for many years. Unfortunately, the battery gave out and it's somehow DRMed, so even though everything else works fine, the vacuum refuses to work because it doesn't like the new battery.
It's the worst kind of e-waste, it's only waste because someone decided I should buy a whole new vacuum when the battery dies, but Valetudo is otherwise good. Just never try to look for support at all.
Did you look inside the old battery? It may well be just a bunch of 18650 cells with some electronics in a plastic case. Just desolder the old cells and solder on new ones.
I did the same for my wife's cordless vacuum, and it works better than new, because the new cells are about 2x the capacity of the originals.
Luckily, I do happen to know that stuff, so I used the existing board with brand new 18650 cells. Unfortunately, the board seemed to brick itself when it lost power, so the vacuum kept complaining the battery wasn't kosher.
>This is only good advice if you're good at soldering
I meant soldering onto the pre-welded tabs that come with the new cell (unless you have a spot welder). You don't need much soldering experience for that.
>and know details about cells like which ones have in-built protection.
It's highly unlikely that the individual cells would be protected ones. Manufacturers are not stupid to pay N times the cost of a management circuit.
I don't think you'll ever find a battery pack using cells with integrated low-voltage protection, if that's what you're referring to. All that stuff is managed by the BMS.
What you should be on the look-out for is the cell's operating range, continuous and max power. Personally I use buy VT6's in bulk and never think about any of that.
Lets go with the usual reminder: de-soldering / soldering Li-ion cells can be super dangerous. With a bit too much of heat it can fire or even explode...
I mean, if you want to think I broke it, you're free to. The fact remains that my battery connections were correct, the voltages were right, but the vacuum didn't work with either the battery I made or the new one I bought.
It's too bad because it's such a great project otherwise. He puts a ton of free labour into the system and I'm sure he's dealt with some entitled users but it's really a huge reason I don't recommend it to more people. Actively telling people they must learn to solder and making the only support channel on telegram are two big turn-offs for a lot of people.
This is absolutely his right and perhaps his intention to keep the project small, but in that case I wish there was another alternative vacuum firmware project.
For me it's so weird nobody makes a thing you can trust. I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud and the need to do some hacking with valetudo, with an official service and support for the device. Yet nobody is willing to take the money. They'd rather go bankrupt..
> I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud and the need to do some hacking with valetudo, with an official service and support for the device. Yet nobody is willing to take the money. They'd rather go bankrupt..
I feel like you are over estimating market demand based on your own preferences. Been there, done that. Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
The market for privacy focused vacuum robots (at a significant premium) is probably not even going to pay for the injection mould tooling
>Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.. and there's this weird idea of owning thing you were sold, i know - its' a bit weird.
Just like when you go buy some food you don't have to think if it is safe to eat.
>No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.
But that is orthogonal to the goals of many governments, as I'm sure they have access to most of them either by official or unofficial channels/backdoors.
Unfortunately, companies prioritize profits over everything else, and sometimes that is at the expense of what should be the morally right thing to do. They can only be pursuaded against this by regulation, which they're also in a position to influence at their will. To say nothing about the usual government incompetence and tech illiteracy, which is another factor for technology products specifically.
And then you add the point GP was making, which is that regulation only happens when citizens demand it, and it is politically favorable. The extremely low percentage of the market that demands privacy and security, coupled with everything else, means that these things rarely if ever happen.
> Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
Exactly. Everyone I’ve talked to about my own robot vacuum (which is using Valetudo, so not phoning home to China) just kind of shrugs and says “who cares if audio and video inside my house are being piped to China, I don’t do anything interesting, what use would they have for it?” This also applies to other consumer electronics that do similar things.
They just can’t conceptualize that _in aggregate_ all this mundane information can be wielded by bad actors for their own gains. Which is funny, because they certainly have strong opinions about how Facebook et al are being used to push misinformation.
Yeah. The real options are usually: a Chinese device from a company that seems nebulously a little close to their government, imported (so, limited need to follow local safety or privacy regulation); or, a US product from a company with explicit connections to the Google/Facebook/Amazon network, and with a warranty that lasts a whole month (as long as you don’t open the battery hatch).
I don’t know if people would pay 3X for something that actually works in their interest, probably not, but it isn’t as if such a product has been tried in the last ~50 years.
As it is so easy to start a mass production of vacuum cleaners, yes. Give me a week in my garage. TBH I have zero idea where I should go to start a business of such scale even if I have a 100% zero-risk shot which is never the case. Not everybody has an MBA, some of us just code stuff.
For what it's worth I never connected my 5-years-old Xiaomi Mi to the Internet - I just push the button and it starts. A wheel stopped working this year but I bought the replacement and installed it without much fuzz.
As for modern vacuums I have no idea what happens if you never set up their WiFi.
Installing Valetudo stops any firmeware updates forever from the OEM. [1]
I wouldn't consider it a hack. It's an alternative way to run your vacuum, with yes potentially less features if the OEM makes a lot of future updates, but Valetudo also comes with their own set of updates.
Unless you happen to live in a jurisdiction that care more about users than companies, like the EU. The manufacturer would have to prove that the new custom firmware is actually the cause of the damage, otherwise they need to fulfill the warranty guarantee regardless of what firmware you run.
> Good luck proving that changing the firmware is not voiding a warranty.
You're thinking about it the wrong way around. The manufacturer has to prove that the custom firmware is the reason it broke, you don't have to prove anything. Username not accurate.
>Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down?
It depends on what exactly you want. My Roborock can't connect to my Wi-Fi anymore for some unfathomable reason. It no longer runs automatically, and I can't edit its map or tell it where exactly to clean. I just hit the power button once a day to start it manually, and it cleans everything it can access.
My D7 lost its mapping capability (including markerless no go zone) a few weeks ago due to the new owner pulling the plug early on their server. An enthusiast is jerry rigging an offline solution thanks to a vuln in an earlier firmware, but for those unwilling to solder an esp32 to the debug port of their vacuum they essential got a lesser robot overnight.
Lots of modern appliances connect to the Internet, have multiple computers inside that need updates, maintenance, maybe subscription payments, and that need to phone home everything they see, hear and do.
Not buying them means usually having a good understanding what "smart" means, or why having an app as a requirement is silly. The mean consumer has no idea what any of that means, they sometimes even lack the technical vocabulary needed to put into words what annoys them.
You've apparently been off the web and out of stores for over a decade. Home Depot sells a bluetooth-connected shower head (just the head - it doesn't turn the water on). There are smart thermostats that are wifi connected so you can change the temperature of your house from anywhere in the world... for reasons...
You're right, I'm trying hard to practice digital detox as much as I can. Unfortunately, for job and family reasons I cannot give up an internet connection at home, but I have never owned a mobile phone in my life.
It often feels strange when I peak out my head into the real world as it exists today.
I have a roomba i3, it's blocked at the network level, but it is connected to my home assistant instance. It can clean and map rooms but doesn't communicate with the cloud because of the network blocking.
Second this if you are willing to do some mild hardware hacking. I've been running valetudo on two Dreame L10 vacuums for three years without issue. Keeps a lot of the smart features, for use over lan instead of a cloud connection.
I have bought a Dreame L10 Ultra with Valetudo in mind, but I discovered that if you skip connecting it to the internet during the setup process, you can still use it normally. I don’t care about any of the smart features and simply start a full cleaning or a spot cleaning by pressing a hardware button on the robot itself.
Just buy an old Roomba on Ebay. Mine doesn’t even know what the internet is. You push the button and it goes. There is a huge market of cheap aftermarket batteries for it.
I don’t get where the fear mongering is coming from on this. All or nearly all robot vacuums have controls for their various functions on the side. Plenty of robotic vacuums even come with remotes so you can program schedules without a phone/wifi/internet. If you go really cheap you can get decent robots that won’t even let you connect to WiFi if you tried (at least as of a few years ago).
I have eufy 11s. It does a braindead bump-and-run algorithm that uses no computer vision and does not map your room. It's a bit slower, but still does a solid job. Cheap too.
The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table? How much would Charmin pay to know I have two rooms with tiled floors?
What iRobot actually suggested was more mundane: that there could hypothetically exist a protocol for smart devices to share a spatial understanding of the home, and that their existing robot was in a favorable position to provide the map. The CEO talking about it like a business opportunity rather than a feature invited the negative reception.
It didn't help that a few years later, photos collected by development units in paid testers' homes for ML training purposes were leaked by Scale AI annotators (akin to Mechanical Turk workers). This again became "Roomba is filming you in the bathroom" in the mind of the public.
The privacy risk seemed entirely hypothetical—there was no actual consumer harm, only vague speculation about what the harm could be, and to my knowledge the relevant features never even existed. And yet the fear of Alexa having a floorplan of your home could have been great enough to play a role in torpedoing the Amazon acquisition.
> The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table?
I've no idea about rug pile depth, but I'd have thought a simple link between square footage and location would be a reasonable proxy for that affluency.
Not sure that works though for flogging, say, client IP to affluency data to advertisers, unless they can already reliably pinpoint the client IP to an address (which for all I know, maybe they can).
The roombas with cameras don't need an internet connection to work-- they need it if you want the app control features like scheduling. The imagery based navigation is still local.
When I got one in ~2019, I covered the camera and connected it long enough for it to get firmware updates (which annoyingly you can't trigger and it takes a few days)... then I firewalled it off to get no internet access.
I later figured out that if you let it connect and firewall it off it just sits in a tight loop trying to connect again hundreds of times per second which meaningfully depletes the battery faster.
Changing the SSID name so it couldn't connect to the wifi solved the problem.
I'd like to get a new one-- the old one still runs well (with some maintenance, of course) but the latest robot vacuums are obviously better. Unfortunately at least some are more cloud dependent and I can't tell which are and to what degree.
Would the US security leviathan give away other people’s money for highly current floor plans of every residence in the country just on the 1-in-a-million chance they decide to kick in your door and shoot your dog? Probably.
You’re looking at this from a point where the only piece of information about you out there is the data collected by the roomba. In reality, every sensible data broker would just add that signal to your already verbose profile and feed it to a model to determine the stuff you’re likely to buy… or would trigger you to generate engagement or whatever is needed.
The privacy danger here is not the one data point, it’s the unknown amount of other parties who will mix and match it with more data.
With GDPR, I’ve been requesting copies of my telemetry from various corps and it’s amazing the kind of stuff they collect. Did you know kindle records very time you tap on the screen (even outside buttons), in addition to what you read and highlight and pages you spend time on? Now add to that your smart tv’s insights about you and your robot vacuum cleaner … you see now this all grows out of control.
I don't get this, so you're saying than they can and do sell maps of your home to the highest bidder. But... it's actually overblown, even though they're doing exactly what people were concerned they were doing?
It's MY home! I don't want anybody filming it or recording it or selling maps of it. Full stop!
> [iRobot CEO] Angle said iRobot would not sharing data [sic] without its customers' permission, but he expressed confidence most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.
The "sharing data" here meant sharing data with other brands' smart home devices but appears misinterpreted as "sharing data with advertisers/data brokers/etc." Say Sonos wanted to make a hi-fi system that optimized audio to your room layout based on Roomba's map.
Upon careful re-reading of the article, I think what the CEO was saying was that they were pursuing becoming the spatial backend for Alexa / Google Home / HomeKit, but the journalist wrote Amazon / Google / Apple, which makes it seem more about advertising data collection than about smart home technology.
(Evidence that this is the correct interpretation: Facebook, despite being a giant data harvesting and advertising operation, was not listed as a potential partner, because they do not have a smart home platform.)
If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline.
It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily customize routes or focus on specific rooms; do a shockingly good job at self-emptying; and best of all you don't have to rescue them from the exact same sliding door track every single time you run them.
I read a story about Dreame. The founder worked in aerospace, but wanted to make a mass-produced motor with aerospace standards. So he modelled air flow using aerospace tools, built the motor to tight tolerances. Conventional vacuum motors run at 30k rpm, his runs at 100k rpm. Then he standardises on a single motor, for all his devices, robovacs, stick vacs etc, so he gets scale.
Dont be. Source: tried roborock and dream. They are both useless because you spend so much time troubleshooting it dealing with stuck issues you may as well get the cheap vac out.
Datapoint: I've used my Roborock s7 max ultra in three different households (2 houses, 1 apartment) and have had zero issues with this.
It actually was night and day compared to the $1000 equivalent roomba I had at the time. lidar is the game changer in this space, and roomba was complacent with their technology.
I've had a few issues, but they're far from useless. The issues are, e.g. a sofa has tapered legs so the end part is very low to the floor and basically invisible so the vacuum gets stuck there. I've placed a rag that stays there above the leg and nobody sees it or cares except the robot.
I had a Roomba+Braava Jet for a few years and I constantly had some issues with both devices, but the worst part was that in theory they should be working well together. There's this function "linked cleaning" where Braava mops the floor right after Roomba finishes vacuuming. But in practice it often didn't work, either the automation didn't trigger, or Roomba got stuck somewhere, cancelled the cleaning, and then Braava started mopping floor that hadn't been vacuumed.
Eventually I moved to Roborock with vacuum+mop in a single device. It still has its issues, but it is ten times better. It's able to lift the mop on the carpet, the mop is self-cleaning, and it has a large tank so that I only have to refill the water once a week instead of every other day. Day and night. Roomba eventually introduced a similar model, but it's been years after competitors had them.
Just out of curiosity as I don't own a vacuum robot: do yo loose any key functionality by rooting your device with Valetudo, compared to what the manufacturer offers?
Yes, they put that on their website. That if you are looking for features, stick with the original firmware. Valetudo is for privacy. That being said, they still support most of the features and honestly I don't miss anything.
I have a second-hand "dumb Eufy" and it's great. No cameras, no microphone, no Wi-Fi, no app, no calling home to mommy. It just spins, sucks and bangs (gently) around my house and I don't get mad when it gets stuck. It cleans under things I can't reach easily with a vacuum, and it cost me almost nothing.
Absolutely. I bought a new Roomba after my old one died and was surpised to learn it's basically unchanged and still just as stupid as the old one. Returned it, got a Dreame X40. Much better, night and day difference.
Currently looking to make my living space robot friendly, I wonder: can they clean hard to reach spots behind doors or under the ledge of a sofa (I can't remove every obstacle)?
Robovacs aren't a drop-in replacement for a maid, they aren't a fire and forget cleaning solution for a house that's already dirty and messy or have constant spills and stuff left on the floor, but more for regular maintenance of an orderly place that still gets cleaned or maintained in the tough to reach places every now and then.
But if your place resembles a crack house, a robovac won't magically clean it.
Doors no, couch yes (if it fits). I wouldn’t get one unless you see value in having 80% of your home vacuumed once a day. For me that’s still a huge improvement and spending a few minutes spot vacuuming every two weeks or so is all I need to handle the corner cases.
Such a good point. Vacuum wars website has no way to filter out vacuums without mop (my house is mostly carpet, I do want a good product but they are all with mops nowadays).
It's such a common issue with sites like this. It's either all products or products WITH this feature. No way to find products WITHOUT this feature.
Anyway quite happy with my Mova which is a rebranded Dreame.
my house is actually mostly tiles/hardwood (at least areas that are accessible for roomba). but i want it just to be vacuumed.
polished tiles will always have some water marks after washing and require pass with floor buffer to buff it out. i also don't want to deal with with clean/dirty water (yeah, i know that are now few models that you can hookup to drain/water supply. but it's not exactly trivial to arrange in convenient way).
what i really want, is dock integrated with central vacuum.
i bypassed this specific problem by getting dogs that don't shed (frankly, i shed more than both of them).
i contemplated getting spare dock for my roomba and modding it. but one thing I didn't figure out yet it's a how to close opening into central vacuum piping when it's not actively engaged. probably possible to do something with servos/etc, but it feels like too complicated/messy
You fix this by doing a cycle of vacuuming first. Robots allow you to clean frequently to prevent large buildups. It's the same as if you were cleaning by hand. I have tiles as well and no dirty water marks.
i have robot running daily. it will never pick up 100% of everything. because if it would have picked up 100% there would be no need in mopping.
when i did robot shopping year ago, based on reviews and feedback it (vacuum before mopping) doesn't always work and the more polished your floor is, the worst the outcome
No, mopping is not for dust, but rather for sweaty/greasy/sticky matter that accumulates and can't be recovered by vacuuming. This is why proper cleaning is vacuuming + mopping, and it was like this before the invention of the cleaning robot.
You can also mix a non-foaming detergent with the distilled water to have an even more thorough cleaning (or just ask the robot to pass more than once). Robot mops are typically rougher to compensate for the lack of detergent, though.
It's the same for professional car cleaning - it's done with distilled water. If what you said was true, it would be impossible to clean cars as they are much more polished than tiles.
so it's going back to square 1: sweaty/grease/sticky matter not going to be picked up 100% by mop after it was diluted by water. distilled water or not distilled water.
this is why floor buffers exist. to buff the floor so it will be nice and shiny.
professional car cleaning usually made with deionized water. much easier than bringing distillery. but even with usual water on my car there will be usually no marks after wiping it with towel.
Where is Lina Khan who struck down the acquisition? Read the comments from the FTC. That was from less than two years ago. I am all for antitrust but Lina Khan was inept as they come in terms actually dealing with anti competitiveness in the tech.
This is called dumping. Long-term dumping but it is what it is.
They struck it down because they said it hurts competitiveness based on faulty economic arguments. It was clear even two years ago that the market was extremely competitive with much cheaper iRobot copies. Lina Khan just didn’t want Amazon to save an American company. Plain and simple. Anybody in the robotics field in MA could have told you iRobot was struggling and that Amazon was throwing them a bone to keep those engineers afloat.
People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service).
If you were happy with your Roomba you could keep it running for many many years. You only needed to buy a new Roomba if you wanted new features.
Thanks to the full Chinese supply chain, you can replace every single part of the roborock. Even if Roborock doesn’t sell it directly, someone does. I’ve owned a couple and I haven’t had any main board die. But you can buy anything from the wheels, to main board, to lidar online.
I liked how you could buy an official Roomba spare parts kit, though.
In a mechanical device meant for messy places, parts necessarily wear out quicker than in most electronics, and being able to buy and swap out the parts easily seemed like a nice feature.
Aside from having parts available, I was unexpectedly impressed that my RoboRock self-emptying dock (c. 2023) was clearly designed for painless serviceability. The ducts are easily accessed via removable panels, and you need only a Phillips screwdriver.
That said, the performance of the robot certainly degraded over time, and I haven't identified the cause to my satisfaction. Obstacle avoidance needs work (especially for charging cables left dangling off the couch), and the map is frustrating to edit and seems to degenerate over a 6 month period.
I’ve repaired a eufy vacuum without issue, pretty easy to find repair parts as others have mentioned. I replaced a wheel assembly that wasn’t working quite right.
Repair shops will refuse to look at them outright; pretty frustrating they wouldn’t take my money and I had to do it myself. But I think that was categorical for all robot vacuums.
In general though, robot vacuums as a category are improving so quickly I doubt repair is the right options many times. A 10-year-old (or even 3-year-old, because they were always so behind) Roomba is almost like running a 10 year old Intel Mac in 2025.
This was the main reason I bought a Roomba last year. It wasn't clear to me that any competitor could match their repairability and availability of parts.
>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.
Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.
Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
Because that's always the case at the beginning, the country doesn't matter. It takes time to learn and improve. People look at the first or second generation models, get complacent and then they are surprised that by the third or fourth generation those remote countries start to innovate and sell better and cheaper products.
It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably.
By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.
> I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.
THe Chinese seem to be extremely good at taking western products and just layering on tons of incremental improvements, which make their versions that much better. It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
Well, allow me to make a suggestion, that the US came up with the original idea, in 1947 - the transistor, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Similar to how Germany had been capitalizing on the invention of combustion engine and various chemical processes for a century. Now, the curve of innovation on top of the fundamental invention (of the transistor) is in the flattening out region, where all the low hanging fruits had been taken down, and now it's about the remaining 5% of polishing - something that the labor force of well fed and comfortable nation is not really motivated to do.
> It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
I think that's a dangerous assumption to make. Certainly it's true that for most major technologies so far, western countries were first - but that's probably mainly because China's been busy playing catch up. But now the Chinese have huge numbers of factories, suppliers big and small, machine shops, PCB fabs and experienced engineers. You really think they're not coming up with original ideas?
Any engineer will tell you a new product is a little bit of idea and a lot of execution. The Chinese are able to execute in a way that the west isn't any more.
That's a generalization with some truth, but in this case it was blatantly obvious that iRobot was not putting much effort into improvement - or was not effective at improvement. They basically ignored the moat and relied on their headstart to the point that even brand new entrants to the market could equal or overtake them in an initial product offering.
And the business model aspects they relied on for their protective moat - e.g. mass commercial electronic production - was generalized and massively optimized in China (not just for vacuum robots but mass commercial electronics).
It's not just marketing, iRobot basically stopped innovating. For commodity items like robot vacuums or pool cleaners, there is a relentless pressure to innovate. You can't simply coast or else you will soon find yourself left behind.
Vorwerk makes really good hardware and home appliances. Its only negative part is the almost pyramidal sales style. It's not really pyramidal as in the scam, because you actually buy something and you don't need to become a seller, but it uses "regular housewives" [1] as sellers.
[1] at least 30 years ago, now many of them do also another paid work (not Vorwerk-related) on top of unpaid house chores.
Well, I don't know how much you can innovate in that space, while keeping things reliable for decades like Vorwerk does. I own a (2n hand) TM31 that's probably 15 years old now, and I have friend with the TM21 (I guess?) which is like the first version and it has over 20 years now and it's still perfectly working.
Last versions, with big LC touchscreen, recipes on a cartridge o downloaded from Internet, and now I read that latest one can reach 160C to caramelize things or can do slow cooking.
I mean, I don't feel like they sat on the product, although the other day I saw a cooking robot from some other (japanese?) manufacturer which had 2 bowls in the same machine to cook 2 things at the same time. That seems an interesting feature Thermomix is missing.
Not all innovation or value offerings are technical, though admittedly it's what first drew me in.
Example: I buy an iPhone over the competition because it's a superior experience. Their walled-garden (RIP) made for a less appealing attack vector than Android, their commitment to privacy is real (a reflection of Tim Cook), and how they as a company project those values against government entities are all positives.
Before then, I never imagined buying Apple products; and always believed they were overpriced (in many respects, yes) but there are other harder-to-quantify benefits.
There is not much tech to steal here. 2D lidar mapping is something a high schooler could do 10+ years ago, and that was their core tech. The value was in executing earlier and better, and applying existing tech to robovacuums. If they could have sued they likely would, this is a valuable market.
There is not that much more to it than lidar and 2D slam as far as the core technology. There are a lot more features yes but they are not nearly as valuable. I agree they are better, but that's for reason of execution and non-enshitiffication, not core tech.
Unintentional I’m sure, but that’s a goalpost shift.
What made cloudless Neato amazing was how many real-life edge cases it handled well. That’s where the innovation was.
It’s the integration of the vacuum and sensors along with great software that allowed it to handle furniture shifts and creeping up to stairs without being confused.
I think of it this way: Tesla’s core tech were batteries and electric motors. Nothing groundbreaking. But integrating the core tech as a vehicle took real effort and trial-and-error; then more, in order to make a manufacturing pipeline.
Sorry if I sound bitter. I fell in love with the product on my first purchase and was mortified when the market utterly failed to reward them for the innovation.
Yeah, this company went through an amazingly bad period. They quite innovating, and also worked really hard to segment their products in a way that would extract every last $ out of the consumer. "Oh you want it not to run into things? You'll need one more step up for another $100-200" It wasn't really based on the hardware, so much as the intentional limitations of the software.
Meanwhile cheap roborocks had no arbitrary limitations and more honest marketing.
I miss the optimism that this company used to have, but I won't miss the entity that they became.
I haven't seen a useful innovation in a robovacuum for at least a decade. What are you talking about?
Biggest issue has been the flood of cheap chinese units on the market - like GoPro, they had nowhere to go, and got beat on price once feature parity was achieved (which didn't take that long).
Emptying into the dock instead of having to empty the robot's dustbin weekly and almost everything involving mopping in combined units is within that time range. Lidar mapping was also pretty rare a decade ago, Neato was the first and it took a while before others did it too, then there was apps for controlling no-go zones using those maps instead of variations of virtual walls, if they had anything like that at all.
Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.
The roller mop vacuum are getting incredibly good; that is in the last year also.
Just got a Mova z60, it's shocking how much progress has been made even in the last 5 years compared to my old lidar Roborock. The z60 can even hurdle over small barriers.
How many general public appliance makers out there have a competitive production line outside of China ?
As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.
On Miele, they sure seem to make a sizeable effort to keep as much as they can in Germany, including the motors, electronics etc.
They seem to expand vacuum cleaner factories in China as well, but it could be the best of both world with a company dedicated to push the local ecosystem as much as they can, and go beyond when absolutely needed.
Don't know about the US. From what I can tell Samsung and LG appliances are certainly less common in Europe than the European brands (there's also cheaper brands like Beko or Gorenje).
The German luxury brands have made the "made in Germany" shtick a core part of their marketing. So Miele, Gaggenau, Vorwerk, ect.
Bosch/Siemens are far larger than those, but they outsourced a lot. But even here, significant parts of the higher-end stuff is still made outside China.
I was rather happy with my old, dumb Roomba. It just bounced around until things were clean. No cloud required. No mapping. No AI marketing foo. Seems like all the newer alternatives want internet access and send maps of your premises to some cloud somewhere. Seems completely unnecessary to me.
Roomba couldn’t remember map, so when you wanted to clean part of the apartment you had to build barriers or just walk with it. It also got lost way too many times.
As for the Chinese products - look at Valetudo. If you write about cloud and privacy considerations then you are already aware enough to just flash it and you have local, cloud-free, GREAT product.
I still have one like that, and it runs mostly fine, but is partly held together by duct tape these days. Not replacing it as long as I can keep it running.
Especially considering that story some year ago about photos taken by Roombas that had been uploaded to the cloud and leaked.
Are you implying that internet access is required in order to have "smart nagivation" and obstacle detection? If so, could you clarify what you think the connection is?
No, I'm implying mapping is useful. I'm certain you can have local only mapping. But OP seemed to put the mapping as well as the rest of the features in the "unnecessary" bucket and my problem is that I consider mapping super necessy.
Maybe mapping is very useful to you. The lack of it hasn't bothered me in the slightest. You also don't need mapping (or internet access) for obstacle detection. But I find that the old dumb roomba's bumpy nature is a good motivator to keep my place somewhat free of obstacles, which has other benefits.
I like being able to tap my phone a couple times and tell it to clean out e.g. the area around my cat's toilet, or my kitchen floor after I spill something, etc...
You can still find ones that don't need to be registered online and will work without WLAN or app. They will not remember the room layouts and you won't be able to lay virtual fences, but apart from that they work fine.
I wonder what happens to the app and cloud functionality.
> Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganized company. The company’s common stock will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan.
I had a roomba i5 fully stop working earlier this year. It said it couldn't connect to the internet but I believe what it meant was "some aspect of the remote server has decayed to the point that it no longer works with this platform". I threw it in the trash, vowed to never let this happen again, and got a valetudo machine.
I think the lights have been off for some time already.
This is surprising to me because not long ago I bought a Roomba i5 specifically because it was one of the few robot vacuums that could still work fully off-line (in the "just vacuum everything reachable" mode, but I don't need anything else).
We moved this year and couldn't get my old(ish) Roomba i5 to work in my new wifi easily. I've been meaning to debug the problem further, but if it can be confirmed that it's an iRobot issue and there's nothing I can do, it would save some effort.
It sucks, though, that I can use my fucking vacuum cleaner because a remote server of the manufacturer has decayed. Does anyone know if there are robotic vacuums that work fully locally without remote servers?
I can't give 100% confirmation, but it was working one day and not the next, with no changes to my network along the way.
Yes, it is an absolutely infuriating state of affairs and one could claim we were naive to not see this coming. Needing to be this cynical is the root of crisis of trust. The only thing we can rely on is that everything is a race to the bottom.
That being said, there aren't many commercial offline robot vacuums. I bought a secondhand roborock unit that is on the approved list put out by valetudo. I got one that required some disassembly to flash, which maybe lowers the market price. It's been working great and the home assistant hooks are working. There isn't a company on the planet that is in between me and my robot vacuum now.
I have an i3 controlled by Home Assistant, it is on an "IoT" network without access to the Internet. Works like a charm. The integration allows to start, stop and view information like battery level, area cleaned, issues, etc. No mapping though.
The only caveat is that to associate it with a WiFi network, the legacy app is required. So if the app is pulled from the app stores, it may not be able to connect again after a factory reset. I don't think the pairing requires access to the Internet but it uses a bluetooth protocol that I don't think anyone reverse engineered yet.
Edit: I vaguely remember that mine also stopped working a year or so ago. I factory reset it, re-paired it and it has been working well so far.
As an aside, I will say that municipal waste has antipatterns for responsible waste disposal. Someone could:
A) disassemble their ewaste, remove the battery, look up which of 10 days a year they can drop it off, and pay a $50+ fee
B) quietly put it in their trash
I'll let you guess what most people are actually doing.
Contrast this with car batteries where manufacturers pay for batteries that are not responsibly handled and consumers are incentivized to dispose of them responsibly with a financial carrot. The manufacturer pays for the disposal, passes that cost on to the consumer, and the consumer gets the money back when they responsibly dispose of it.
Honestly, the app has been stagnating and there is a glimmer of hope the new owners will invest in it! For example, myself and many others still cannot access the "Obstacle area review will normally appear here" error, so I have no idea what photos my robot is actually taking of my socks.
I bought a roomba because I associated it with quality. It's crap! I bought a nice mopping model. The cheap one I had before was even better with a simple only-turn-left algorithm. I'm not surprised by this.
Reading the comments, I'm glad the industry is way ahead, and I was just confused. I think I'm gonna sell and get a better one.
About time. They never iterated and made a better product. All of the roombas end up being bump sensor machines, the mapping is garbage. My $200 Roborock has lidar and works flawlessly compared to my roomba I bought 3 years prior for $700. Sure there is a gap on years but the difference is light years apart.
Too late and unless pricing changed too expensive.
I was amazed when I got this Roborock a year ago it was 2-250 on sale via Amazon. Just a vacuum but it has lidar. I remember it mapping the floor and was amazed how well it worked.
I got a Roomba Combo J7+ (auto empty, mopping) a few years back. Spent $700+ on it. A few years into ownership it ran over cat vomit, got it warranty replaced. And then just recently it decided to stop going home — it makes its way to the dock but stops shy of actually charging. I could get some module replaced but it's no longer under warranty, and I really don't want to deal with a dying company.
I've been seeing a lot of ads and talk about Roborock, and ChatGPT highly suggested that I upgrade to a Roborock Qrevo based on my household needs. I just don't want to spend $700+ on a new vac that will brick itself in a few years. Anyone have any recommendations? I see a lot of Roborock recommendations in the comments, but also Dream and Eufy so now I'm just overwhelmed.
My brother has a house that is pretty much custom-made for a robo-vacuum. One level, no transitions, they have pets. And they like it well enough (not an iRobot)--and it still gets tangled up in stuff from time to time.
I have a 2-level house. Even after some house work, one room that probably still has too high a transition. A lot of different surfaces (And I'm not religious with cords and the like.) I'm guessing that my house is a lot more typical of a lot of houses of any size that would justify an iRobot type of device.
Decided a few years ago that a broom vac just made a lot more sense.
I was also dreaming of an opening in a wall where I can brush my dust into and it magically disappears... Since having cordless vacuum I no longer dream about that.
I mean even a plug which would let you plug in an elephant nose - I think that is more cumbersome than the cordless vacuum. I mean having to get that hose and hook it up every time I want to vacuum something? Meh. Easier to pick up the 21th century broom that makes dust disappear when you roll over it.
And manual brooming makes you give n passes over the same place to do the job... juck.
A friend has a robot vac and just puts it in a room, closes the door, and leaves it for a couple of hours. Avoids the issue of worrying about which areas don't have kids' toys around, Lego, cords, etc. Higher touch than is ideal, but if you're already working from home and the kids are at school, it can work.
Depends on your tolerance for filth (not a value judgement). You don't know how messy your enviroment is untih you see a robovac fill cannisters of shit each week. Having baseline for cleaniness helps with allergies. Like everything you can optmize for some big QoL gains, i.e. i basically just whip crumbs from surfaces straight to the floor knowing it'll get picked up. The solution for 2 level homes is 2 robovacs, cheap second hand, going to get disgusting anyways, replace filters and bristles. A few 100 dollars to have 80% clean floors is pretty life changing. Does not replace need for manual vaccing nooks and corners every once in a while.
Definitely, but my experience with Roomba has been that it picks up far less than 80% of the dirt, I'd say more around 50%. I can just use a classic vacuum once a week and actually do a good job, plus not have to worry about a noisy robot pulling cabled stuff of my desk.
Perhaps these Chinese ones actually do a good job?
iRobot hasn't really done anything about that for quite a while so I'm not at all surprised by the headline. Not to mention insane prices for consumables (filters, bristles, etc) - I got Aliexpress replacements at 1/10 of the cost and there's literally no difference in the end result.
TBH after a while I optimized things around robovac, or tidiness levels. I have hardwood floors, woven carpets, just stuff where vacs pick thing sup very effectively.
I don't know if Chinese ones are any better in terms of performance, suction levels only matter when you're on carpet and then it heavily depends how worn out or well maintained your brush head is which is where cheap consumables start to matter. For me the easy surfaces get 80%+ clean, the harder surfaces get 50% but even with very highend vaccuums I can still scrapes tons of hair out with a fur brush. But part of it is also I have a ancient magic high performance furbrush (random plastic junk for 30 years ago) that somehow digs out more fur than any other brush.
Probably fair. I have a pretty high tolerance for both a level of floor droppings and clutter until I pull out my broom vac every week or two. And I do have a housekeeper every 3-4 weeks to do a deeper cleaning--a lot of which wouldn't be handled by a robovac.
Seems like could be a good solution to using best rated (chinese) vacuum's while mitigating privacy concerns.
I am bummed that US robovacs aren't that competitive. Rooting for Matic, though currently don't seem to be as good as Dreame / roborocks [1] (can't go under furniture, apparently take longer to clean same area, tout "vision only" as a feature while charging more - you would think having fewer sensors / no lidar would bring costs down).
Yup, been using it on an older roborock s5 for several years now. It's excellent and works flawlessly with home assistant. Cannot recommend enough. The robot running its own webserver while it cleans my apartment is still so funny to me.
I had a Roomba about 10 years ago. It was OK but required a lot of “handholding” to not run over cords, kids toys, etc. It just was not really worth it to use it in an environment where you can’t keep everything nailed down and off the floor at all times. Relocated it to a basement level where we had much more empty but sill finished space. The cat angrily pooped just outside her litter box and the Roomba ran right over it and shredded them turds all over the floor. Since then it has lived in my mind as the dumbest smart product.
The real problem for me has been that I want something to straighten out my living spaces, not to vacuum the floors. Vacuuming is quick and a good vacuum cleaner (old school bagged kind, not a silly filter one), will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways. But a robot capable of picking up the toys my kids like to leave out, or bringing abandoned coffee mugs to the sink (can you tell I live with multiple adults and children?) would be worth quite a bit to me. A robot capable of washing my dishes and putting away my laundry would be worth more. One capable of preparing meals would be worth more to me than a car.
Of course they would have to be 100% open source with easily replaceable and repairable components, which is where I think most of these types of projects go wrong. I remember seeing the Chefee demo and it was very cool but the main problem is that you aren’t buying a product, you are investing in the idea that the company behind it won’t go belly up in two years and brick your $60,000 chef/cabinet/fridge thing and that it won’t sell itself to e.g. Google which will cram it full of ads and spyware.
That's my experience as well. We got rid of our Roomba because you need to remove pretty much everything from the floor, only for it to spend 20 - 30 minutes vacuuming at incredible volume. Getting the 20 year old Miele vacuum from downstairs, vacuuming and putting it back takes 10 minutes, you just move stuff out the way as you go, and it clears better too.
A robot capable of preparing meals also has a similar hazard matrix to a car.
Absolutely no way I'm having something cloud-connected - with human-body level degrees of freedom and the actuator strength to pick up a knife and chop a carrot - or anything else it might want to chop - in the house.
Plus, anything that smart is connected by definition. It doesn't need wi-fi, it's got eyes. Open-source-ness is somewhat moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.
A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.
Why would the food prep robot be humanoid? There is no reason for that. And my point is that I wouldn't want it to be cloud-connected at all. No reason for that either. I don't need it to be intelligent. I need it to have recipe-following, and specific functions like measure(), chop(), dice(), grate(), mix(), etc.
For laundry, have you considered that not everything is a T-shirt? Suits, socks, onesies, pajamas, sweaters, halter tops, lingerie, long johns, bedding, etc. And drawers are only suitable storage for some types of clothes. Putting a suit into a drawer is for example a terrible idea.
I was agreeing with you on all accounts but seriously doubt they’ll be open source. I think the average person will barely clock this as mattering, and will pay up. The market has shown time and again that consumers prefer highly integrated environments that work seamlessly vs open source, especially for hardware.
I also agree it’d be worth more to me than my car, and I’d hope much like modern cars such an expensive consumer purchase will end up with similar warranty protections and eventually a third party market for replacement parts.
Much like cars, I’m guessing it’ll be a better idea to go with a large company that’ll be able to honor that warranty without being financially ruined. The first few generations will see lots of experimentation and thus be more risky for the consumer before the market settles out with a few big winners (as is often the case).
I honestly am not sure why hardware startups do not adopt the open source model more frequently. At the very least they could do a software escrow where if they go belly up, the software becomes open source. The point is that it is a huge marketing point that they could use but do not. You are right that if let's say Samsung started selling completely autonomous kitchens then it is less likely that in two years they go belly up. But they also will want to cram it full of ads and spyware. Why can't a hardware startup position themselves against this and keep hammering their marketing with how they are open source and do not want and will not to show you ads or spy on you.
I think the point is that consumers never have a choice in these things so even if they cared, what would be the outcome? For phones, TVs, laptops, cars, if I do care about not just privacy but repairability, what options do I actually have? For phones there are various attempts at libre phones but they are all unusable in some way. Dumb TVs exist and so do open source media players, but something that lets me stream all my video subscription services + local media and does not have some phone home cloud thing built in just doesn't exist at all. Laptops are maybe as close as you can get with things like Framework, etc. and I think this is where I am surprised at the lack of serious marketing. Finally, cars are a complete mess. I have seen one or two open source ECUs but it is so far from plug and play it's not even on the horizon.
Basically, consumers don't care because they aren't choosing between a libre phone and Google Pixel. They are choosing between a Google Pixel and a buggy prototype or a dumb phone.
> will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways.
Running my 1.2kW vacuum for <2 minutes is guaranteed to defeat the roomba from a work capacity standpoint. These products are fundamentally unserious to me.
The big thing for me was that hauling out a canister vac was just a big PITA. But I concluded that a 10 minute job with a broom vac (Dyson) dealt with 80% of the headache (and I had a monthly housekeeper anyway). A robovac just didn't really do anything for me and would have had various issue with cords or random stuff on the floor.
I think anyone getting married with the intent of treating their spouse like a maid is in for a bad time with that whole "70% of marriages end in divorce" statistic.
i watched via camera 12 years ago roomba spreading my dogs diarrhea all over living room (thanks god to tile floors). I connected to camera first time in a months just few seconds before roomba took first swipe over the poop. Still remember feelings of paralysis, despair and lack of control.
Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.
latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".
The camera based object (and poop) avoidance actually works pretty well in my Roomba j7+, bought in 2022.
The cloud-based software for everything else has degraded in quality, tjough. I'll probably upgrade to a lidar-equipped competitor model if this continues to get worse after this bancruptcy.
This is one of the reasons why data collection is such a big problem: companies either sell the data, or they get bought themselves. If you trust a service with your data, all you need to do is wait.
After a long time of being skeptical that a $1300 robot will work well enough, I bought the Eufy X10 for $500 CAD. It's insane to me that this thing sells for so little and yet it works incredibly well and has all the features I'd want. The UX is also really, really good (my full-time job is real-time map UI for robot fleets). What impresses me the most is the maintainance section that has "X hours left" for a dozen things you maintain on the robot. Tap one and it shows you a visual step-by-step for how to perform maintainance on that component. It feels like China will be very hard to compete with.
> At Matic, we believe your data should stay within your home.
> Matic's intelligence is localized on the device, and it never sends any of your data to the cloud for processing. That means no user information is ever sold, shared, or even collected in the first place.
Word to the wise: installing Valetudo can be a nerve wracking task even for the tech savvy. On my model, a Dreame L10s Ultra (there’s about three similarly named models and only this exact one is valetudo compatible, and isn’t sold any more) you are strongly recommended to use a custom pcb and to use Debian to run the commands, and not in a VM. If something goes wrong you can permanently brick your device. I ran into all kinds of esoteric sounding errors, and I half gave up and one point since I was burning valuable free time on evenings and weekends to get it done (busy family with small kids and stressful job). The robot sat unused for several months but I eventually got it done. I’m glad I did it but it was an ordeal.
Not too surprising. iRobot was all into SIFT for 15 years before the patent expired in 2020. Meanwhile, Chinese robot vacuums reverse engineered/stole/copy Neato's XV-11 lidar and made it better over the span of a decade (RIP Neato). iRobot joined the lidar party recently but it was too little too late. Product was too expensive and their brand was soured by the poor VSLAM performance. I had one of their mopping robots during the pandemic and you had to keep the lights on to mop. It would often get really lost if it went under a table. I got rid of it and replaced it with a roborock shortly after.
As far as I can tell cheapish 2D lidar for mapping and robot navigation were a bit earlier than the XV-11; they were made by Hokuyo in 2006. I remember that their lidar module was made by some other (American?) company that in turn competed with Hokuyo, people would take them out and use for their own projects.
It's ultimately not very complicated - it's a laser rangefinder that you spin on a motor. It's such a simple - and old! - technology which would obviously get significantly cheaper with time, it was definitely the right horse to bet on. I never understood iRobot's vision strategy.
I think the XV-11 was the first affordable (as in, affordable enough to be part of the COGS and reliable enough to be in a product) for consumers. It helped how there was a cult like following (understandably so) and everything got reversed engineered from schematic to firmware. By principle, a lidar is simple but most things are. The hard part is how to make a product out of it. One of the main things Chinese suppliers improved on 2D LiDAR is having the laser portion completely wireless. Induction powered, and LED light pipe for data communication. This removes the need for the slip ring which wears out and is hard to package.
So the FTC blocked Amazon's acquisition of iRobot in January 2024 and now China gains control of the assests for a bargain? Another stupid application of antitrust.
To all those making catastrophical scenarios, how would a Chinese entity start streaming data from your robot cleaner and, more importantly, how will this be a security breach at your home or worse, nation?
A comment like this belies a complete lack of imagination. Having a view inside the house of anyone remotely in power can be used in all kinds of ways ranging from espionage to simple blackmail. A video of infidelity, large purchases, guest lists at your domicile etc. can be catastrophic for someone that wants something from you.
In home automation circles, Roomba is generally regarded as worse than other brands.
Anyone know which brands work when you completely block internet access? I think Roborock is one of the better regarded robot vacuums, but I think I read that they shut down when they can't phone home.. maybe Dreame?
This is a shame. Unsure about later models, but my Roomba 620 is eminently repairable. Just last weekend I replaced the wheels with some original (from iRobot).
It'll still be going in another 10 years, but the AliExpress sourced parts are never of the same quality.
It was bound to happen. I had bought two different robo vaccums at two different times (in 2022[irobot], then 2025[eufy], both upwards of $400) - they both were pretty terrible and I ended up returning both of them. I can't believe people are still using these things. They get stuck when there is no reason to get stuck, they miss dirt that should be picked up.
I got a cheap Chinese one (no camera, wifi) in 2024 and it's been a game changer. Yeah it's kind of dumb but it runs every day and picks up an unholy amount of dust, cat hair, and the like. Maybe if you were already vacuuming every day they're pretty useless but for me it's been night and day. As another commenter said, they're also surprisingly repairable, and I bought a ton of spare parts before the tariffs went in.
As a friend described the first generation: they're way worse than hand vacuuming, but way better than not vacuuming. So they're really only valuable for people who don't enjoy cleaning and don't have servants clean for them.
The only ones worth getting have Lidar. I've had a 'random path' one before and it was like you described. My Lidar one runs every day with only a rare issue when I leave a cord strung across the floor or similar.
That's what I thought and hence I bought the eufy model with a lidar; I also thought maybe the technology in 2025 is more mature but it wasn't the case. It would complain about obstacles even thought there was nothing on the ground. Maybe I was unlucky both the times but I am just way more satisfied when I clean the house with my $100 hand held vaccum haha.
"[..] the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into the merger. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and several Democrats in the House of Representatives sent a letter to then-FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying "the FTC should use its authority to oppose the Amazon–iRobot transaction."" [0]
Thanks, I guess? Better to let China buy the husk than evil Amazon, right.
How bad were they doing? I thought this is a good time to be in robotics and was actually thinking roomba could be the big beneficiary in the new AI personal robot craze. Very surprising to see they filed for bankruptcy, could they have not just raised private equity with some ai buzzwords?
>A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns.
I never understood why the US objected to this. Amazon was not in that business.
But you see acquisitions like Paramount that will eventually turn US media into a near monopoly with probably 2 or 3 players. Now we have a fight over who will pick up WB, I am sure who ever wins the fight will have the merger approved. But Amazon, denied.
FWIW, I have no love for Amazon, but they were not trying to buy a company like Walmart which will be far worse then buying iRobot.
Do you have a source to back this up or you're just assuming? So far I've only seen FTC statements on this and they wouldn't have been too pleased with the merger.
"Amazon's proposed acquisition of iRobot has no path to regulatory approval in the European Union, preventing Amazon and iRobot from moving forward together—a loss for consumers, competition, and innovation."
One more proof that you need real industrial policy, not just 'let the market handle it'. Otherwise you end up as a consumer of products designed and manufactured somewhere else.
The good thing is that China has proven that there is a way to turn not-industrial country into industrial one. So there is a blueprint for that.
It really is amazing that we keep letting our main geopolitical rival buy up our companies.
The "shareholder value == societal benefit" mind virus is easily the worst thing to come out of higher American academia in the last hundred years, and that's saying something.
I bought a Roomba around 2006. It died within a month. Never bought again. Today I'd need to assume it would serve as a surveillance tool by the Chinese gov, or other bad actors, and so would also never buy one.
iRobot’s largest creditor isn’t its Chinese supplier. It’s the US government, in the form of unpaid tariffs, some $3.5 million. Arguably it was Trump’s stupid tariffs that drove the company out of business. Rather than bringing manufacturing to the US, it allowed the Chinese to acquire an American company, leaving production right where it is.
The problem is that all are quite tall which is a problem with some older sofas etc. Samsung did one "slim" model I think some time ago, but not sure if you can still buy it.
iRobot's failure is that they made a bet to use CV instead of Lidar for their mapping robots for a long time until it was too late. That made their affordable, non-mapping robots far far worse than only slightly higher priced lidar robots, while their mapping robots were too expensive for mass appeal and were still worse at navigation than up-market lidar based robots. Ultimately they were simply outcompeted.
Neato, which had a robot vacuum with LIDAR, shut down in 2023. That's not the key problem.
Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It's short range compared to the inter-camera distance. Vehicle object ranging at distance is much tougher and can be fooled.
> Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum.
It could be, but it just is not. VSLAM robots were practically significant worse. There are a lot of limitations to multi-ocular vision for a robot vacuum, for example the relatively featureless walls and few features across the horizontal binocular axis.
Neato was never as big as iRobot. They didn't fail from commanding heights, they never were that successful to begin with, for entirely different reasons. If they had managed to get to iRobot's level of ubiquity and distribution they would have had a much better shot of still being around nowadays.
Right. The cheap solution to that is projecting a pattern of IR dots on the walls to give them some features. One version of Microsoft's Kinect did that.
Another success for EU antitrust law. By blocking an acquisition, they have allowed a bankruptcy purchase by a Chinese firm so that the market is between a few Chinese firms.
In one of the articles, they said Roomba were greatly affected by tariffs. Well, this company has been in business for a long time and should have figured out how to build roomba in the US, that would have been great innovation.
But like most US corp, they only cared about profits and stock price.
I'm not a fan of big coorps either, but these changes happened gradually over time, starting way back in probably the 50/60s. The blame is with the companies and the US government back then for allowing this critical knowledge to be lost. But Roomba didn't exist back then, and the problem is bigger than a single company.
The only real solution is for the US government to invest heavily in regaining this capability for the coming 25 years. But doge and trump axed any chance of this happening so though luck i guess.
Until this administration there was no mandate to move manufacturing home, and importantly why would any company forgo significant profit to match an ideological framework, unless the ideology is what they sell or market?
https://archive.ph/7DyNA
According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a]
Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too.
The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots already inside people's homes and offices.
More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.
---
[a] https://www.ft.com/content/239d4720-aee4-443d-a761-1bd8bb1a1...
Our household (and I suspect many with us) bought a Roomba specifically to not give the Chinese government a roving camera in our home. Ouch!
This!
I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced.
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I guess Rodney Brooks got busy with other interests, and whomever ran things didn't realize that Tim Ferris is full of shit.
It was extremely frustrating to watch these assholes destroy the company right from the outset. All they needed to do, was to slowly walk forward and iterate with improvements.
The only surprise in this news is that it took SO LONG for them to dismantle the company.
I do not think it's appropriate for an organization holding this much deeply personal data can be sold to any foreign entity.
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.
So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.
But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.
I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors.
I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project.
In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.
> I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that:
* is well designed
* can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing
* prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability
* uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit
If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
> If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
Isn't it more like "if society has time to think about and can afford those qualities"?
If most folks out there have limited finances (CoL-relative, of course) and are just scrapping by, they'll buy the cheapest thing out there that just does the job (vacuums) and tend to ignore any extra luxuries, even if those would be more economically advantageous long-term (repairs/maintenance part of the TCO). That's simply because of the focus - it's more on the account balance, due bills and next paycheck, than on the implications for a more distant future. Crazy volatility and all the global rollercoasters like pandemics, wars, and all the crazy politicians around the world doesn't help regular folks' sensible decision-making at all, of course. The more stressed one is, the less rational they act.
People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.
>People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.
The focus, thanks to years of advertising, is shifted towards features, new features sell, quality doesn’t, so to keep the price point and “innovate” manufacturers need to lower the quality knowing that a new version will replace the device soon, most consumers see this as normal so when a poorly designed and cheaply made thing for what there’s no replacement parts , no repair info, no software/ firmware fails is just an excuse to purchase the new shiny iteration with all the the bells and whistles (and AI!, copilot toaster!) wich is gonna last les than the previous one but now needs an “app” an activation and a subscription for the premium features .
Having done the hardware game, it's not so much the clones that get you, it's the VCs/shareholders.
You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.
Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.
So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.
You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.
I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.
> So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.
Or - turn it into a subscription.
This isn't unique to China, it's just the nature of modern manufacturing. The only reason China stands out is because we offshored our manu there, so it's where we see it happen.
I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products.
The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US.
But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.
Isn't that basically the reason patents exist? If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.
No-name chinese cloners selling on Amazon don't care about patents.
While those patents are not enforceable in China (unless equivalents were also filed in China -- unsure if they would be worth much) they would be when imported to the US. This is one of the reasons the ITC exists, and it played a prominent role during the smartphone patent wars. So at least the US market would be protected from knock-offs.
The smartphone wars were fought among tech giants, not capital intensive hardware startups. The problem with patents is that you need to already be financially successful enough to file them, able to pay to protect them in court, and can float your company's operating costs long enough to see them enforced and rewarded, which may take years.
Yes and no -- filing patents is quite affordable (probably outdated info, but I recall average costs for drafting and filing was ~10K / patent, most of the costs being related to the drafting rather than filing.) Compared to all the other capital investments required for hardware startups, these costs are negligible.
But you're totally right that enforcing them is extremely expensive, slow and risky.
That said, Roomba isn't exactly a startup but wasn't a tech giant either, and did enforce their patents often.
And especially against imported infringing products, the ITC provides a much cheaper, faster mechanism to get protection via injunctions.
In theory, sure. In practice? Chinese companies ignore your patent, you waste money suing, it takes a long time.
If you win? Good luck collecting damages from China, and have fun suing the next brand that starts selling the same machine in different plastic
That's why the ITC is so relevant here: it is relatively quite speedy compared to regular patent trials, and have the power to issue injunctions against imports (which is partly why it was relied on a lot during the smartphone patent wars.) So you may not collect damages from Chinese companies, but you can completely block their infringing imports into the US and deny them US revenue.
Why isn't Amazon liable?
> If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.
That's an opinion, and not one I agree with.
If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades.
Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example.
It's asinine to think you can outsource manufacturing of whatever object to some other company in another country, but that no one on the planet can make the same thing because "the idea is yours".
> Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire.
What happens at expiration is an important and intended feature of patents. They trade a legally guaranteed headstart against the requirement of publishing your methods for your competitors to learn from.
Oh, I know.
The fact that it takes decades for that to come about is harmful to society.
You would prefer the inventor to be basically ensured of financial destruction and disincentivized in the first place, sounds great for society.
Skill issue. That just sounds like you're bad at inventing things and running businesses.
Lots of places sell unique/novel things that are not patented, successfullyn
I agree. I'd assume that's a holdover from a time when innovation moved slower.
Coasting on their patents is exactly why iRobot went bankrupt. If they had a proper incentive to continue innovating, they might be around today. Instead, the patent system incentivized them to erect a tollgate and snooze away in the booth next to it.
US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government.
Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA?
People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
>Who is the Chinese Intel?
Zhaoxin makes X86 and countless make ARM and RiscV chips. SMIC being a foundry.
> The Chinese Microsoft?
Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance.
>The Chinese Boeing?
Comac makes passenger and Chengdu fighter jets.
>The Chinese NVIDIA?
Huawei makes AI GPUs.
>People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world
Considering the US never had its industry blown up in any war and could reap the benefits of 150+ years worth of stability, higher education, skilled immigration, compounding wealth, and taking over the vacuum and brains of Europe's post-war industrial powers, that's not really something THAT impressive.
>and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
If it isn't halfway trying, why does it feel the need to sanction or ban chinese competitors?
There's a nice list of substandard products.
Clip this comment and let's check back in 10 years.
Germans also said the same thing about Chinese EVs in 2014. They ain't laughing now, especially in Dresden.
If it isn't halfway trying, why does it feel the need to sanction or ban chinese competitors?
Because it's easier than actually trying, as witnessed by this very story.
>> US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government.
> Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA?
Where are the new ones?
Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing.
> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.
All of those have government subsidies, we just call them national security contracts.
> The Chinese Boeing?
There isn't one.
AVIC owns Xi'an and Chengdu, who make large commercial aircraft and light bizjets, but they're in no way comparable to Boeing.
Unlike Boeing, they actually care about worker's rights, and product safety.
> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world
Manufacturer of what, exactly, though?
What do you export? What do you sell?
Food? Nope, illegal in most of the world.
Cars? Nope, uncompetitive in most of the world. "High end" American cars lack even basic features fitted to poverty-spec cars in the EU, like heated windscreens.
Computers? I'm typing this on a computer assembled in Scotland onto a Latvian-made chassis using a Chinese-made motherboard populated with Korean memory chips and an Israeli microprocessor.
What does the US actually make and sell, any more?
> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Isn't this why patents exist?
Yes, but China or one of the many other countries that don't respect US patents could care less.
How does your theory account for Dyson?
A lot of Dyson products are wildly overpriced and kind of shit, but people keep buying them because they look pretty.
Some are also quite good. I’ve rescued and revived over 6 Dyson hand helds. Almost all still work well.
There’s also a good after market ecosystem and 3D models you and print for various attachments.
I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
The real whole shtick is run economy in closed cycle to keep currency weak. Or the good old 1930s trade bloc economy. They're not just good at optimizing costs, they charge appropriately in CNY and inappropriately in USD. Workers don't care about obscene undervaluation in USD so long that they have bacon on the table after few hours of work.
It's not that rare that Chinese products are sold below cumulative costs of Western equivalent products and services, let alone prices. Chinese(<-substitute this with appropriate East Asian nations past and future) economy just isn't coupled well with the rest of the world that USD converted cost calculations would work. This in economic theories is sometimes explained as exports of starvation and/or overproduction, but IMO that make less sense when they've been doing it at scale of multiple decades.
The craziest example of these is Chinese PCB prototyping services: as cheap as $2 per 5 pieces with $5 extra for complete assembly and $15 shipping. $5 each would be darn cheap in the rest of the world, even $50 each for the board and $150 per assembly work would not be so absurd. There's just no competing that.
E.g. Tesla:
At this point, isn't Tesla another example of Chinese companies taking a product and making a better, cheaper version?
A lot of Chinese EVs are much better and cheaper than the Cybertruck.
To be fair, a lot of Tesla's own models are better and cheaper than the Cybertruck.
Also relied on government subsidies until recently.
Seems like a pretty good investment. Leading EV company and 1tn +. Lots of white collar jobs.
Great point, and to drive it home -- TSLA is the only competitive non-Chinese company in the EV space. You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms, considering the whole U.S.-Taiwan stranglehold on chip mfg
> You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms
Except it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.
Tesla was very popular in the Chinese market and globally, including in markets where Chinese EVs aren't banned, until literally this year, which I'd argue is due in part to the trade war.
> I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
I think there are a lot of different reasons:
1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll even throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.
2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US anymore.
3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.
>I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.
Just post your ideas to crowdsource websites and wait for the aliexpress clone to appear, zero r&d costs, zero dev and manufacturing/qa! That said, Taobao and Ali are so full of bizarre products (transparent rubber domes to be able to type with 5cm long nail extensions), it will be a challenge to stand out
Idk if I’d hold GoPro as an example of a company launching amazing things anymore…
That's the point.
They could improve the design and get people to replace their machines with the improved ones, repeat and repeat.
Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
> Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
Cords suck. So I bought a cordless vacuum, and was able to vacuum more. But I also needed a mop because vacuums don't do well enough on my laminate, stuff still gets stuck on. So I bought a cordless mop, so I could map more. This worked great for awhile but...
But it turns out if I did my vacuuming and mopping every night, I could keep my floor in better condition. I don't have time for that, but a robot from Eufy does and doesn't cost much compared to how much I would benefit from it.
Luddism on HN is a bit weird, but I get it, some people don't see the point of automating these tasks because their lives aren't complicated enough yet (e.g. they don't have kids, or have lots of free time and energy to spend on house work).
I have a Miele canister vacuum. I love it.
My wife bought the Dyson garbage anyway because she can't ignore her instagram feed.
I don't understand how people deal with cords anymore, and basically I've stopped thinking about those for more than a decade now.
Cordless is nice until the batteries won't charge anymore. Or the charger stops working. Or you forgot to charge it and now want to use it. Or the charging connector gets worn and unreliable. Then you have an expensive battery replacement or other repair or (more likely) you just replace the whole device because it was made to be unrepairable, and now you have several pounds of plastic and e-waste to dispose of.
Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.
If the batteries don't work anymore, I buy a new vaccum. My Dyson was last updated in 2020, it is 2025 now, so I think it is working out? The charging dock works great for not forgetting to replace it.
I guess this is how people felt when they moved from wired phones to wireless phones?
> Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.
And dragging the cord around, and having to plug out and re-plug the cord in again because you want to do a different part of the room.
> And dragging the cord around, and having to plug out and re-plug the cord in again because you want to do a different part of the room.
As someone who used to sweep the floor of the family home as a chore, as a child, that makes me smile.
Ya, a broom is easier at that point: no cord. Or you just get a stick vacuum and call the problem done.
I'm also a Miele canister vacuum owner, and everywhere in my house where I vacuum is within range of a wall outlet. When I'm done, the cord retracts into the vacuum so I don't need to wind it or stow it myself. I guess, for me, that takes care of the issue to a great enough extent that I just never saw an advantage that justified the expense?
If you are ok with it, I think that's fine. Cordless to me is a huge productivity boost since I can just pick it up and vacuum whenever. I think most people see it as a huge win, but I haven't conducted a formal poll or anything.
Having a robot do everything is just another step in the convenience direction. It is great if you have expensive floors that you want to maintain on a daily or bi-daily basis.
> They could improve the design and get people to replace their machines with the improved ones, repeat and repeat.
> Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
This strategy has limits, and I think iRobot hit those, and they didn't didn't lower themselves to switch to the second strategy of selling cheap unreliable garbage (at least not before 2019, which was the last time I bought a Roomba).
> The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
I'd dispute this in this case: Roombas may not have solved the vacuuming problem for everyone, but they solved it for me (at least), and they were built pretty well (reliable, modular & reparable design, etc.).
> Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
1. I've got both, and the Roomba works a lot better than not vacuuming with the canister vacuum at all. It doesn't frustrate me, and it took far less time to Roomba-proof my home than vacuuming it every week for a year.
2. I agree with the IP address thing, but I think at only got added when they attempted to "get people to replace their machines with the improved ones." I have a couple of the older models that have no network connection (and had no plans to buy more due to the unnecessary network requirement).
a roomba, in a perfect world where it could avoid cat/dog toys scattered around the living room floor, makes pet ownership much more pleasant
There was a video of a iRobot store employee sweeping up at closing time. I’m not surprised they are bankrupt.
This is my take:
If the EU was concerned enough about Amazon taking them over in early 2024 to block the deal, I'm still concerned about a foreign owner in 2026...
The promise didn't pan out for us. You have to prepare and cordon off the floor, and the unit gets stuck half the time. Somehow it's exactly the right height to get wedged under furniture.
My wife got one to try and automate away the vacuuming. We went through the same thing, and it still needs to be babysit anyways. For the sheer amount of time and frustration of basically all robot vacuums, it has been easier to just get a nice Kenmore upright bagged vacuum and do it yourself anyways (and the results are basically always way nicer).
We've had the Chinese dreame with valetudo (so fully disconnected from the cloud), it works honestly very well. Doesn't get stuck, avoids my son's toys rather effectively and just works. I run it when we leave home. There's honestly no reason why roomba didn't make something equivalent to the dreame, they could have competed with the Chinese manufacturers on feature and by allowing users to easily disconnect from the cloud. They didn't because the company was completely mismanaged and their products barely evolved.
I'm pretty optimistic about biped robots for this. Either you buy or lease one and a cleaning service teleoperates it, or subscribe to a cleaning service that drops it off and teleoperates for a few hours a week. Suppose it could even walk itself to the next customer if close enough.
If a wheeled low-profile vacuum that stays in a room is too hard to deliver, surely we can fix it by making it walk around and grasp a vacuum cleaner and walk between houses.
I remember the "upgrade for pets" option, which... didn't work. After buying the maxed out version I realized that the product simply had a long, long way to go - but iRobot did nothing with it other than launch new segments like "upgrade for vision based mapping" etc.
Rodney Brooks is first and foremost a scientist. I doubt that he had a hand in the operations and planning at Roomba.
Can you explain the Tim Ferris jab, what’s the story there?
Is there a connection between Tim Ferriss and Roomba, or is this just a joke about Brooks having a 4-hour workweek?
They were saying that whoever was running things at Roomba must have been duped by the 4 hour work week bs because nothing was getting done. Specifically whoever took over operations, planning, and product improvements from Brooks.
Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government. The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders (e.g. Meng Wanzhou, Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried, Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom, etc.).
> Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government.
You're making zero sense:
1. I predict there will be no change in the US government's access as a result of this.
2. I don't think Americans are so indifferent to their own country that they'd prefer a situation where an adversary country gets handed an intelligence asset. I mean, hypothetically, would an American prefer US trade policy be set that in a way that disadvantages American workers, because some politician got blackmailed because of something his Roomba recorded?
> The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders
3. The Chinese government has been going after people in the US. They've long been engaged in industrial espionage, but there's also their "overseas police stations" (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65305415). It's worth noting that US citizens can have a Chinese origin, and I doubt the Chinese government would suddenly become uninterested in a dissident once he got naturalized.
I'm not sure how useful of an intelligence asset a map of my house is, or pictures of me in my boxers on a saturday morning. I'm also not sure why you think they weren't already just buying this information from iRobot.
> I'm not sure how useful of an intelligence asset a map of my house is, or pictures of me in my boxers on a saturday morning.
Seriously, who cares about you or your house? Why do you think your personal example is the one to reason from?
iRobot sold 50 million robots, lets conservatively say 10% of those are internet connected and still in service. That's 5 million households. There's probably quite a few people in that 5 million who have something going on that Chinese intelligence is interested in, even things that may affect you personally, if indrectly (if that's what you care about).
Again, I don't know why you think China wasn't already buying that information from iRobot before it went bankrupt.
> Again, I don't know why you think China wasn't already buying that information from iRobot before it went bankrupt.
Come on, do really you think iRobot they sold data like that to third parties? Like user-identified floor plans? Camera images from inside people's homes?
> The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens
Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.
> Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.
When Twitter had its recent VPN reveal, what actually took me by surprise was how many divisive accounts weren't from China or Russia, but from regions of the world like Turkey, India, Africa, and South America. Sure, they could be spouting divisive politics to push an agenda of someone who is paying them, but the simpler answer might be that they spout divisive politics because it earns them money in terms of advertising dollars.
And that's the real problem, IMHO. The subversion of democracy isn't happening because of China, Russia, or any number of adversarial countries, but because our social media companies don't care enough about our country or the people living inside it to meaningfully crack down on ragebait engagement farming.
Ah yes, as opposed to the United States that have never meddled with another country's politics.
The general thing about state actors is that they have every incentive to have a dossier of compromising information on every foreign national regardless of current relevance, for potential use in the future. You could, for instance, someday be in a position where you have privileged access to data that becomes relevant to them, and thus your history becomes useful.
True, but the US has a long track record of pursuing both foreigners and citizens—through prosecutions, extraditions, sanctions, or asset seizures—often years later and regardless of nationality. In practical terms, the risk of being targeted by the US for breaking a law is far higher than being blackmailed by a foreign state like China. The consequences are asymmetric as well: blackmail usually amounts to little more than embarrassment, whereas being pursued by the US government can carry lengthy prison sentences or worse.
This is not to mention that the US also engages in data collection for coercion purposes.
State actors also have finite budgets and do cost/benefit analyses. They don't really gain much for creating and maintaining deep dossiers on hundreds of millions of random foreigners.
Why did you mix the comparison between
-Caring about citizens only on the Chinese side
-Going beyond their borders on the US side
and then list out examples that the US targeted which includes a US citizen, also while ignoring that China goes beyond its borders to target their citizens?
Both countries routinely act this way because they have the power to do so
I figured this would happen given how crap Roombas have been since they fired or lost all their engineering talent years ago.
So I went with a roborock since it is superior but completely blocked it from ever communicating outside my home.
Works great, there are plenty of ways to modify roborock vacuums and load up other software even.
> modify roborock vacuums and load up other software even.
Can you provide more info/got any links? I would love to try some open source software on it
Since this can be a significant security issue for the state, why doesn't the government sponsor a security audit of the software. Does it upload the data or everything is done on the device? (Also, will have to keep up with the updates)
The NSA has a bad historical reputation for this sort of thing - intentionally weakening crypto standards to make things easier for themselves to break, while keeping them "strong enough" that other agencies outside of NSA/GCHQ/GRU can't. The Crypto AG scandal [0] was pretty bad, with Clipper/Skipjack & Dual_EC_DRBG [1] being more recent ones. The NSA could do what you are asking to do, but they probably won't let us know what the really bad holes are because they want to keep using them.
Notes:
0 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
1 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nsa-nist-encrypti..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
How does that provide any assurance against future changes that the public wouldn’t have any ability to know about.
So the govt implements rules and a panopticon for penalties. this works for the FDA, why wouldn't it for the FCC
Because regulation is bad, according to the current executive?
Politics aside, the FDA applies a very generous amount of regulation (mostly justifiable), not sure we want to pay multiples for our consumer electronics, as it (mostly) shows acceptable behavior and rearely kills anybody.
It is bad. Regulations have been historically hijacked to benefit corporate interests. See Intuit and tax policy for example.
Voters on the right naively thought he'd work to fix it. (Wrong!) But it is very much bad for a very large number of issues. Maybe next executive will fix it? (Wrong!)
"Why doesn't the state protect everyone from ___?" is a naive question.
Almost anything can be a significant security issue for the state. They have to carefully choose where they are going to spend effort & money.
And they pick whatever will keep them safely in power... which never ever includes "strict regulation of vacuum cleaners".
We don't regulate/protect the SCADA systems that run utilities like water treatment plants and the power transmission system.
> which never ever includes "strict regulation of vacuum cleaners
but has routinely included "network and encryption related technologies".
It's just that these two worlds now, amazingly and probably incorrectly, overlap.
The government's idea of regulating encryption-related technologies is to prohibit anyone but the government from using them. No, thanks.
Better yet, why not pick a security auditor and have the bidder pay for it, as a condition for approval?
Ironically we bought a Roborock (Chinese brand with close links to Xiaomi) and didn't connect it to the internet (checked this would work before we bought it).
If you don't want the scheduling and other app features, and are happy switching it on when you need it, it works fine.
Motivation for an offline one was more than just cameras, also that it wouldn't be bricked by an update one day, but still...
Why didn't you just buy one with no camera at all?
Why do you think they want to see the inside of your house, and what do you think they'd be able to do with the information?
"Your" here means "anyone".
The inside of a lawmaker's house? A general's? A CEO's? Why would anyone ever want insider information, including possible blackmail evidence, from them?
People like that have a cleaning service, they don't do their own housework. And ironically, the cleaning service is far better equipped to plant surveillance devices or exfiltrate information than a robot vacuum gadget.
Why not both?
Also I would assume it's a lot more dangerous and expensive to send someone in when you can just put an innocuous robot into a room which has cameras and microphones that can watch + listen 24/7 and auto-recharges when the battery is low (unlike surveillance devices).
Let's just say a family member has a very important and somewhat secretive job. The most classified meetings don't happen in our home, of course, but for a state adversary even small clues can be what's needed.
(So why get a roving camera in the first place? We judged that one from a historically and currently aligned state would be safe enough, even though it's not ideal.)
Why would the Chinese government want to regularly launch cyber attacks against US infrastructure, except it's been happening for years? US security companies and governments have been defending against it for years and have even cataloged the state-sponsored attack groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat#Chi...
It's very easy to think other people are being paranoid when you're ignorant about the topic.
Blackmail for one: "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....". That will work on some people, discovering extramarital affairs, or proving you know intimate details about the inside of someone's house, along with threat of physical violence will work on others. You just need to be sufficiently creative. You can parlay the successes from one target to the next: "I can get both of you divorced unless you install the rootkit on your work's network"
I will reference a quote I originally heard on HN years ago, though: the audio surveillance is magnitudes more valuable than the video.
Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough, but when people are having sexy time, they are not really likely to be running the roomba. Having that thing running is the opposite of sexy. When the thing is parked on the base station, it is facing the wall. So exactly how frequently do people think a roomba is running to be capturing all of this explicit footage?
To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some of these examples are just bat shit crazy well beyond paranoid
> they are not really likely to be running the roomba.
You seem to assume that they have somehow physically disabled access to any kind of remote activation. That seems extremely unlikely given the overall selling points of the roomba.
The roomba doesn't have to "run" in order to be using its microphone, which as noted is likely the more valuable data acquisition source here.
Maybe read the comment I was replying to before replying with something unrealted? "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....".
Turning on a microphone is not going to capture the required pics for this blackmail campaign.
Fair. I was combining multiple subthreads when replying, and that wasn't fair.
Its a numbers game, and what I described is just a sketch. Combine it with geo-location: select all roombas within 50mi of washington, DC and run all these various playbooks on it, eventually you'll find something.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
Yes, that's deliberately missing the point of what was said though. We know the vacuum is using the camera (when equipped) while the unit is running. Go back and re-read what I wrote to see why this is not the same thing.
Knowing how people live moment to moment is how you can know how to extract money from them
Ok, keep going. Clearly draw the line from “X has access to vacuum cleaner cameras” to “X is extracting money from them.”
Target Y is a closeted homosexual in a country where that is punishable by death.
X now gets monthly checks from Y. Done.
You already know this Ryan
https://blog.avast.com/what-do-security-cameras-know-about-y...
Data brokers love this data, dont play with me I know you better than that
https://www.cloaked.com/post/the-data-broker-economy-will-hi...
I don't like this kind of surveillance any more than anyone else on HN, but we get this here all the time. People make these posts that X leads to Y and jump way over the details. Sometimes X does lead to Y. Other times, it's the Underpants Gnomes: There's a big "???" step between X and Y that people don't like to take the time to articulate. This is how conspiracy theories take hold--you ignore the ??? and just assume "Of course X leads to Y! We all know it!"
HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.
Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.
We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.
how hard is this to understand. you have a roving camera/microphone in your house and you think that is OK?
Yes? You also have several cameras and microphones in your pocket, and probably wearing more microphones on your head at various times of the day. And so does everyone around you.
GP is correct. "Roving camera/microphone" -> ??? -> "harm". What is "???" and what is "harm" specifically, and how the former leads to the latter, in specific steps?
Why are all us HN old timers in here arguing about this
I thought this was settled
People are walking around with self spy devices and putting them everywhere and giving all their private data to corpos.
That’s not new, we know it happens, we know companies use “anonymized” data for advertising. Its in public records for large companies balance sheets and there are thousands of data brokers who live exclusively on this data.
There are multiple compelling and popular documentaries about this.
What’s the push back here?
Yeah well the data to money pipeline is well understood and the basis for the entire surveillance market.
The book Surveillance Capitalism wrote about this a decade ago: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791
If people are still skeptical then they are ignoring reality.
And it's only bad when China does it, not the American company in question. /s
American companies can be held accountable and we've seen many companies getting sued. Try holding a Chinese company accountable.
This is a false premise that we don't hold Chinese companies accountable.
They were so proud of how they were one of the early ones to move their entire manufacturing process to China. Sorry, they always (could have) had a camera in your home
Well, I hope you learned your lesson and now won't blindly trust any corporation again, but rather demand open code and full control over the device you bought. Especially if it is a moving camera in your home...
At least in the US, the Chinese government realistically should have been the least of your worries. What's China gonna do, if they caught you reading the Quran, or snorting crack? They could livestream your marriage proposal in WeChat to a billion people and you wouldn't ever notice. Meanwhile Snowden revealed, covertly watching random people through webcams is a leisure activity at the NSA, a national institution incidentally sharing jurisdiction with you. And evidently, your wife's death in a car accident may become a trending video at Tesla headquarters, while they deny your claims for a lack of such evidence.
> demand open code and full control over the device you bought
What do we do with companies/products like Tesla, short of shutting them down? Fully open code and absolute full control seems like it's going too far. Idealistically I like it, but practically I can't see it working.
I was making a point about trust, not what to do about it. If you are American, you should worry about Americans spying on you, as that actually could have consequences for your life and there is well know evidence and a legal foundation to justify such worries.
As non-car owner, I also dislike the Tesla cameras around me. Maybe one solution would be to not have fucking cameras everywhere, if the owner's exclusive access can't be guaranteed, abuse can't be prevented and legal consequences are not enforced. Maybe there should be standards and certification.
How far did you take this? (did you check out the Roomba supply chain at all?) Thanks
Back when Amazon was going to buy Roomba so they could use the cameras to sell us crap and/or sell the feed to law enforcement, I unplugged ours.
They were unimaginably unreliable compared to our older Roombas, and I was kind of shocked how little we missed them.
Anyway, I looked into getting a secure (or at least not malicious) alternative. At the time, the best bet was to get a Chinese model, then MITM its connection to the cloud + run your own server locally.
At that point, I realized it was less effort to just manually vacuum the house and moved on. I'm certainly not the only one, given the size of the modder community for the Chinese competitors.
Now, I wonder how far the modders are from buying a handful of commodity components + just 3d printing the rest of the robot, since that's less effort than dealing with enshittification.
What is not for sale today, can be for sale tomorrow. Even Apple and Alphabet, should their leaders see greater market value in selling data rather than not selling it.
this age, feels like the most dangerous thing the Chinese government could do is sell that data back to our government.
Genuine non snarky question:
Did you weigh data collection, persistence and transferability before purchase and then conclude that the risk/benefit was there?
At this point I trust the Chinese government way more than almost every US tech giant.
I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.
But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.
As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.
Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.
This reminds me of the line from "Jackie Brown": "You can't trust Melanie. But you can trust Melanie to be Melanie".
I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.
> If they're taken offline, they stop working.
If people ask me what's wrong with the so called modern technology, this is it.
Local-first system paradigm should be made mandatory and default, not optional [1].
[1] Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud:
https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
I disconnected my Roomba from the network right after programming its schedule. It still works great, following the same schedule for 7 years.
I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.
If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
> Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
Most people don't have the required knowledge to make an educated decision about whether to care. In fact, most people are not even aware of the question, let alone have the knowledge, let alone caring, let alone making a choice.
I don't think there are tens of millions still in use.
Unless you design your house and buy your furnitures taking these roomba into account, they get stuck nearly every where or at the first sock left on the ground by someone in your household. They have a number of wearable most owner will not even want to replace and will start being inefficient rather quickly. Add to that some battery wear and I don't think there is a lot of +5y old devices in the wild.
I and most people I know went back to regular vacuum cleaners. The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house. Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them and cleaning the bathroom and toilets correctly are both much more time consuming and annoying jobs.
> The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house.
Hard disagree, because vacuuming is something you often need to do daily. Spending 10 min/day becomes over an hour a week. That's a significant chunk. If you have smooth floors, running a Roomba kind of becomes a no-brainer.
On the other hand, I only need to dust once a week, and that takes all of 10 minutes. Cleaning the bathroom is similarly once a week (assuming you wipe/brush the sink and toilet bowl as necessary after use).
Reducing vacuuming time, to me, is the #1 thing you can do to save cleaning time, if you live in a Roomba-compatible space.
I've never met anyone in my life who vacuums at that rate. Not sure if your personal germophobia counts as a counterpoint.
You don't know anyone with pets that shed a lot? Most of my shedding pet friends try to vacuum daily, and if a day is missed it is very obvious.
People that don't vacuum that frequently, I'd assume, are also the type of people that don't clean a litter box for a week instead of daily.
3 dogs, 3 cats. 45 seconds with a broom once a day does the trick…
I love these exaggerations. It doesn't help the conversation at all. Sort of like the recipes that say it takes "a couple of minutes" to brown onions.
If you get a robot that automated it you'll feel the difference. Floors get a lot of dust. Especially if you have pets but even without.
I would not personally vacuum daily but having completely automated, vacuuming and mopping, every day has produced wonderful floors. Less work than what we did before too.
There's no germs involved here. Dustin on the floor is dirty socks, and you can peel crumbs and other things under foot under foot. It all goes away if floors are cleaned daily.
I agree with this take, it has been my experience as well. The robot vacuum isn't there so you never need to vacuum, the robot vacuum is there so you can have decently clean floors daily and only need to do the deeper cleaning once a week or so.
But I also get the difficulty when you have a space with lots of larger debris around. The robot vacuum was excellent before kids. Now with little kids that will leave toys and other obstacles all over the place, it requires diligence to pick up after them (and work to teach them to clean up their toys and socks) to ensure the vacuum can be effective.
Vacuuming daily is insane behaviour.
My dog that sheds a lot says otherwise
A lot of people probably bought them for the novelty and then decided they weren't really all that useful for their homes and lifestyles. At least that's what a number of friends have told me. Cordless stick vacs also came in and made a lot of vacuuming jobs quicker and easier.
>Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them
With furnishing optimized for dust generation (less materials where the dust-shitting microbes live, like material curtains) and daily Roomba runs (plus eventual air filter running in the background) there is very little to dust off of surfaces. If there's little dust on the floor, it doesn't get kicked up and doesn't land on things. Ergo - Roomba makes dusting easier.
Keeping a basic air purifier (i.e. fan strapped to HEPA filter) at low power but constantly on would also help with the dust problem, I believe. There's not going to be much dust on things if it gets sucked out of the air before landing on things.
Yeah - they don't work well at all. And work from home is definitely incompatible with roombas. Those things are loud and run for a long time. Both ours are in the storage room collecting dust.
They're doing their jobs if they're collecting dust.
And I'll show myself out…
I am one of those weirdos! I bought a roomba in 2015 and it's still going. Second battery, sixth set of rollers and brush, god knows how many filters. Mine's also a dumb one: no wifi or pathfinding, just boring old "drives around until it smacks into shit" navigation.
I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
I used to have a similar dumb one (Roomba 860 if memory serves) and it would take the same path over and over again in certain corners of my house, which meant my carpet ended up with unsightly wheel tracks on it from the repetition. I don't think it did a very good job vacuuming either, no matter how much it ran, a normal vacuum would always pull a boatload more crud up.
It's an interesting idea but it just didn't work for me and I wouldn't consider buying another.
It's not for hardcore use for sure, not a replacement for a proper vacuuming. I use it in my office/part of my basement, it gets the vast majority of stuff up and keeps the cat hair under control.
I don't know that I'd buy another, especially because the new ones creep me out with all the cameras and such, but as long as I can keep this one running, it does a good enough job.
I worry a lot about privacy in general but its hard for me to figure out the danger posed by my roborock. I suppose it has the floor plans of my house and knows we vacuum on Saturdays. It doesn't seem to know if the object passing by is me or my cat.
Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets.
What is the concern?
I think this is the wrong mental model (attempt to articulate threats from a specific information leakage). The problem I have with this approach is that it ignores "sensor fusion" by treating each leak as independent and defining threats as "things i can picture happening".
I think the correct mental model for this is "leaking bits". Leaking bits is bad, it doesn't take many bits to uniquely identify you and you're also not able to anticipate how those bits might be used in future or correlated with other bits.
Just stop leaking bits when you can avoid it. Then you don't have to mentally model every threat you come across
One of the more tractable examples here is the information what cell towers your cell phone is connected to. On it's own, it doesn't tell you that much.
But if you have this from 2-3 people, you can start inferring if they are meeting sporadically, meet a lot, possibly live together.
Or, if you add information about the services in the vicinity of cell towers, you can start deducing changes in a persons life. Suddenly the phone is moving more, to places with a doctor nearby, a gynecologist nearby, clothing stores, furniture stores, ... eventually a hospital. Start mixing in information about the websites they visit...
This incremental discovery of information about a person is surprisingly powerful depending on the data you have and hard to predict.
I agree with this completely. I feel like my phone is leaking so much sensitive information about me in so many ways. And it has access to my location, my communications, my finances. And it is hard to turn off. I can turn off my vacuum cleaner for months if I want. I can't turn off my phone or the computer in my car.
I guess that's why the vacuum doesn't worry me. The phone really does.
Totally agree, but my point is that you shouldn't be modeling this by looking at various devices and calculating worry thresholds
Just stop leaking willingly leaking bits for little or no upside instead it's much simpler
The concern - for you, maybe nothing. However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us" (trying to capture private conversations of politicians. Or it could do the same for vacuums located new military bases or corporate headquarters. With transcription software and AI, it could simply record and transcribe every conversation it hears and look for important information or mentions of key phrases.
> However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us"
The old company could have done the same thing. I recognize that China is a u.s. geopolitical adversary, but when it comes to politics domestic adversaries are just as ruthless.
The old company wasn't a domestic political adversary; it was a capitalist corporation.
I'm not making moral comparisons; I'm just saying that the motivations of the PRRC and Coca-Cola are different.
> The old company wasn't a domestic political adversary
That depends entirely on the politics in question. It's well known that corporations are willing to abuse their power for political ends if it serves their interests to do so.
It was a capitalist corporation beholden to demands by domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
And just because a corporation is based in China doesn’t automatically make it some kind of government managed communist entity.
If you live in the US, it is better for you if the home robots with microphones are controlled by the US than the US' geopolitical rival.
Can you expand on why that’s the case?
Suppose the Chinese gov has access to my robovac data. Given that I reside in the US, how is that worse than ICE having access to my data?
In a scenario, where the US and China go to an actual shooting war, moving a couple million high-energy-density devices near the most flammable object in a houshold and purposefully setting the device on fire would be an interesting new variety of shock and awe. Not too new actually, thinking about the mossad pager attack.
Maybe it would be a bad idea to get into a shooting war, then. Seems like these little Roombas might act as deterrence and help to preserve peace!
Mutually Assured Domestic Cleaning?
Exactly! This is why some Chinese people are avoiding iPhones at all cost.
Your current device won’t do it but Wi-Fi can now identify people, and because it’s able to penetrate flesh it can identify people by skeleton so that it can’t be hidden by clothing. That’s separate from WhoFi being hard to identify peeler from gestures.[1]
This could be a future where your home devices sell what you look like to data harvesters who can then see you appear in shops which run the same scanners, even through walls where there’s no cameras, connecting back to the person who lives in your house near your future-vacuum cleaner. Even if you leave your phone and devices behind and pay in cash.
The historic privacy we had by virtue of things being physical started to fall slightly with writing and post which the government might intercept, further with telephone calls which the phone company could intercept, further with radio which could be hidden in one room listening, further with CCTV to CRT screen banks and no recording, further to purchases by credit card, then suddenly in the 90s to cellphone tracking and mass internet use, then the 2000s with Bluetooth beacon scanning and CCTV recording to disk and online purchases and unencrypted chat programs, faster in the 2010s where so many people upload their photo streams to Facebook which does face recognition on who is in photos and who is attending events, location tracking apps (all of them asking for that permission), to smartphones tracking location for live traffic and live store busyness ratings, and Hey Siri and Alexa and all the fitness tracker apps, and Ubers and video calling proxies through Microsoft and Google servers, cheap IoT CCTV left open to the world, car license plate tracking cameras…
“What is the concern” - is there really no concern?
[1] https://www.techspot.com/news/109975-wi-fi-can-accurately-id...
Do you think the Chinese government would ever have reasons to "ask the company forcefully" to take pictures and/or record audio inside specific offices and homes?
The broad concern that some people have is misplaced (China doesn't care about the average American home). The narrow concern is extremely plausible: that China would happily use it to target dissidents for example, or people that have fled China for various reasons. We've seen how aggressive they are over time in targeting those people, including physical kidnappings in the US and elsewhere.
The acquisition of iRobot should be immediately blocked on national security concerns. China would have no problem doing the same if the situations were reversed.
What do you mean by "worry a lot about privacy"?
If it is a practical view of privacy, like the "I don't want others to know I have foot fetish" kind, or even typical operational security like not letting others know you own something valuable, then the concern is most likely minor. In fact, it may be a good thing that the data goes to China instead of in your own country, because there is a border somewhat protecting you.
If you take a more general approach of just making less data available about you on the internet, for things like targeted ads, AI, etc... Then US or China shouldn't change much and you should avoid connecting your robot to the internet in the first place, most work without it for the simple "clean" function.
Now if you are a US citizen and a patriot, then yeah, it matters.
I’m curious about this too. I’d worry about a local burglar having this information, but what can a Chinese tech company do with this data that I should be concerned about?
First, just the evergrowing tracking of everything, it's just unwholesome in general.
Second, why assume a random Chinese tech company will manage to keep this information to themselves? I wouldn't exactly bet against some terabytes of videos appear on some torrent indexer. Now, combine with modern AI tools for sifting for what you are interested in, and it might hit closer to home for someone.
>>Second, why assume a random Chinese tech company will manage to keep this information to themselves?
I never assumed American companies kept this data to themselves so nothing has changed in that regard.
What I don't get is why people buy robots that carry microphones, lidars and cameras AND connect to the Internet.
I don't really care if the camera is American or Chinese, I just don't want a camera/mic in my home that I don't control. And yeah, the smartphone counts but it's a lot harder not to have one.
Assuming an efficient market it'll eventually be sold to a local burglar. Also, I imagine ICE might be interested in a list of homes where something besides English was spoken. Also there are those email scams that claim to have video of you doing something embarrassing, but usually don't. Given the trajectory of AI, their claims might start being true.
An employee of that company sells footage of you to a scam center. They then blackmail you.
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict what new information can be derived from the combination of different datasets collected from your devices.
Especially as the N of datasets grows.
I know we have older models for upstairs and down, and saw a newer one with camera at a thrift store. It could have been a different brand, but I saw camera facing up at about 30 degrees and thought to myself, nope. There are reports of it sending revealing pictures I read, and am quite happy that the bump and go ones keep down dust and fur overall. Most of my wifi gadgets have cameras not moving on their own.
... and my floor plan is available online through public records
With that being said, I specifically got a roborock device with only LiDAR and no camera just in case.
device on your network is not concerning to you? I'm not going to explain it to you only because I'd like to see the outcome.
US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire.
From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more.
You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.
It is, because Apple's privacy stance and record are known. What do we know about this Chinese company, besides the fact that it is beholden to a government that does not care for privacy?
Apple's record is complying with a majority of government requests for customer data.
Not to mention its CEO manufacturing and gifting on bended knee a custom 24-karat gold Apple plaque to a federal government leader that does not care for privacy or foreign customers. That sent the message internationally, loud and clear.
Apple's policy is to submit to nearly all requests made by the federal government, though they get substantial credit for resisting some requests. This of course depends on the decisions made by current leadership, which can and will change (while the phone in your pocket remains the same).
The problem is that not all governments constrain themselves to only use requests and/or allow companies to challenge said requests. And that's at least what you get dealing with Apple and the USA (most of the time).
(Most of the time) is as true as you trust the federal government that demonstrably lies and “loses” records whenever it feels is convenient for them.
> You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.
You had all the right reasoning but came to the wrong conclusion. That is exactly how it works, and people should not use iPhones.
There are tens of much more successful robot vacuum companies. You do not buy roomba because of their capability in making robot vacuums, that already drove them bankrupt. If all you wanted was the brand name, you could have bought just that. The valuable asset here is the large number of products in people's homes which can now be monetized.
Let's put aside whether you can trust apple for a moment.
Where the hardware comes from is much less of a risk than the fact than where the locked down firmware and software comes from.
Yes the west's over-dependence on Chinese hardware is a liability, but what's easier? Compromising hardware or compromising software? If you don't know, I'll tell you, it's the latter.
This is a bullshit argument. At least the OS on iphones is american. For IOT devices it isn't the same.
Which is why the parent said "for anyone outside the US". Of course for anyone in the US, at least Apple is a US company. But that only works for people in the US :-).
How does it work then ? Explain us how the US, China, and India don't abuse of surveillance on whoever they can, please.
Not the OP, but I understood it as "anyway we're screwed, and if you're okay with the company in question being in your country, Apple is okay only for people in the US".
Nope, not all of them are connected to the internet and not all of them have cameras.
Thanks. That's true. I edited my comment to reflect as much.
Definitely not all live and functioning. In fact I suspect less than 10m are actively used. It is a company that has been around for years and it has run into sales issues that last few years with competition and their products have tech product lifespans of around 3 years I suspect.
Personally, I have a Roomba I bought in Jan 2019 that's still doing just fine (So 7 years now).
Most of the parts are pretty easily replaced (genuinely pleasant surprise, as an aside) and the company stocked most replacement parts for a long time - I just checked again and I can still get parts for my model (I-series) incl batteries, wheels, brushes, filters, etc. Which is less than it used to be, but still enough to keep mine rolling around for another 3ish years without any likely problems.
And that's outside of the whole "unofficial" replacement parts ecosystem that popped up online.
3 years doesn't track with my experience on this one. I'd bet it's 5 to 10.
---
For context, Amazon tried to buy them for exactly the same purpose ~2 years back (home/house data) and failed to get EU regulatory approval, so scrapped the deal.
I'm not thrilled to have ownership transferred to another company (I was also very unhappy to hear the Amazon rumors back then) and I think this is a pretty clear risk.
Even if a user is no longer using the device, Roomba still likely has plenty of data about their home floating around.
> Most of the parts are pretty easily replaced (genuinely pleasant surprise, as an aside) and the company stocked most replacement parts for a long time - I just checked again and I can still get parts for my model (I-series) incl batteries, wheels, brushes, filters, etc. Which is less than it used to be, but still enough to keep mine rolling around for another 3ish years without any likely problems.
I've never owned or really used a different brand than roomba (I've joked that I've owned 4 roombas, but never purchased a single one...) but I fully agree that the modular nature of their parts replacement is a super welcome thing. The fact that the electrical contacts are all just sprung into each other, and each component is basically designed for near-minimal replacement overlap (not replacing things that are not broken) is something that I would LOVE to be implemented in more things. I always assumed that it was this 'forward thinking' design that a) Likely added a bit to the cost of the brand b) Likely didn't assist with future sales from breakages, etc.
Out of the 4 I've acquired over the years, one has been stripped of parts and discarded. One is relatively in that process, and the other 2 are happily (?) doing the different areas of my house. A few amazon batteries later (Which I originally only charge when I am home and able to check on them, then place faith in 'not burning down the house') and everything is hunky doory.
Also, they have been around so long, there are a boatload of 3d printed replacement parts floating around that can be quite useful if one has a 3d printer.
I've always held them in pretty high regard for repairable tech.
> Personally, I have a Roomba I bought in Jan 2019 that's still doing just fine (So 7 years now).
BTW I just found on a bunch of robotic vacuum websites that 4-6 years is the quoted expected lifespan with maintenance:
https://us.narwal.com/blogs/product/how-long-robot-vacuums-l...
https://ca.dreametech.com/blogs/blog/how-long-do-robot-vacuu...
https://au.roborock.com/blogs/roborock-au/how-long-do-robot-...
I think that likely means without maintenance it is a little less.
I love how easy it is to service a Roomba. And the parts (both original and 3rd party) are plentiful.
Mine is from 2017 btw, still doing daily duty.
So the actual problem is the "feature" set of the vacuum cleaners, not the nationality of the new owners, right?
Depends on which nations you care about. How would you feel if Roomba devices were controlled by North Korea, for example?
That was kind of my point, I don't buy any of these surveillance appliances.
But answering as a hypthetical roomba owner: As I am from the EU, this new ownership would actually be better for me. The US already mandates spying with devices like these, and has been caught multiple times doing so already. It is also known to share info with the domestic services, the latter point not being true for China.
the US does not mandate spying with roombas -- wtf are you smoking?
China absolutely shares info with all of its national police services, intelligence services, and military. Depending on the company these PLA may literally own some / most / all of the organization.
I am not in the US or China, and on balance I am less worried about the Chinese blowing my house up, but don't pretend they're nice, or that they're your friend. I don't want them having my data any more than I want the NSA, Research & Analysis Wing, or the NK Reconnaissance General Bureau.
You have the Stored Communications Act, the Patriot Act, the Cloud Act, FISA, and so on. Most of which don't require warrants if it is about non-citizens. Which is then shared, through Five Eyes and similar agreements, with foreign countries, so a workaround for not needing warrants in the target country. This is what I commented about, data sharing with the services in my country. Of course Chinese intelligence agencies will share info with the Chinese police, but they don't share with police in the EU.
Again, the root problem of course is that there is any data to share in the first place.
> How would you feel if Roomba devices were controlled by North Korea, for example?
Depends on where you live. If you are living in North Korea and somehow you got to own a Roomba, it would be surely a bad thing.
But living in a western country, I would hands down prefer giving all my secrets to the North Korean government instead of my own one.
Yeah, this is the funny thing about it.
As an American, I'd much rather a Chinese company have data on me than an American one.
The American government and FBI and police don't have access to the Chinese company's data. But with a subpoena (and sometimes just with a friendly ask), they sure do have access to an American company's data.
Now if the US is at war with China and you're a politician or in the military, then of course get rid of every device in your home and workplace from China that could be used to spy. But if you're just a normal citizen worried about your government collecting information on you, it seems preferable to stick to foreign companies, like Chinese ones.
Yeah I think a lot of privacy advocates like to pretend they are some high value target. A nation you don't live in, that has no use for information about you is collecting information on you. What is the problem that wasn't there before? I can at least understand a principled stand of not wanting cloud connected cameras or microphones, but the China hawking is just ludacris.
It really depends. Where I live there is a large Chinese expat community, including many democracy activists from Hong Kong, Falun Gong practitioners, anti-CCP critics, and other expats who left China out of fear of persecution. They do have legitimate reasons to worry about the Chinese government tracking them down[1], and now they have to worry about whether their friends who invite them over for tea have a Roomba at home.
But if you live in an area with little exposure to these communities, I doubt the Chinese government would care about your private information.
But no matter who I am I certainly wouldn't want North Korea to have my private information, because they'd have no qualms about finding ways to use it to empty my bank account.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/chinese-spy-speaks-out-enquete...
The US is the biggest world wide surveillance state by far. If you don't worry about that why would you worry about NK a country that has 0 soft power and will have 0 impact on your life whatsoever. At that point I'd give my data more willingly to Russia or China, at last it would equilibrate things a bit
I've been buying Roombas since the very first one (I've had four), but stopped buying them when they started including internet connectivity and cameras.
That was a total dealbreaker for me. No vacuum cleaner needs that.
> More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.
Does comparing sales to households make any sense though? You'd need to figure out (40MM - Roombas in landfills) / average Roombas per household.
I have a Roomba. Never connected it to wifi or a phone app (no phone). Works great.
Sounds to me like we need to figure out how to flash our own custom firmware or do some fun DNS tricks to keep our data to ourselves.
Take that with a grain of salt (typhoon).
If they're taken offline, they stop working.
I think this is a bit of hyperbole. I haven't had my Roomba hooked up to the internet in at least four years. It works fine.
The only thing is that I have to start it by pushing the button on top, instead of using a phone app.
> Chinese owner .... inside people's homes
They made the devices. I would say its fair to assume they already had access to the data if they needed it. Other than the fact they legally own it now I don't think this makes much difference from before.
Why are you concerned about china having access to this data anyway? I'm far more concerned about how much access the US gov has to this type of data. They can easily use it against someone in the country they control if they want.
American tech companies have already built an apparatus of mass surveillance that works hand in glove with our government to violate our constitutional rights on a regular basis.
But it turns out that an economy based on rent extraction and enshittification can’t in the long run compete with one based on a real economy of industry, agriculture, and public services.
We should have privacy laws including mandated user control of user data. In my view, scaremongering around China just demonstates how uncompetitive the US is, in the long run. We should set our sights higher than merely begging to trade one form of technofeudalism for another.
I don't understand how you can sell 40 million units and go bankrupt.
Roomba has been obsolete for 10 years. Competitors have eaten their lunch in every segment.
Perhaps because the 40 million units rely on an expensive back-end service that isn't covered by monthly fees to users?
Don't give them ideas.
what is in between a disc shaped robot vacuum and an android walking around with a broom? there's no obvious path between those two designs. the answer is all the growth iRoomba needed and another $10b.
the problem with disc shaped vacuums is adapting your whole home to make their labor saving make sense. not maps or china or all this other bs.
It's not exactly the missing link, but a lot of brands have started adding features that could be seen as in between, like a little robot arm to pick things up, and little "legs" to go up stairs.
https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/dreames-new-...
How many users does TikTok have again? Talking about internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots...
I take it you also believe then that every third person on the planet has an iphone, yes?
(Apart from the innumeracy, also the gall to still launder this type of conspiracy theories in 2025, after the entire world can see you now for what you really are. Mindbending)
Well, not to worry. The Biden Admin FTC and the EU ensured this outcome in the interest of making sure consumer rights are protected. Therefore, consumer rights must be better protected in this scenario.
Biden Admin?
Yes, when Lina Khan was FTC Head during the Biden Administration she helped protect consumer rights by getting iRobot sold to a Chinese company.
Why are you more afraid of Chinese billionaires surveilling on you than American billionaires?
What is the significance to you in just a change of owner here? Relative to the situation already?
Not gp, but more and more euroheads much prefer China over [current] USA.
I’d rather have the Chinese than the Americans.
I appreciate the alarm. However, I don't know if we should feel China having this is less safe than an America, European, or other country. I think we have seen that whatever alleged rights to privacy and data protection we have are becoming more-and-more meaningless as the corporatocracy of the US manifests itself more.
I mean to say, this should not be any more alarming than if, say, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon bought Roomba vs. any random Chinese company.
I say this not to say that China has no human rights issues to worry about, but rather, that the US and other Western countries have just as many concerning human rights issues (including privacy, freedom of speech suppression, and police state) that we're just more familiar with and used to, compared to the Other that is China.
Basically, 6 of one, a half dozen of the other.
I'm all for antitrust, but it's a shame the Amazon acquisition was blocked.[0]
iRobot was in a distressed state then, and immediately laid of 1/3 of staff when the deal fell through. I knew a survivor of that mess. Now this.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-ac...
0: https://archive.is/rBn7z
100%. Amazon actually has a sizable robotics presence in Boston. It would have been great for Boston job market and there are actually a handful of companies based out of MA including BD. You really need a cluster of companies to strengthen an industry. I mean see biotech in Kendall if you need an example.
Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.
How do we recover from this?
Five years ago you'd be called sinophobic for suggesting we do something to stop bleeding industries to China. (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.) Yet we already saw how this had happened to Canada with Nortel, etc.
China wants every industry it can have. If we give up technological salients, we won't be able to get them back. China has so many advantages - manufacturing, chemicals, materials, electronics. They now have better experience than we do with design and engineering.
The outcome of this happening broadly and at scale is that high paying US jobs will disappear and the country will slide into economic stagnation.
You wouldn't hire a robotics or mechatronics engineer in the US. There would only be small bespoke jobs. The vast majority of supply would come from China where everything is both vertically and horizontally integrated. Cheap, fast, better. These career sectors will shrink and atrophy. There won't be enough talent, jobs, or pay to support building new companies, meaning we're dead in the water and that industry is dead to us.
We need to do something fast. It'll be gone within a generation if we don't.
I don't have anything against Chinese people. I just want America to dominate or be competitive in enough key industries to keep us all employed and growing. For our own economic security and insurance.
Elizabeth Warren is proud of blocking this deal:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-room...
That old bat is the enemy of any kind of US technical progress.
No. Enforcing anti-trust law is critical for healthy markets. Healthy markets support technological progress through competition.
You're assuming the deal was anti-competitive. A lot of the time, the process is the punishment.
How is Chinese market consolidation a healthier market outcome here?
Opposing one purchaser does not imply supporting another purchaser. I don't know the details of this specific transaction, but I would guess the Chinese buyer does not have the same market power that Amazon does, so isn't running afoul of antitrust law. It's also possible Warren is opposed to this purchase, too, but no longer has the influence to stop it.
> Opposing one purchaser does not imply supporting another purchaser
Opposing the merger in this case necessarily meant embracing iRobot going out of business. Their financial position was clear, and no one else was in that business vertical but iRobot and Chinese companies. So either iRobot folds and the market is owned by Chiense companies, or iRobot folds and its IP is bought by Chinese companies.
> but I would guess the Chinese buyer does not have the same market power that Amazon does
In home robotics? They own the whole market.
> Warren is opposed to this purchase, too, but no longer has the influence to stop it.
Warren is too blindly ideological and frankly stupid to have pieced this together.
It's not US government's job to help bad business leaders, they should do a better job of running their companies than using them as a slush fund.
This company would have probably flourished if it had workplace democracy but instead it was a centrally planned dictatorship and failed.
Maybe that is the real lesson here.
She should be, honestly. To me as an American, China has a better reputation than Amazon. Of those two choices, I'm happier with this outcome than giving even more stuff to Amazon.
As an American with a strong personal interest (kids) in keeping the country strong and competitive in the future, it seems bizarre to cheer for our largest adversary to gain advantages over us.
I also would have preferred to keep it in the country, but the fact is that Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is. Hence "Of those two choices... I pick China."
I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.
>Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is
Yeah, I'm going to need some examples as to how Amazon is worse than China.
See downthread comment[1], and please keep in mind the context of this conversation is specifically, "Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans than China is".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277647
Chinese doctrine explicitly has labeled America as the enemy for 10-20 years, with a goal of taking a democracy by force (after crushing dissent in HK and taking it over earlier than promised), and steals the West’s IP, and manipulates American businesses, and is actively committing a genocide for the past decade.
That's all pretty hand wavey and abstract, not very convincing (for example, I'm pretty sure China is not committing a genocide in the US, and Western IP law is arguably not worth much respect anyway). I'm not saying China is without problems, I'm just saying they're less harmful to Americans than Amazon is.
You’re claiming that documented and active IP theft and anti-democracy and enemy-action doctrine is handwavy and better than a tax paying business that supports democracy and that is not trying to undermine the west? You’re wrong
I similarly can't understand how you can look at the US over the last 10-20 years and think the US's biggest threat is some country on the other side of the planet who makes the stuff that we ask them to make, and not the billionaires and megacorps who control every aspect of our economic and political system which directly lead to the situation we are in now. The call is coming from inside the house, man :)
I would definitely argue the opposite, that China is the larger threat.
They want control of Taiwan and are building way more capable hardware than Russia has.
Sounds bad man.
Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future.
So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.
There are threats from without and threats from within.
China isn't going to physically invade the US. They want to take our place as the world's cultural leader and relegate the US to approximately the current state of the UK.
Companies like Amazon want to increase the wealth of the owners at any cost including domestic political capture. They would see the country being run by oligarchs like Russia.
Would you rather live in the UK or Russia?
To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company. They bring in Chinese products by the boatload, warehouse them here and offer 2 day shipping. That's virtually their entire retail business and value proposition. It's a slightly curated selection, easy ordering and fast shipping. You can buy all the same stuff for less at Ali Express if you don't mind waiting 3 weeks.
I don't mean to make light of what Amazon actually does. Their logistics are incredible. But, really, that's what they are. A logistics company. Your money still goes to China and you pay more so an American company can get their cut too.
>"To be fair, shopping at Amazon is nearly the same as shopping at some Chinese company."
Have you actually used AliExpress? I use both Amazon and AE, and the former definitely offers a lower-deceit, easier to use, and better customer experience. Amazon powers most of the web, whereas AE regularly has massive bugs (I was completely unable to sign in for over a month due to a UI bug last year).
That's interesting. To me as a Canadian, I think Amazon is more aligned with my best interests than China.
What makes you feel otherwise?
See other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277647
I was so angry at this.
I want Amazon and Google to be broken up, but not in this category or along with these lines. This wasn't going to create some household appliance monopoly. Amazon has plenty of competition, and Roomba was already behind the curve.
Now America is out of this market category. A category we invented. This felt like our last toehold in consumer robotics.
Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this.
I doubt it though
There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents.
Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop.
It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector.
Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's Game of Thrones production costs using unrelated business units, market those movies and shows for free in the Amazon app, on their website, emblazoned on their delivery vehicles and on every item of packaging. Other companies have to pay hundreds of millions to match this. There is eyeball opportunity cost for consumers, and Amazon is flooding the zone with their free wares. This is a markedly unfair advantage.
Amazon moves US union jobs overseas and trains up low cost crews in Eastern Europe. They buy up once successful studios on the cheap because they all tried to catch up with the stupid steaming game.
Theatrical box office receipts are the biggest revenue driver for studios by a wide margin. Individually, studios could have countered Netflix and Disney by pulling licensing. Amazon in the mix threatened this, because they had existing content licenses and also controlled home media releases. The studios felt cornered by tech giants basically salting the earth. They had to give up healthy Box Office proceeds and exclusivity to chase streaming and defend their access to eyeballs as best they could.
You've heard of Disney eating the mid market film? Amazon ate everything. It left no oxygen in the fish bowl.
Amazon's entertainment business needs to be spun off.
All of that can be true and completely unrelated to Roomba. Nothing should have prevented their purchase of iRobot. That was insanity.
The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half.
The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.
In the theoretical limit, a single monopoly owns and dictates everything. That's bad.
In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. The platforms themselves barely innovate, yet they rake in enormous revenue streams by taxing all other participants and being the central connection point for all economies.
Is it healthy that we only have two smartphone providers? That they can extort every industry - including crazy unrelated industries like fintechs, automotive, various entertainment industries, etc.?
Is it healthy that the "URL bar" now means Google search in 95% of the panes of glass humans use to access the internet? That a search for a company's products are now a competitive bidding zone where every market participant is taxed on basic branding?
Healthy capitalism should be brutally competitive. It uses regulation to ensure companies do not grow too big to escape evolutionary pressures. Google, Apple, and Amazon ought to be sweating - not sitting by the pool, relaxing. And they certainly shouldn't be able to become invasive species in other markets when their entry amounts to dumping.
I love capitalism. A healthy dose of antitrust regulation makes it more distributed and less antifragile. It makes sure lots of stakeholders can pursue lots of objectives rather than concentrated labs that are merely the lavish luxuries of titans. It prevents laziness and ossification by forcing everyone to be nimble.
You know who else is a monopoly? The Federal government.
I have received better treatment from the worst monopoly companies like Comcast etc than the services from the US government.
I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.
So you’d prefer we send access to China? The comment above was pointing out that we blocked the acquisition that would have kept it in the country.
The US government is more likely to be a threat to my personal freedom than the Chinese.
The emergence of a totalitarian state compared to a liberal democracy (for all it's faults and current state due to voters making bad choices) is so much worse for everyone in the world. Us included
"due to voters making bad choices" ahahahahahaha
What exactly can the Chinese government do to hurt you in your own home in America?
Now think about what the American government can do to you.
Maybe instead of ad-hoc fear-driven interventions in the market when Chinese companies do too well (TikTok), US should have some general data protection laws, and not allow making surveillance devices that are locked-down and serve their corporate overlords?
Amazon isn't on your side. They would have sold this access to China if they could make a buck on it.
What was the last time a Chinese person shot a US citizen?
When was the last time you called a Chinese person to respond to a crime?
Is that an option I’m not aware of?
Do chinese police even carry firearms? edit: most don’t (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...)
So, given that, I would choose 100/100 times to deal with Chinese police over the US ICE/police murder squads if I had an option
No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America.
The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but that ship sailed here centuries ago) but they do send vans to harvest the organs of dissidents. And Google “persecution of Uyghurs”.
They’re not a benign organization just because they shoot less, they just get shot at less.
My dude I spied on the Chinese for a decade I know more about the Chinese than you’ll ever understand
Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist.
However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you include the global war on terror and the modern prisoner slave market encoded into the constitution (13th amendment)
If you wanna go all the way back to the cultural revolution then absolutely fine but my argument there is going to be that’s no different than any of the culls that the United States or any other country have done. So they don’t get a pass but they aren’t worse
Ultimately all you have to do is put up the “death toll” from state action both inside the nation and outside the nation to compare numbers. I’ll let you go ahead and do that exercise.
No that the communist party has only ruled in China for less than 100 years but the same structure in America which has been completely depraved since the founders of the country were alive and actively shaping the politics of the US is coming up on 350 years ago.
I mean for Christ sake we bought the southern United States from France in order to maintain our slave plantations as the French were getting rid of all their slave holdings worldwide. And then after the Civil War which was supposed to solve that ethical burden they completely gutted the entire process of reconstruction in order to prevent the full completion of it because the population was so racist they did not want to do it. As a black person in America I will tell you the slave population in jails is higher than it ever was anywhere else.
If that’s not a disqualification on its own of any type of ethical foundations I don’t know what is.
In the U.S. you have free trials, in china you don't. What are you even talking about.
Hard to tell if someone is ignorant, not bright, or a CCP propaganda bot these days, but anyone who thinks the Chinese government is preferable to Amazon is one (at least) of those 3.
I’ve been in court multiple times in my life including last month. I assure you there’s nothing free about them.
The US has the largest prison population.
China has plenty of problems but no country matches the depravity of the US “justice” system.
Oh and that’s just the “formal” system, go to the south and you’ll see what it is.
No county matches the depravity of the U.S justice system? Other countries (china for example) have reeducation and labor camps. The us has its problems, and we should make things better! But it's incomparable, china actively imprisons political enemies, puts Muslims in "reeducation" camps, and has an iron fist on free expression.
The U.S. never made internment camps or had rampant government enforced slavery? Cmon
Do they have them today? Wasn't my claim that they never did.
Yes
https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-prison-labor/
Well, were they handed a valid warrant asking for that footage?
Maybe there's a 3rd option... like encrypt the footage in a way that it can't be accessed en-masse without passwords?
Like imagine if the US government gave a warrant to apple and said "Give us all iphone pictures from this area on this date"... they'd presumably say "We won't because we designed it so that we can't."
Amazon wouldn't have kept the manufacturer alive by making Roombas better, but by making it more expensive for other manufacturers to sell their vacuums through Amazon.
What’s the basis for this claim except some ideology you possess?
This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.
It is complacency or is China just accelerating?
It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.
Ford themselves said they need to stay in the Chinese car market no matter what - not because they think they can win in it but because they can't compete anywhere if they leave.
The one tech area the US is most definitely ahead is AI - both software and hardware. The US will be ahead as long as China does not have access to EUV manufacturing yet.
IMO, the US business industry has become over-financialised to the point of self-sabotage. R&D and capital expenditure are seen as "bad" things to have on accounting statements. Combine this with Jack Welsh type CEOs who do everything they can to cut out "costs" on financial statements and you get organizations like GE turned into (badly run) banks.
Cisco is now essentially a publicly traded PE firm that buys up other companies to milk dry. Most internal development is outsourced by suits far removed from any qualifications on quality.
We all know the foibles of Boeing, where accountants made the final calls on everything.
The only innovations the traditional American car companies seem to be able to focus on is how to make cars bigger to increase margins. It's ludicrous that it took a new company (Tesla) to make electric cars available.
I could go on. This is not to say that other countries (including China) don't have their own issues with their business climate, but the United States has an environment where some of the smartest and best paid people in the country are working their asses off to find out better ways to show ads (Google/Facebook).
Well the good news is we just destroyed our education and research sectors, too, so we'll catch up to China, uh... any day now...
I know, right? I think all we have to do is follow their lead in having near slave labor /s
That is the direction we're heading in, yes.
That's ultimately what you get when you have a system that 1) has most of its money held by the retirement/pension funds of a generation that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth and 2) has incentivized returns to those institutional investors at the board and c-suite levels of most companies.
I mean if we're talking about generations that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth, then China is actually ahead of us there. Their birth rate plummeted below replacement well before the US's did.
Everyone acts like the C8 corvette doesn’t exist when they shit on American cars. Actually GM is an innovative awesome company.
The C8 has topped many “top car” lists since it came out in 2020. The reviews on it are universally excellent and it gaps pretty much anything that the turn-signal hating BMW crowd manufactures both in literal performance and in design.
The Corvette is a pretty niche vehicle though
Also there's no longer really any such thing as an American car. Everything now is some globalized mess of parts from brands here and there. Made in factories wherever is most financially convenient.
yep bingo
> American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.
Why does China have a bunch of electronics companies? Because people outsourced all their manufacturing to China. So all non-China has left, barely, is the hardware design. Cool, so let's outsource that too? So all non-China has left is, oops?
The bigger risk specifically with roomba may be that people who have connected their roomba’s to wifi and have their floor plans mapped and possibly in the cloud.
Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.
There's very low value to the Chinese state to having detailed floor plans of a random person's house. Or even a prominent person's house. A lot of this stuff is semi-public domain regardless as many real estate listings will include a floor plan.
The camera/microphone is more worrying.
> It is complacency or is China just accelerating?
Specifically in the case of Roomba complacency certainly played a role. I have one of their robots for several years already, and while it mostly works fine for my usecases their app is a complete mess. Sometimes the roomba has an issue and aborts a run but there's zero to no detail visible in the app as to why that happened. I seem to be unable to look at old runs, see statistics over time, basically anything that might be useful other than the bog-standard basics, and even those are lacklustre at best.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually reverse-engineered their APIs and made a better app on top of them; the app is comically bad with little to no improvement since I've started using the product.
China's definitely much more advanced that it was twenty years ago. The science, design etc. was much worse than the west, now it's on par or sometimes ahead.
New Chinese phones and cars are incredible.
Yeah, I was just comparing BYD twenty years ago and now.
2005 you had the BYD F3 which was like a bad Corolla rip off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_F3
And now you have them getting the record for fastest production car https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/yangwang-u9-xtreme...
Agree. I visited China recently and every time we ordered a Didi (equivalent to Uber there) we were surprised with their vehicles, we used to order “deluxe” ones and boy we got some fancy electric vehicles.
Their bullet trains are also excellent.
Just wanted to point out that Roborock is now in a similar position - they have completely slept on the roller mop trend - and meanwhile other Chinese manufacturers are building better robots.
There was an interview from a Chinese Founder and he said something that I think accurately sums up the difference.
US R&D may be on top in some areas especially AI or Frontier Tech. But it is at best 2x better than China. What sets Chinese companies apart they can have product from Lab to market and manufacturing at scale that is at least an order of magnitude faster than US, not to mention a lot cheaper.
Motorola Smartphone is now Chinese owned. I dont think people even realise it. Most of the Consumer Appliance from Washing Machine to Microwave are not just manufactured in China, the brand itself are sold off to Chinese companies as well. Toshiba Home Appliances for example. Even if they are not Made in China, they are made by a Chinese Companies in SEA Region.
For TV, most of the LCD Panel are from China. TCL and Hisense are not just copying but innovated with newer panel technology. CSOT Produce the Panel for Sony top range Bravia 9 TV. Inkjet Printing OLED commercially coming out this year.
Even Agricultural tech China is catching up, something traditionally US is strong in. And some of those results are coming in already.
There are a lot more in the pipeline they have been hammering for the past 10 - 15 years and they have finally coming out where most mainstream media haven't covered because they have no idea. I remember reading Bloomberg around 12 years ago saying Tesla Battery facility being biggest in the world and they have never heard or reported anything about CATL.
And there has been a lot more Chinese companies exporting directly. I am wondering if anyone have heard of a brand called laifen where it was massively popular on IG for their toothbrush a while ago. They called it how Apple would have design and make toothbrush. And they are using exactly the same Apple packaging box for their product as well.
Even Beauty products where it used to be R&D and manufactured in South Korea. China is now picking up a lot of market share as well. And it is apparent in Cosmoprof, largest beauty and cosmetics trade show.
Edit: I forgot to mention something I think is bigger than AI. But doesn't get the headline like AI. Robotics. Not only do I believe they are far ahead in Humanoid Robots, they are also manufacturing it better and faster and cheaper. They are already deployed in some places in production already.
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China has won. And they are not Japan in post WWII where US can force them give up certain things. Nor do they have a free flowing currency, arguably their biggest moat where the whole bubble may burst. Barring any black swan event China will dominate in nearly all consumer industries along with other adjacent industries. And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.
And I am writing this on the day they announced [1] Jimmy Lai was found quality under Hong Kong's National Security Law.
[1] Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong tycoon and democratic firebrand who stood up to China
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/jimmy-lai-hon...
It is unfortunate given China's abysmal stance on human rights, freedom of information, and pollution.
Compared to the current hegemony? you must have never felt yourself on the other end of "spreading freedom and democracy"
Fortunately, China is not strongarming or invading the rest of the world.
Compared to the previous dominant superpower of the last 100 years (USA)?
Yes, obviously.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/against-their-will-the-sit...
It's funny that we are running into the same problem that the British had with China in the 19th century:
China doesn't need or want anything from the West, they do not trust the West and they certainly do not want to rely on the West.
The last time the British came up with the ingenuous opium plan. But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.
China loves KFC.
There are other American brands that do well such as Nike, The North Face, Coach, Polo, and Estee Lauder.
And while Hollywood movies have been in decline in China, Zootopia 2 did amazingly well recently.
15 years ago I would've agreed. I saw SUVs with obvious BMW inspired styling cues that had manufacturers badges that were conveniently the same place and the same size as the BMW roundel. I saw Starbucks and Pizza Hut look-alikes. I saw the dismay on the barista's face when I ordered a coffee drink instead of tea. They regarded the US with a sense of awe. When I told my Chinese colleagues it was unlikely that the US would lead the way in nuclear power because only China could do it at enough scale to succeed, they were shocked.
Now the Chinese have their own expensive coffee brands. They even have what one could call private equity with Chinese characteristics: private equity in China is strategic, mostly minority stakes, and often behaves like late stage VC.
I'm not making a moral comparison here. The impact of bad PE deals in China is that an often technology oriented pre-IPO company goes bust, whereas in the US your local hospital will close. Make up your own mind which is worse.
Not to disclaim Britain's & France's atrocities in China - but blaming Mao's victory on those is simplistic at best. China is not a cardboard NPC village, where nothing happens unless the PC's visit and start pulling strings. And while various Chinese people may find it convenient to say "because $western_country did $thing", 99% of actual Chinese decisions are made from their own motives, for their own benefit, with minimal-at-best regard for Westerners.
I am not blaming the Western powers at all and neither did the communists. China was weak and they only had themselves to blame for it.
And of course the Chinese don't give a shit about Western interests. It is the duty of any Chinese government to take care of their own first.
Other than customers
If China doesn't want or need anything from the West, then why do they kvetch so loudly when the US implements trade barriers?
>But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.
This is very insightful. But it's more profound than what's observed on surface. There was a chain of reactions along with many coincident events.
If we consider a collection of human bounded by different glues, i.e. tribes, culture, religions, ethnicities , political beliefs, cooperate, LLCs, etc., as a new form of creature superior to nature animals, then Chinese as a new creature is very special one. Maybe next to Jews.
The failure of Opium war and consequential changes caused a humiliation that created a special stress on this creature, resulted in a strong response which also drove many revolves inside China. Chinese elites seeking different solutions as reaction to those changes.
One big revolt lead by revolutionaries , the predecessor of the Nationalists who fled to Taiwan in 1949, overthrew the last dynasty of China. However it didn't address the issue of humiliation. The elites continue to seeking solutions while tried to reunite China. CPP was one of them.
After WWII, only 2 contesters survived. Another 4 years of civil war later, the Nationalist lost and Republic of China migrated to Taiwan. In 1971, ROC lost the seat in UN, CPP took over as the representative of China.
Both CPP and the Nationalists are nationalists , among others who lost in the history. The majority of early members of CPP, even strongly believe in the Marxist ideology, deep in their heart they are the same as the other nationalists even they hate and kill each other.
Marxism is a tool which is very effective proved by history, used by the unique creature called China to restore its honor and dignity, without the user of the tool even realizing it. Today it is called "Socialism with Chinese character", a heavily modified and unrecognizable version of Marxist ideology.
That's a little long version of
>that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949
I wish I have time to write a book about it as real long version after some time, maybe 10 years.
Yes, being able to pay wages that amount to slavery opens a lot of doors. There is a lot of positive Chinese sentiment on this website, much of it exaggerated, and all of their accomplishments pretty much hinge on being able to exploit their workforce, of which we just sort of wave our hands and dismiss it in these types of discussions.
Not to mention the blatant corporate espionage. They may have some of their own innovations, and I’m sure there are plenty of smart people there who, despite being oppressed, still find joy in building things. But let’s not pretend this is all due to excellence.
And then the Chinese end up stealing any actual IP that may get the US company ahead by being there.
Also, is it still difficult to bring profits back to the US?
Damn'd if you do, dam'd if you don't.
Why do American companies have to rely on artificial protections like IP in order to compete? Don't forget it's only "stealing" if you're culturally inclined to see IP as actual property, whereas in China the idea has long been that ideas are common good, even predating Marxism.
Not to mention that the US was notorious for IP theft until it would up at the apex of the international order. I presume as China becomes economically dominant it too will gradually shift toward rent seeking and patent enforcement.
So stealing trade secrets is legal in China?
Or do they publish all their IP on a government site for all to see?
They introduced more and more IP laws due to requirements from the WTO[https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/completeacc_e.htm...]. At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies, and now we're at the stage where there's essentially legal parity.
Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions. But now they're getting to the point that they can start to lead the conversation.
Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
0: https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/steal-book-elegant-o...
> At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies
Funny how that works.
> Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions
Like making it mandatory to have a Chinese co-owner own 50% for all businesses created in China? I don't remember seeing that in the WTO rules.
> Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
Thanks for the book recommendation!
> Like making it mandatory to have a Chinese co-owner own 50% for all businesses created in China?
I'm not sure what this hat to do with IP laws, could you explain?
> Funny how that works.
It seems to make sense to me, but what are you suggesting?
R&D is very expensive and you want some protection for having borne that cost. If a competitor can just swoop in and clone your tech then they’re at an immediate, unfair advantage.
There is a huge difference between "some protection" and blocking the competition for many decades, because an incompetent patent office has approved many exaggerated claims, either about things that are obvious and well known by anyone in the field, but nobody was shameless enough to claim them in a patent before, or else about things that the patent filer is completely unable to do in the present, but they are claimed in the patent for the case when someone else will figure how to do them in the future.
Today the vast majority of patents are not intended for any kind of licensing and they might be even completely useless if licensed, but they are only intended for preventing competition in the market where the patent owner is active.
In order to be useful, a patent system should start to require again that the inventor shows a working prototype that demonstrates all the features claimed in the patent. Moreover, the patents should expire much faster, certainly not later than after 10 years from being issued. Perhaps a longer validity could be accepted for patents owned by individual inventors, but in any case not for the patents assigned to the employers of the inventors, as most patents are today. Also, patent owners should offer "Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing" (FRAND), otherwise the patent should be invalidated.
Patents aren’t the only means of copying something. I would imagine China has a very sophisticated reverse engineering skill set. Made even easier since pretty much everything is made there so if you want the specs of some component you can just call someone up.
So?
The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US!
On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places.
Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things!
People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymore, and in the same breath get pissed that China doesn't kneel to our absurd IP laws!
The US COULD compete if we put building shit ahead of rewarding some shithead capitalist for someone else's work.
I'm not American.
Yet china's economy where IP isn't respected seems to contradict your point. Why doesn't that counterexample make you change your mind on this?
You’re asking why Chinese companies aren’t stealing from each other?
How do you know they’re not?
Nothing happens in China without State approval so maybe the penalties for encroaching on a State backed entity are quite severe?
He's saying the opposite:
1. Chinese companies steal IP from each other all the time.
2. The Chinese economy is growing quickly and Chinese companies are out-innovating their US competitors in many segments.
And the question then is: do strong IP protections actually benefit innovation? Because China seems to be a counterexample.
Except that you have the technical know how to keep advancing, and have already been producing them before they hit market an have been reverse engineered.
Also a lot of research is already done at, or in cooperation of universities, or with research tax breaks.
Let alone the fact that a lot of patents are absolute bullshit. There are patents on UI elements, even black rubber handles with a hand grip. Not white ones, mind you. It’s insanity and stifles innovation.
But if patents and trademarks and copyright are so incredibly important for innovation, I guess that’s why stuff like math and theoretical physics has the lowest amount of innovation, right?
> artificial protections
Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
IP is an incentive to develop the IP in the first place. Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long? America and Europe have been creating and innovating for centuries and millennia. In recent decades China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West? What is the plan to surpass the West without someone else supplying the IP? Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done? Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
A key difference is that the West are liberal democracies and there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
> Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
No it isn't and this comes across as a straw man. Competing on price, build quality, distribution, aesthetic, service support etc etc are all very real.
> Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
How/why did we ever develop anything prior to 1710? And we can add first movers advantage to the list of "real" protections, as well as prestige, marketing etc.
> And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long?
Define superpower here? It seems to me that Western powers became global powers first because of colonialism, which A) was driven by materials not by IP, and B) caused direct harm to China.
> China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West?
Was China in a bad position before the Europeans arrived? Since the Opium Wars they've been forced to play along or risk being wiped out completely. Where could they be without the west indeed.
> Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done?
Haven't they? It seems that they are very competitive for a host of practical manufacturing reasons that could have been implemented elsewhere if there had been a will or long term vision.
> Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
Japan was completely neutered and propped up by the US for half a century while they "recovered." It's not a comparable situation.
> there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Is there? Did Britain become a superpower because of its free and cosmopolitan society? Is being a superpower our end goal?
> Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
This isn't an argument at all, just an ad hominem not in keeping with site guidelines. I'm happy to discuss but strawmen and as hominems are very off-putting.
That seems to be a problem with many companies. Chinese companies are innovating aggressively while others don’t. You see that with 3d printers where Bambu is kicking ass. I remember when GoPro did a drone and it simply wasn’t good. Or American carmakers are trying to turn back the clock on electric instead of embracing it.
I know people like to say that it is American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies.
This may be true in certain areas, but I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product all while the original company refuses to act.
Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads but I don't believe that's the only reason they are not competitive.
I generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look.
Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this.
Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets). Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration).
„Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
Western politicians did it to us. China was allowed into the WTO but never held to any of the rules.
It is still treated with kid gloves by governments as if it were a developing country despite the fact that it hasn't needed such treatment for decades.
That’s an over simplified view of the world that completely ignores all the benefits of outsourcing our manufacturing to China brought. It may have been short sighted of us, and we may have over valued those short term benefits, over the long term costs, but it wasn’t a decision made by some shadowy group of “politicians”. It was a collective societal decision, to choose easy consumerism, cheap products, and rapid growth in quality of life, over the long term viability of societies.
But this story hasn’t ended yet, and China certainly isn’t treated like a developing country. It’s treated like a country that has a vice grip on our economic nether regions, and we really don’t want to make any sudden unexpected moves.
Those benefits were chiefly lower prices for the manufactured goods. But the Federal Reserve interpreted this as a problem per their mandate to keep CPI going upwards, and created a bunch of new money that went into asset bubbles. So the "benefits" to the average person also included housing unaffordability and the general financialization of everything. Viewed through this lens, it does not seem like any sort of collective societal decision.
The WTO never did much to benefit anyone but capital anyway; I say China is humanity's champion here.
iRobot hasn't got that excuse. They had market dominance and high margins for long enough that, had they retained focus, they could've created follow up products that would've made for durable, defensible market leadership, even if not every product was a success. I hope everyone is clear that that's the world we live in now <cough>Model Y</cough>.
That's how it is today. The R&D will follow the manufacturing capacity, where it's cheaper and more efficient in every way.
The west was extremely foolish to think that IP would scale beyond national markets for very long.
That makes sense, are there any expamples of the Chinese leading in a market + R&D yet?
DJI as consumer and professional drones seems like they‘re most certainly they are also an R&D leader given the fact that there are essentially 0 western competitors.
When it comes to more commodity tech, batteries immediately come to mind. Chins has spent years funding battery research and they are now the biggest supplier for LiIon batteries of basically all kinds. Solar panels seem like another example.
Every category I can think of where China is near-first there is some international manufacturer that has a better product.
Several areas where there are much higher volumes or outstandingly better value though. Things like automotive lidar, construction assemblys (like double glazed window units), consumer electronics like quadcopters.
I recently bought a handheld spectrophotometer for work (color assessment). The product from the leading US company (X-Rite) is ~US$15k in my market. I bought the Chinese equivalent for US$3k. Maybe if I needed guaranteed nine 9s of colour accuracy the US product would be worth it, but for 95% of users in the market, the Chinese product is more than fine.
I have a vague theory that China's massive home market of poorer people keeps the innovation going. There's always an upside for making something 1% cheaper and simpler as more people can buy it.
That gets mocked by rich people in rich countries in the short term but then leads to disruptive innovation from below, cheaper, simpler items growing and eating the market.
I think you are on to something. In the US I feel the focus is more and more on catering to the maybe top 20% who can afford to pay a lot more for things. There are less and less low end cars. Concerts and sports events are super expensive. New apartments are usually in the higher price range. No starter homes anymore. Instead of innovating, we just increase the price of assets.
How about the thread topic, robot vacuums? I don't think any other country can even compete anymore, I can't think of any top non-Chinese model.
I saw a Matic, seemed impressive, but I have very few points to compare with personally.
Bambu wasn't good enough? Perhaps BEVs are?
BEVs most certainly aren‘t. Chinese EVs are strongly competing on price. Based on my own experience with them (n=4). They are very good as a EV, solid as a rolling smartphone, but not leading as being a car. Given the choice, I still would prefer a BMW EV any day.
However, batteries as a commodity are a good example where china is leading as volume and R&D leader
Try a larger n.
They are more than capable. I have just looked at what BMW, Mercedes and Audi have on offer. Then compare what Zeekr and Xpeng has on offer (7X, G9). Quality wise they feel the same or even better.
While I agree as a "complete car" the full package might not quite be there yet. But that is from a European perspective as they mostly are focused on their home markets. But this is changing. This is then simply iterating for product/market fit.
Personally I find the major problems in chinese cars are the software. That is the easy fix and they are getting closer with each iteration.
So much that today I would choose a Zeekr 7X but choose to postpone as the software was too annoying (adaptive cruise control, lane assist, sign recognition, auto brake, audio cues).
The big loss we have with EVs are servicability. But that is a universal problem with all automakers.
or Yangwang, BYD luxury brand.
DJI for consumer drones could be one? They make really good products, including vlogging and action cameras too.
No, as someone in the western side of product development things. The problem is studied in the standard MBA course for Strategy, without even China mentioned.
First-mover advantage, which comes from R&D into new markets is short lived no matter what. It is critical for firms that hit new ground to find ways to continue to grow their position and market as soon as they can. Copy-cat firms always always come, even big western megacorps love to come in and push out the little western corps, this is typically what is taught in said MBA class. Depending on the market, making newer products that are cheaper is absolutely something a firm must evaluate if there is a demand for it that can be a position and a threat to them.
It's simply the song and dance of the business lifecycle. It's one of the many reasons why 90% of startups fail.
Pretty much every American company is just a bank with extra steps.
The big boys would rather own real estate and balance books than sink money into R&D. And acquiring companies is simply easier, and it's basically a broken strategy. If you just keep consolidating you just get a higher and higher valuation, while doing literally nothing.
> American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies.
Let's take Roomba as the example, because "innovate" does not mean what people think it means.
Roomba invented the consumer robot floor care machine and won the market early on. Roomba's competitors innovated more (iteratively adding features) and Roomba has now lost it's independence.
See Blackberry, Motorola for some more recent examples. What the lesson is: there's only one way to go when you are #1 in your market category. You cannot allow gravity to work.
Yeah, "Chinese companies just copies" was 10-15 years or beyond. No way is that relevant now.
I've been wondering about why this is. With no evidence, I wondered if one of the reasons is the long term result of the many design and engineering graduates (I notice an incredible amount in the industry I work in) who were educated in the "best western uni's" and have now returned home and grown up.
They were a honeypot for said uni's for so long. But the end result may now mean they're kicking all asses in product markets.
It can't just be cheap labour ... or maybe it's the combination.
It is definitely still relevant. A friend showed me two products- one from a US manufacturing company he worked for, and one on alibaba- that were practically identical. One was designed and developed, the other an illegal rip off.
The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
I feel like there is a hypothesis that open source and open science has helped the West but the IP laws have slowed innovation whereas China is kind of an open source culture internally which confera an advantage.
While I would love to attribute it to their culture of hard work I believe the credit should go to the combined effect of poor choices made in the west. You cant begin to list our spending on bullshit directly nor instances of money intended for useful things that was lost in bureaucracy. China does this too of course but we are so much better at it.
> Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads
I think this, plus different attitudes to intellectual property are the two big reasons western companies can’t compete.
The general strategy for R&D in the west is to spend significant sums developing a new technology, then building an IP moat around it to prevent direct competition. Our IP laws make this approach viable, and it allows companies to develop something new, then exploit it for decades without needing to innovate further.
China on the other hand does not have this approach to IP. Copying is rife, even between Chinese companies, and generally the idea of being given a state enforced monopoly just because you were first is laughable. As a result, when one Chinese company figures something out, that technology, process, technique, rapidly spreads around the entire market, and all of the competing companies benefit.
This creates few interesting side-effects.
* One a ginormous ecosystem of basic parts and components that are basically common between all competitors in a market (looks at the LiDAR units of robot vacs). This drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players, it’s easy for them to get access to everything they need to build a “good enough” product, without having to do much R&D themselves.
* Two, it forces all companies to innovate and developer technology continuously. There is no state enforced monopoly for IP, so companies can only maintain an edge by innovating and advancing faster than their competitors at all time.
* Three, it’s makes a failure to constantly innovate an absolute death sentence for a company. Not just because they loose their edge, but because it takes time to rebuild the R&D skills needed to innovate as fast as their competitors. Once you start falling behind, you can never catch up, there is no space to financialise a company and sweat its assets. It’ll be dead before you got any return.
All this creates huge problems for companies like Roomba. They developed so very cool tech early on, but stopped innovating as fast, thinking they had a strong edge over any of their competitors, and solid IP moat. Unfortunately once Chinese companies caught up, and figured out how to get around their moat, its was impossible for Roomba defend against these new competitors. They were able to innovate orders of magnitude faster, because the environment that created meant only the fastest innovating companies could survive, they had huge momentum, and also a huge common core of shared components that had driven the cost of a basic robot vac to well under anything iRobot could achieve.
The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well.
I've owned a few 3d printers, including a kit printer, and the Bambu doesn't have any tech that other printers don't. They just always work well, and are easy to maintain.
Others are finally catching up, though. Snapmaker really scared them with the U1 (which is getting insane reviews), and Prusa has finally stepped up and started innovating again, too. The Centauri Carbon is another really good entry-level printer as well and it's eating into Bambu's market.
> The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well.
Everything wrong with the western tech academic/industrial complex in two sentences.
Being that “Making something work really,really well” isn’t seen as innovation?
Important use of “just” to downplay it too.
“The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. ”
That’s basically Apple’s MO
What do you mean they didn't innovative? The H2D and the AMS are new techniques and their latest release is certainly innovative with the 6 extra hotends
They didn't, though?
The H2D's printer/laser combo was done by Snapmaker before that, and the "2 heads" thing was done numerous times in many different ways before the H2D.
The AMS may not have looked exactly like that, but the same idea was already in place by Prusa at least.
Tool changers are not new, and the way that the extra hotends are held and dispensed was already in use in industrial machines. The "6 extra hotends" thing ... I'm willing to admit that might have been an innovation not yet seen in the 3d printing space, but BondTech announced their INDX before Bambu announced their solution. Both were in R&D for years before that, of course.
But Bambu was big and popular long before their current generation of printers. Only the AMS could be seen to contribute to their popularity, and again, it was because it works so well, not because it was a new idea.
> didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well.
I thought that was the difference between "invention" and "innovation"?
"make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products." according to Oxford.
It's a stretch to me to think that "make it work reliably" is a new idea, and their products and methods were all already done by others, but less reliably.
Chinese companies don't have quarterly financial metrics to report to shareholders, which result in severe punishment if the "growth at all costs" strategy isn't followed. This means chasing quarterly profit over innovation, because it's much easier to milk an asset for as long as possible until suddenly it isn't and you're left behind. But that doesn't matter when the pressure is entirely placed on showing financial growth three months from now. Chinese companies are allowed to strategize for the long term, and receive assistance from the CCP to dominate foreign rivals.
They're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially.
We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years.
I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
You're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker.
The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.
Totally agree on those points too, but I think you're giving US companies too much credit when you say:
> playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years"
5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
The Chinese government is heavily subsidizing 3D printers by granting tax deductions up to 200%.
https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
Same for drones, and you know why? Because all of these civilian technologies can be easily leveraged for military... so a) they get the good stuff first because they're leading the sector and b) western countries buy their shit instead of making their own, which means we don't develop the tech and we effectively subsidise theirs
Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.
So why would 3D printer companies in China bother innovating rather than sit back and cash the government check?
Because the owners want to get rich, not live as pensioners.
Why does anyone innovate? When I sell something I don't care if the dollars come from the end user or the subsidy, I just want more of them.
Because there are over 200 competing 3d printing companies in China.
Because China is actually a capitalist free market economy not a communist one.
Chinese companies compete with eachother ferociously. And Chinese society itself is dog eat dog. Everyone wants to make money.
Well, save for the part where the government directs the parts of the economy they care about.
Like Japan 40-50 years ago.,
Anybody who played Doom, or Quake, or Counterstrike knows: if you are not moving, you are dead. And if you try to show a counterexample, and say: "Look, I'm not moving, and I'm alive all right", it's an illusion, because the rockets, grenades, nails, and plasma charges that will slay you are already in flight, you are just failing to see them.
> sits for hours playing a video game
> if you are not moving, you are dead.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but there is some irony here.
Dying in your chair so your game character can live!
The metaphor still works, it's just the timeline changes.
Rats don't sit down to play.
Camping is a viable strategy in many Quake levels, and it is problematic to the point that many servers will kill you if you stay in one place for too long.
Camping is like.. regulatory capture? Stretching the analogy thin here.
First mover advantage.
Can we not do the computer game analogy? it breaks down quickly
Regulatory capture or sitting on an immovable network effect.
Antitrust is like anti camping mods for the server.
Some of the sharks will also do just fine sitting still: https://www.britannica.com/story/do-sharks-really-die-if-the...
Seconded. Something was lost want camping was banned.
Hey! I'm a camper, and I do fine
Beautiful spawn point you have there. I think I'll set up camp.
And if you look at e.g. https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ you can see companies like Dreame and Eufy coming up in the space. It's a really competitive market and these things are getting better at a very fast pace.
I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
There is also another thing where quality Chinese products are very cheap compared to western products. Since Chinese engineers are cheaper, they can live with lower margins on their products.
A roomba was twice as much as a roborock that was better.
Prusa MK4S is 720 EUR, the arguably better Bambu Lab A1 is 260 EUR.
It wasn't labor costs that made the Roomba twice a Roborock, but manufacturing costs. Roomba teardowns basically show that iRobot was just really bad at cost-optimizing their vacuums for mass production.
You can probably maintain your Prusa forever. The Bambu... not so much. It is a philosophy choice here and the 3D printer space is vastly more complex and nuanced for many users than an appliance that has one simple job. Yes if you /just/ want to print stuff and treat it like an appliance as a curious consumer dabbling in the space the Bambu is great. That was never Prusa's target. I don't think the comparison is very strong.
https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
Wow I found Rohorock a bit sucky so god knows how bad a Roomba is.
My theory is to make a decent robot vacuum that can compete with a human and a $50 vacuum and a cheap mop... you would need a 5k price point.
I've been happy with the Roborock but I did not expect it to match the cleaning levels of a human. I can run it while I'm not there or doing other tasks, though, and it does a good enough job until I feel the need to intervene.
When I was looking at getting one, the iRobot one took hours / days to map out a house and it needed the lights on to do that. The Roborock model could do this in 15 to 30 minutes, and it could do it in the dark because it used LiDAR instead of a camera.
That was several years ago now, and iRobot _just_ added LiDAR to their latest models.
I have a Roborock too. It is certainly good at quickly creating a reasonably accurate map, but it just gets stuck so easily. Things like going into an enclosed corner but unable to get out. Or going into a room, cleaning the floor just behind the door such that the door shuts and now unable to leave the room. I certainly cannot run it while not at home. It will just get stuck.
We must have different layouts or settings because I can count on one hand the number of times that it's gotten stuck.
Once it ate a piece of paper and jammed the main roller. The other times have been when it's managed to get itself under an area rug.
If I leave a door open it doesn't touch it. On mine there are settings which tell it to avoid bumping into things.
This is the cost of taking too much funding. Roomba could have remained a modest robovac company and continued indefinitely... they still sell millions of units. American corporate leadership in partner with VCs are chasing massive paydays and absolutely wrecking the companies they're running to do it.
Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down?
I've had my Miele vacuum cleaner for 15 years now, and I bought it second hand. I can still buy bags and filters for it, and when the floor roller piece broke (something heavy fell on it) I was able to buy a replacement one for cheap. I see no reason why it can't go another 10 years.
It feels like a very low probability that a robo-cleaner I buy now will come from a company that (in 10+ years) will a) exist and b) support 10+ year old vacuum cleaners.
I used Valetudo on my early Roborock model and it worked great for many years. Unfortunately, the battery gave out and it's somehow DRMed, so even though everything else works fine, the vacuum refuses to work because it doesn't like the new battery.
It's the worst kind of e-waste, it's only waste because someone decided I should buy a whole new vacuum when the battery dies, but Valetudo is otherwise good. Just never try to look for support at all.
Did you look inside the old battery? It may well be just a bunch of 18650 cells with some electronics in a plastic case. Just desolder the old cells and solder on new ones.
I did the same for my wife's cordless vacuum, and it works better than new, because the new cells are about 2x the capacity of the originals.
This is only good advice if you're good at soldering and know details about cells like which ones have in-built protection.
Otherwise you're just creating a fire hazard.
Luckily, I do happen to know that stuff, so I used the existing board with brand new 18650 cells. Unfortunately, the board seemed to brick itself when it lost power, so the vacuum kept complaining the battery wasn't kosher.
>This is only good advice if you're good at soldering
I meant soldering onto the pre-welded tabs that come with the new cell (unless you have a spot welder). You don't need much soldering experience for that.
>and know details about cells like which ones have in-built protection.
It's highly unlikely that the individual cells would be protected ones. Manufacturers are not stupid to pay N times the cost of a management circuit.
I don't think you'll ever find a battery pack using cells with integrated low-voltage protection, if that's what you're referring to. All that stuff is managed by the BMS. What you should be on the look-out for is the cell's operating range, continuous and max power. Personally I use buy VT6's in bulk and never think about any of that.
Lets go with the usual reminder: de-soldering / soldering Li-ion cells can be super dangerous. With a bit too much of heat it can fire or even explode...
Hobbyists should buy cells with pre-welded tabs. You solder onto the tabs, not the cell terminals.
It doesn't quite explode. Instead it shoots out a super hot flame that is nearly impossible to put out.
Imagine having a blowtouch that you can't extinguish or touch which is likely rolling around.
That sounds exactly like one of the kinds of deflagration (aka low-speed explosion) that seems worthwhile to discourage people from invoking.
"Hey, the worst case is that you get jets of super-hot flames that are impossible to extinguish!"
I did. Still, DRM.
DRM feels like conjecture. You admitted to working on it, it's also possible you broke it / didn't hook it up correctly?
Maybe, but I also know how to measure voltages, and everything was fine.
Except, I guess: It didn't work, so it wasn't fine.
I mean, if you want to think I broke it, you're free to. The fact remains that my battery connections were correct, the voltages were right, but the vacuum didn't work with either the battery I made or the new one I bought.
Oh boy the creator of valetudo sure has an abrasive writing style. Whatever works for him, I guess.
It's too bad because it's such a great project otherwise. He puts a ton of free labour into the system and I'm sure he's dealt with some entitled users but it's really a huge reason I don't recommend it to more people. Actively telling people they must learn to solder and making the only support channel on telegram are two big turn-offs for a lot of people.
This is absolutely his right and perhaps his intention to keep the project small, but in that case I wish there was another alternative vacuum firmware project.
This stuff should flat-out be illegal.
I think it now is, in the EU. Still trying to figure out whether I can salvage this vacuum...
Please blog about it if you can, success or not!Also, I hope John Deer won't succeed with their attacks on the Right to Repair in US nor EU
For me it's so weird nobody makes a thing you can trust. I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud and the need to do some hacking with valetudo, with an official service and support for the device. Yet nobody is willing to take the money. They'd rather go bankrupt..
> I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud and the need to do some hacking with valetudo, with an official service and support for the device. Yet nobody is willing to take the money. They'd rather go bankrupt..
I feel like you are over estimating market demand based on your own preferences. Been there, done that. Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
The market for privacy focused vacuum robots (at a significant premium) is probably not even going to pay for the injection mould tooling
>Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.. and there's this weird idea of owning thing you were sold, i know - its' a bit weird.
Just like when you go buy some food you don't have to think if it is safe to eat.
>No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.
But that is orthogonal to the goals of many governments, as I'm sure they have access to most of them either by official or unofficial channels/backdoors.
Unfortunately, companies prioritize profits over everything else, and sometimes that is at the expense of what should be the morally right thing to do. They can only be pursuaded against this by regulation, which they're also in a position to influence at their will. To say nothing about the usual government incompetence and tech illiteracy, which is another factor for technology products specifically.
And then you add the point GP was making, which is that regulation only happens when citizens demand it, and it is politically favorable. The extremely low percentage of the market that demands privacy and security, coupled with everything else, means that these things rarely if ever happen.
> Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
Most techies vastly overestimate how much money most people have available for nice-to-haves like privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
this. Thank goodness i'm a broke phd student.
Maybe I should buy some broke phd students for vacuuming then. Perhaps take their phones while they work, so that they aren't connected to the cloud.
> Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
Exactly. Everyone I’ve talked to about my own robot vacuum (which is using Valetudo, so not phoning home to China) just kind of shrugs and says “who cares if audio and video inside my house are being piped to China, I don’t do anything interesting, what use would they have for it?” This also applies to other consumer electronics that do similar things.
They just can’t conceptualize that _in aggregate_ all this mundane information can be wielded by bad actors for their own gains. Which is funny, because they certainly have strong opinions about how Facebook et al are being used to push misinformation.
Yeah. The real options are usually: a Chinese device from a company that seems nebulously a little close to their government, imported (so, limited need to follow local safety or privacy regulation); or, a US product from a company with explicit connections to the Google/Facebook/Amazon network, and with a warranty that lasts a whole month (as long as you don’t open the battery hatch).
I don’t know if people would pay 3X for something that actually works in their interest, probably not, but it isn’t as if such a product has been tried in the last ~50 years.
>I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud a
Those wall-to-wall advertising packed smart TVs that cost $350 for a 65" outsell the $1500 65" 10 to 1.
People love low prices. Their concerns about privacy are a distant second or even third (after aesthetics).
> Yet nobody is willing to take the money.
It’s weird that you have identified this business opportunity with such confidence, but you are also unwilling to take the money.
As it is so easy to start a mass production of vacuum cleaners, yes. Give me a week in my garage. TBH I have zero idea where I should go to start a business of such scale even if I have a 100% zero-risk shot which is never the case. Not everybody has an MBA, some of us just code stuff.
Mine doesnt need cloud or internet. AIRROBO P20
For what it's worth I never connected my 5-years-old Xiaomi Mi to the Internet - I just push the button and it starts. A wheel stopped working this year but I bought the replacement and installed it without much fuzz.
As for modern vacuums I have no idea what happens if you never set up their WiFi.
Your best bet would be to check which models are supported by Valetudo, which is a local-only firmware replacement: https://valetudo.cloud/ and https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo
valetudo is just a hack, not a firmware replacement, and could be blocked by a firmware update from the OEM
plus it can void your warranty
Installing Valetudo stops any firmeware updates forever from the OEM. [1]
I wouldn't consider it a hack. It's an alternative way to run your vacuum, with yes potentially less features if the OEM makes a lot of future updates, but Valetudo also comes with their own set of updates.
[1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/usage/firmware-updates.html
> plus it can void your warranty
Unless you happen to live in a jurisdiction that care more about users than companies, like the EU. The manufacturer would have to prove that the new custom firmware is actually the cause of the damage, otherwise they need to fulfill the warranty guarantee regardless of what firmware you run.
Good luck proving that changing the firmware is not voiding a warranty.
> Good luck proving that changing the firmware is not voiding a warranty.
You're thinking about it the wrong way around. The manufacturer has to prove that the custom firmware is the reason it broke, you don't have to prove anything. Username not accurate.
>Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down?
It depends on what exactly you want. My Roborock can't connect to my Wi-Fi anymore for some unfathomable reason. It no longer runs automatically, and I can't edit its map or tell it where exactly to clean. I just hit the power button once a day to start it manually, and it cleans everything it can access.
Had a Neato Botvac D7 for many years, works completely offline and it's cleaning route is pretty smart using lidar.
Can't vouch for their newer models just because this one has worked so well for years.
My D7 lost its mapping capability (including markerless no go zone) a few weeks ago due to the new owner pulling the plug early on their server. An enthusiast is jerry rigging an offline solution thanks to a vuln in an earlier firmware, but for those unwilling to solder an esp32 to the debug port of their vacuum they essential got a lesser robot overnight.
Neato went bankrupt lol
> Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down?
What do you mean? Why would you need an internet connection for a vacuum cleaner?
(Sorry for asking, I've never owned a robot one, plus I am old.)
Lots of modern appliances connect to the Internet, have multiple computers inside that need updates, maintenance, maybe subscription payments, and that need to phone home everything they see, hear and do.
Huh, why is that? Admittedly, I only own older appliances, but somehow they don't require updates.
Subscription payments? For household devices you own?
I suspect "phoning home" is a good incentive for manufacturers, but why would anyone buy such a device then?
Not buying them means usually having a good understanding what "smart" means, or why having an app as a requirement is silly. The mean consumer has no idea what any of that means, they sometimes even lack the technical vocabulary needed to put into words what annoys them.
Dunno, but welcome to the world post-IOT.
You've apparently been off the web and out of stores for over a decade. Home Depot sells a bluetooth-connected shower head (just the head - it doesn't turn the water on). There are smart thermostats that are wifi connected so you can change the temperature of your house from anywhere in the world... for reasons...
You're right, I'm trying hard to practice digital detox as much as I can. Unfortunately, for job and family reasons I cannot give up an internet connection at home, but I have never owned a mobile phone in my life.
It often feels strange when I peak out my head into the real world as it exists today.
I have a roomba i3, it's blocked at the network level, but it is connected to my home assistant instance. It can clean and map rooms but doesn't communicate with the cloud because of the network blocking.
Check out valetudo.
Second this if you are willing to do some mild hardware hacking. I've been running valetudo on two Dreame L10 vacuums for three years without issue. Keeps a lot of the smart features, for use over lan instead of a cloud connection.
I have bought a Dreame L10 Ultra with Valetudo in mind, but I discovered that if you skip connecting it to the internet during the setup process, you can still use it normally. I don’t care about any of the smart features and simply start a full cleaning or a spot cleaning by pressing a hardware button on the robot itself.
Yeah, just press the button? I thought all machines have that.
Just buy an old Roomba on Ebay. Mine doesn’t even know what the internet is. You push the button and it goes. There is a huge market of cheap aftermarket batteries for it.
I mean, Miele make one, so there’s that. No idea if it’s any good.
Obviously no guarantee that Miele will exist in a decade, but I wouldn’t bet against them personally.
I don’t get where the fear mongering is coming from on this. All or nearly all robot vacuums have controls for their various functions on the side. Plenty of robotic vacuums even come with remotes so you can program schedules without a phone/wifi/internet. If you go really cheap you can get decent robots that won’t even let you connect to WiFi if you tried (at least as of a few years ago).
I have eufy 11s. It does a braindead bump-and-run algorithm that uses no computer vision and does not map your room. It's a bit slower, but still does a solid job. Cheap too.
One of the privacy fears stoked about iRobot years ago was about them "selling maps of your home to the highest bidder" for advertising purposes. E.g., https://gizmodo.com/roombas-next-big-step-is-selling-maps-of...
The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table? How much would Charmin pay to know I have two rooms with tiled floors?
What iRobot actually suggested was more mundane: that there could hypothetically exist a protocol for smart devices to share a spatial understanding of the home, and that their existing robot was in a favorable position to provide the map. The CEO talking about it like a business opportunity rather than a feature invited the negative reception.
It didn't help that a few years later, photos collected by development units in paid testers' homes for ML training purposes were leaked by Scale AI annotators (akin to Mechanical Turk workers). This again became "Roomba is filming you in the bathroom" in the mind of the public.
The privacy risk seemed entirely hypothetical—there was no actual consumer harm, only vague speculation about what the harm could be, and to my knowledge the relevant features never even existed. And yet the fear of Alexa having a floorplan of your home could have been great enough to play a role in torpedoing the Amazon acquisition.
> The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table?
I've no idea about rug pile depth, but I'd have thought a simple link between square footage and location would be a reasonable proxy for that affluency.
A simpler signal: Did I buy the $250 Roomba 105 or the $900 Roomba Max 705?
I'm not sure about that. The wealthiest people I know are also the most careful about where they spend their money.
Maybe so, but the poorest people I know don't buy the most expensive tech toys.
I mean, their teenage kids certainly lobby for them, at least as far as iPhones go...
Sure, but a simple address database seems like a lot easier way to get there than robots roving around houses with LIDAR?
Not sure that works though for flogging, say, client IP to affluency data to advertisers, unless they can already reliably pinpoint the client IP to an address (which for all I know, maybe they can).
Did Roomba ever use lidar? I thought their mapping feature was a camera pointing to the celling which is bringing in much richer data than lidar.
Robot vacuums with lidar don't even need internet connections to work.
The roombas with cameras don't need an internet connection to work-- they need it if you want the app control features like scheduling. The imagery based navigation is still local.
When I got one in ~2019, I covered the camera and connected it long enough for it to get firmware updates (which annoyingly you can't trigger and it takes a few days)... then I firewalled it off to get no internet access.
I later figured out that if you let it connect and firewall it off it just sits in a tight loop trying to connect again hundreds of times per second which meaningfully depletes the battery faster.
Changing the SSID name so it couldn't connect to the wifi solved the problem.
I'd like to get a new one-- the old one still runs well (with some maintenance, of course) but the latest robot vacuums are obviously better. Unfortunately at least some are more cloud dependent and I can't tell which are and to what degree.
Nothing to hide, huh
Would the US security leviathan give away other people’s money for highly current floor plans of every residence in the country just on the 1-in-a-million chance they decide to kick in your door and shoot your dog? Probably.
You’re looking at this from a point where the only piece of information about you out there is the data collected by the roomba. In reality, every sensible data broker would just add that signal to your already verbose profile and feed it to a model to determine the stuff you’re likely to buy… or would trigger you to generate engagement or whatever is needed.
The privacy danger here is not the one data point, it’s the unknown amount of other parties who will mix and match it with more data.
With GDPR, I’ve been requesting copies of my telemetry from various corps and it’s amazing the kind of stuff they collect. Did you know kindle records very time you tap on the screen (even outside buttons), in addition to what you read and highlight and pages you spend time on? Now add to that your smart tv’s insights about you and your robot vacuum cleaner … you see now this all grows out of control.
I don't get this, so you're saying than they can and do sell maps of your home to the highest bidder. But... it's actually overblown, even though they're doing exactly what people were concerned they were doing?
It's MY home! I don't want anybody filming it or recording it or selling maps of it. Full stop!
No: I did not say that they sell maps of anyone's home.
They floated the idea of "shar[ing] maps for free" with other companies in a Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-irobot-strategy-idUSKBN1A... I am skeptical it ever happened.
> [iRobot CEO] Angle said iRobot would not sharing data [sic] without its customers' permission, but he expressed confidence most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.
The "sharing data" here meant sharing data with other brands' smart home devices but appears misinterpreted as "sharing data with advertisers/data brokers/etc." Say Sonos wanted to make a hi-fi system that optimized audio to your room layout based on Roomba's map.
Upon careful re-reading of the article, I think what the CEO was saying was that they were pursuing becoming the spatial backend for Alexa / Google Home / HomeKit, but the journalist wrote Amazon / Google / Apple, which makes it seem more about advertising data collection than about smart home technology.
(Evidence that this is the correct interpretation: Facebook, despite being a giant data harvesting and advertising operation, was not listed as a potential partner, because they do not have a smart home platform.)
If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline.
It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily customize routes or focus on specific rooms; do a shockingly good job at self-emptying; and best of all you don't have to rescue them from the exact same sliding door track every single time you run them.
I read a story about Dreame. The founder worked in aerospace, but wanted to make a mass-produced motor with aerospace standards. So he modelled air flow using aerospace tools, built the motor to tight tolerances. Conventional vacuum motors run at 30k rpm, his runs at 100k rpm. Then he standardises on a single motor, for all his devices, robovacs, stick vacs etc, so he gets scale.
Yeah that's marketing. There's no such thing as aerospace only CFD, and all tolerances are subject to cost/benefit trade offs.
They might be great designers and talented engineers, sure.
Dyson's stick vac motors have been above 100k RPM for almost two decades.
Well now I’m sold
Dont be. Source: tried roborock and dream. They are both useless because you spend so much time troubleshooting it dealing with stuck issues you may as well get the cheap vac out.
Datapoint: I've used my Roborock s7 max ultra in three different households (2 houses, 1 apartment) and have had zero issues with this.
It actually was night and day compared to the $1000 equivalent roomba I had at the time. lidar is the game changer in this space, and roomba was complacent with their technology.
I've had a few issues, but they're far from useless. The issues are, e.g. a sofa has tapered legs so the end part is very low to the floor and basically invisible so the vacuum gets stuck there. I've placed a rag that stays there above the leg and nobody sees it or cares except the robot.
I have used Roborock for ~7 years and now own 3 of them (different floors/areas). Absolutely no issues.
Largely the same here; as long as do regular maintenance on them to keep them relatively clean, clean out hair and related, they just run.
I had a Roomba+Braava Jet for a few years and I constantly had some issues with both devices, but the worst part was that in theory they should be working well together. There's this function "linked cleaning" where Braava mops the floor right after Roomba finishes vacuuming. But in practice it often didn't work, either the automation didn't trigger, or Roomba got stuck somewhere, cancelled the cleaning, and then Braava started mopping floor that hadn't been vacuumed.
Eventually I moved to Roborock with vacuum+mop in a single device. It still has its issues, but it is ten times better. It's able to lift the mop on the carpet, the mop is self-cleaning, and it has a large tank so that I only have to refill the water once a week instead of every other day. Day and night. Roomba eventually introduced a similar model, but it's been years after competitors had them.
I second your option about Roborock. Also Dreame. Although I use both of them after rooting with Valetudo and connecting to my home assistant.
Just out of curiosity as I don't own a vacuum robot: do yo loose any key functionality by rooting your device with Valetudo, compared to what the manufacturer offers?
Yes, they put that on their website. That if you are looking for features, stick with the original firmware. Valetudo is for privacy. That being said, they still support most of the features and honestly I don't miss anything.
Which one do you like better and why?
I have a second-hand "dumb Eufy" and it's great. No cameras, no microphone, no Wi-Fi, no app, no calling home to mommy. It just spins, sucks and bangs (gently) around my house and I don't get mad when it gets stuck. It cleans under things I can't reach easily with a vacuum, and it cost me almost nothing.
Yea same here, it’s great
Absolutely. I bought a new Roomba after my old one died and was surpised to learn it's basically unchanged and still just as stupid as the old one. Returned it, got a Dreame X40. Much better, night and day difference.
Currently looking to make my living space robot friendly, I wonder: can they clean hard to reach spots behind doors or under the ledge of a sofa (I can't remove every obstacle)?
>can they clean hard to reach spots behind doors
Robovacs aren't a drop-in replacement for a maid, they aren't a fire and forget cleaning solution for a house that's already dirty and messy or have constant spills and stuff left on the floor, but more for regular maintenance of an orderly place that still gets cleaned or maintained in the tough to reach places every now and then.
But if your place resembles a crack house, a robovac won't magically clean it.
The newest ones have arms to pick up objects on the floor. Your comment is still valid, but it may pick up that crack vile ;)
"vial".
Certainly "vile", but that's not a noun.
Doors no, couch yes (if it fits). I wouldn’t get one unless you see value in having 80% of your home vacuumed once a day. For me that’s still a huge improvement and spending a few minutes spot vacuuming every two weeks or so is all I need to handle the corner cases.
i got roomba less than year ago, because it was hard to find well reviewed non-mop vacuum with docking station that sucks all the dirt out.
The common solution is to just buy the cheapest Roborock that does a great job at vacuuming, even if it has a mop (that you never have to use).
I got a Q7 M5+ for this exact reason, for $265 shipped. (And yes, that includes a self-emptying bin.)
For the vacuum function, it seemed to be highly rated.
> non-mop vacuum
Such a good point. Vacuum wars website has no way to filter out vacuums without mop (my house is mostly carpet, I do want a good product but they are all with mops nowadays).
It's such a common issue with sites like this. It's either all products or products WITH this feature. No way to find products WITHOUT this feature.
Anyway quite happy with my Mova which is a rebranded Dreame.
I have a Roborock S5, and when I don't use the mop, I just remove the mop AND the water tank. And without the water tank it never gets stuck in doors.
it feels like getting instead of pickup track minivan, removing 2 rear seating rows and then chopping off parts of roof and doors
my house is actually mostly tiles/hardwood (at least areas that are accessible for roomba). but i want it just to be vacuumed.
polished tiles will always have some water marks after washing and require pass with floor buffer to buff it out. i also don't want to deal with with clean/dirty water (yeah, i know that are now few models that you can hookup to drain/water supply. but it's not exactly trivial to arrange in convenient way).
what i really want, is dock integrated with central vacuum.
I have a pretty old Roborock, and I can just not attach the mop and have it in vacuum only mode.
> what i really want, is dock integrated with central vacuum.
I have two dogs that shed HEAVILY. I fear to even turn my robovacuum on, since getting them.
I NEED THIS!!!
i bypassed this specific problem by getting dogs that don't shed (frankly, i shed more than both of them).
i contemplated getting spare dock for my roomba and modding it. but one thing I didn't figure out yet it's a how to close opening into central vacuum piping when it's not actively engaged. probably possible to do something with servos/etc, but it feels like too complicated/messy
You can avoid water marks by using distilled water.
water marks in this case will be because water mixes with dirt and it's not 100% wiped off and polished off
You fix this by doing a cycle of vacuuming first. Robots allow you to clean frequently to prevent large buildups. It's the same as if you were cleaning by hand. I have tiles as well and no dirty water marks.
i have robot running daily. it will never pick up 100% of everything. because if it would have picked up 100% there would be no need in mopping.
when i did robot shopping year ago, based on reviews and feedback it (vacuum before mopping) doesn't always work and the more polished your floor is, the worst the outcome
No, mopping is not for dust, but rather for sweaty/greasy/sticky matter that accumulates and can't be recovered by vacuuming. This is why proper cleaning is vacuuming + mopping, and it was like this before the invention of the cleaning robot.
You can also mix a non-foaming detergent with the distilled water to have an even more thorough cleaning (or just ask the robot to pass more than once). Robot mops are typically rougher to compensate for the lack of detergent, though.
It's the same for professional car cleaning - it's done with distilled water. If what you said was true, it would be impossible to clean cars as they are much more polished than tiles.
so it's going back to square 1: sweaty/grease/sticky matter not going to be picked up 100% by mop after it was diluted by water. distilled water or not distilled water.
this is why floor buffers exist. to buff the floor so it will be nice and shiny.
professional car cleaning usually made with deionized water. much easier than bringing distillery. but even with usual water on my car there will be usually no marks after wiping it with towel.
Where is Lina Khan who struck down the acquisition? Read the comments from the FTC. That was from less than two years ago. I am all for antitrust but Lina Khan was inept as they come in terms actually dealing with anti competitiveness in the tech.
This is called dumping. Long-term dumping but it is what it is.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
So an American company (amazon) was going to buy iRobot, but that was struck down by the courts.
Now a Chinese company is buying them and there's no problems.
is that the background on that?
They struck it down because they said it hurts competitiveness based on faulty economic arguments. It was clear even two years ago that the market was extremely competitive with much cheaper iRobot copies. Lina Khan just didn’t want Amazon to save an American company. Plain and simple. Anybody in the robotics field in MA could have told you iRobot was struggling and that Amazon was throwing them a bone to keep those engineers afloat.
The Chinese company has outstanding loans, it's not an "acquisition" per-se. It's the Chinese supplier getting made whole.
Shouldn't first CFIUS oversee this takeover?
People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service).
If you were happy with your Roomba you could keep it running for many many years. You only needed to buy a new Roomba if you wanted new features.
Thanks to the full Chinese supply chain, you can replace every single part of the roborock. Even if Roborock doesn’t sell it directly, someone does. I’ve owned a couple and I haven’t had any main board die. But you can buy anything from the wheels, to main board, to lidar online.
I liked how you could buy an official Roomba spare parts kit, though.
In a mechanical device meant for messy places, parts necessarily wear out quicker than in most electronics, and being able to buy and swap out the parts easily seemed like a nice feature.
My Roomba has many years by now, and I've swapped a few parts.
But I've bought parts from China, because my local dealer sells the parts at very high prices, if he ever has them in stock.
Same here, AliExpress for the custom parts like brushes etc at 1/5th of the price.
Aside from having parts available, I was unexpectedly impressed that my RoboRock self-emptying dock (c. 2023) was clearly designed for painless serviceability. The ducts are easily accessed via removable panels, and you need only a Phillips screwdriver.
That said, the performance of the robot certainly degraded over time, and I haven't identified the cause to my satisfaction. Obstacle avoidance needs work (especially for charging cables left dangling off the couch), and the map is frustrating to edit and seems to degenerate over a 6 month period.
I’ve repaired a eufy vacuum without issue, pretty easy to find repair parts as others have mentioned. I replaced a wheel assembly that wasn’t working quite right.
Repair shops will refuse to look at them outright; pretty frustrating they wouldn’t take my money and I had to do it myself. But I think that was categorical for all robot vacuums.
In general though, robot vacuums as a category are improving so quickly I doubt repair is the right options many times. A 10-year-old (or even 3-year-old, because they were always so behind) Roomba is almost like running a 10 year old Intel Mac in 2025.
This was the main reason I bought a Roomba last year. It wasn't clear to me that any competitor could match their repairability and availability of parts.
They outsourced production to China thinking that they can just do the marketing in US.
Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.
Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.
Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
Because that's always the case at the beginning, the country doesn't matter. It takes time to learn and improve. People look at the first or second generation models, get complacent and then they are surprised that by the third or fourth generation those remote countries start to innovate and sell better and cheaper products.
It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably.
By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.
> I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.
miki123211 made almost that exact claim in a sibling comment to yours, and is presumably a westerner.
This is replication.
THe Chinese seem to be extremely good at taking western products and just layering on tons of incremental improvements, which make their versions that much better. It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
Well, allow me to make a suggestion, that the US came up with the original idea, in 1947 - the transistor, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Similar to how Germany had been capitalizing on the invention of combustion engine and various chemical processes for a century. Now, the curve of innovation on top of the fundamental invention (of the transistor) is in the flattening out region, where all the low hanging fruits had been taken down, and now it's about the remaining 5% of polishing - something that the labor force of well fed and comfortable nation is not really motivated to do.
> It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
I think that's a dangerous assumption to make. Certainly it's true that for most major technologies so far, western countries were first - but that's probably mainly because China's been busy playing catch up. But now the Chinese have huge numbers of factories, suppliers big and small, machine shops, PCB fabs and experienced engineers. You really think they're not coming up with original ideas?
Any engineer will tell you a new product is a little bit of idea and a lot of execution. The Chinese are able to execute in a way that the west isn't any more.
That's a generalization with some truth, but in this case it was blatantly obvious that iRobot was not putting much effort into improvement - or was not effective at improvement. They basically ignored the moat and relied on their headstart to the point that even brand new entrants to the market could equal or overtake them in an initial product offering.
And the business model aspects they relied on for their protective moat - e.g. mass commercial electronic production - was generalized and massively optimized in China (not just for vacuum robots but mass commercial electronics).
> It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
Nah, they just had access to more capital. That hasn't been true in a while tho.
It's not just marketing, iRobot basically stopped innovating. For commodity items like robot vacuums or pool cleaners, there is a relentless pressure to innovate. You can't simply coast or else you will soon find yourself left behind.
This is a good article to describe the viewpoint of Chinese iRobot competitor https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...
The best robovac was Neato. Lidar and mapping 13 years ago. No cloud.
Too bad our American leaders sold us out.
It's pretty crazy just how much better the Neatos were than brand new ones. I wonder if that (German?) company has tried to sell the IP? RIP...
Vorwerk group. No idea, but it’s pointless imho.
Roborock and Eufy (and other competitors) clearly either stole or reverse-engineered the tech.
If the IP had enough value then I’m sure Vorwerk would’ve pursued it in court.
But here we are.
Vorwerk makes really good hardware and home appliances. Its only negative part is the almost pyramidal sales style. It's not really pyramidal as in the scam, because you actually buy something and you don't need to become a seller, but it uses "regular housewives" [1] as sellers.
[1] at least 30 years ago, now many of them do also another paid work (not Vorwerk-related) on top of unpaid house chores.
Any idea why they just sat on the product? Even today, I feel the product is unmatched.
Zero creep factor (ignoring later cloud offering)..
They still make a robot vacuum: https://www.vorwerk.com/de/de/c/home/landingpages/kobold/sta...
Well, I don't know how much you can innovate in that space, while keeping things reliable for decades like Vorwerk does. I own a (2n hand) TM31 that's probably 15 years old now, and I have friend with the TM21 (I guess?) which is like the first version and it has over 20 years now and it's still perfectly working.
Last versions, with big LC touchscreen, recipes on a cartridge o downloaded from Internet, and now I read that latest one can reach 160C to caramelize things or can do slow cooking.
I mean, I don't feel like they sat on the product, although the other day I saw a cooking robot from some other (japanese?) manufacturer which had 2 bowls in the same machine to cook 2 things at the same time. That seems an interesting feature Thermomix is missing.
Not all innovation or value offerings are technical, though admittedly it's what first drew me in.
Example: I buy an iPhone over the competition because it's a superior experience. Their walled-garden (RIP) made for a less appealing attack vector than Android, their commitment to privacy is real (a reflection of Tim Cook), and how they as a company project those values against government entities are all positives.
Before then, I never imagined buying Apple products; and always believed they were overpriced (in many respects, yes) but there are other harder-to-quantify benefits.
There is not much tech to steal here. 2D lidar mapping is something a high schooler could do 10+ years ago, and that was their core tech. The value was in executing earlier and better, and applying existing tech to robovacuums. If they could have sued they likely would, this is a valuable market.
It’s not just mapping.
Also, I recall Neato was often purchased and cannibalized by researchers for its lidar.
This was all cutting edge 10+ years ago. Even today, the features it supported offline then is just matched at best today in 2025/2026.
Not exceeded; and often crippled when offline.
There is not that much more to it than lidar and 2D slam as far as the core technology. There are a lot more features yes but they are not nearly as valuable. I agree they are better, but that's for reason of execution and non-enshitiffication, not core tech.
Unintentional I’m sure, but that’s a goalpost shift.
What made cloudless Neato amazing was how many real-life edge cases it handled well. That’s where the innovation was.
It’s the integration of the vacuum and sensors along with great software that allowed it to handle furniture shifts and creeping up to stairs without being confused.
I think of it this way: Tesla’s core tech were batteries and electric motors. Nothing groundbreaking. But integrating the core tech as a vehicle took real effort and trial-and-error; then more, in order to make a manufacturing pipeline.
Sorry if I sound bitter. I fell in love with the product on my first purchase and was mortified when the market utterly failed to reward them for the innovation.
Yeah, this company went through an amazingly bad period. They quite innovating, and also worked really hard to segment their products in a way that would extract every last $ out of the consumer. "Oh you want it not to run into things? You'll need one more step up for another $100-200" It wasn't really based on the hardware, so much as the intentional limitations of the software.
Meanwhile cheap roborocks had no arbitrary limitations and more honest marketing.
I miss the optimism that this company used to have, but I won't miss the entity that they became.
I haven't seen a useful innovation in a robovacuum for at least a decade. What are you talking about?
Biggest issue has been the flood of cheap chinese units on the market - like GoPro, they had nowhere to go, and got beat on price once feature parity was achieved (which didn't take that long).
Emptying into the dock instead of having to empty the robot's dustbin weekly and almost everything involving mopping in combined units is within that time range. Lidar mapping was also pretty rare a decade ago, Neato was the first and it took a while before others did it too, then there was apps for controlling no-go zones using those maps instead of variations of virtual walls, if they had anything like that at all.
Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.
There are ones that integrate into your furniture, a bit like a dishwasher - plumbing included.
Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.
Roborock has a model with robot arms. Quite pricy at the moment though.
Poor reviews so far. Needs iteration or two to perfect it.
I got roomba with self emptying dock back in 2018 or so (i think the only one who had it before was ecovacs). same model also came with virtual walls.
The roller mop vacuum are getting incredibly good; that is in the last year also.
Just got a Mova z60, it's shocking how much progress has been made even in the last 5 years compared to my old lidar Roborock. The z60 can even hurdle over small barriers.
How many general public appliance makers out there have a competitive production line outside of China ?
As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.
BSH (Bosch, Siemens, Neff brands) have their main production sites in Europe, a lot in Germany still. But of course China as well. https://www.bsh-group.com/about-bsh/bsh-worldwide/
Miele (at a more premium price point) production is even more concentrated in Germany. https://m.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm
(Edit: No replies after 8 hours, but of course they then came in quickly after Europe woke up..)
Thanks !
On Miele, they sure seem to make a sizeable effort to keep as much as they can in Germany, including the motors, electronics etc.
They seem to expand vacuum cleaner factories in China as well, but it could be the best of both world with a company dedicated to push the local ecosystem as much as they can, and go beyond when absolutely needed.
These are competitive on quality, but are they on price and scale?
How many US homes have a Bosch/Miele washer/dryer vs LG/Samsung? (Outside of NYC).
Don't know about the US. From what I can tell Samsung and LG appliances are certainly less common in Europe than the European brands (there's also cheaper brands like Beko or Gorenje).
https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/domestic-vacuum-cleaners shows China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Mexico as having a significant trade surplus in domestic vacuum cleaners.
The German luxury brands have made the "made in Germany" shtick a core part of their marketing. So Miele, Gaggenau, Vorwerk, ect.
Bosch/Siemens are far larger than those, but they outsourced a lot. But even here, significant parts of the higher-end stuff is still made outside China.
I was rather happy with my old, dumb Roomba. It just bounced around until things were clean. No cloud required. No mapping. No AI marketing foo. Seems like all the newer alternatives want internet access and send maps of your premises to some cloud somewhere. Seems completely unnecessary to me.
Roomba couldn’t remember map, so when you wanted to clean part of the apartment you had to build barriers or just walk with it. It also got lost way too many times.
As for the Chinese products - look at Valetudo. If you write about cloud and privacy considerations then you are already aware enough to just flash it and you have local, cloud-free, GREAT product.
Any pointer on how to flash it?
Go to the website, it has step by step guide for the supported robots: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
Check Valetudo's getting started page.
I still have one like that, and it runs mostly fine, but is partly held together by duct tape these days. Not replacing it as long as I can keep it running.
Especially considering that story some year ago about photos taken by Roombas that had been uploaded to the cloud and leaked.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
Mapping is very useful. I get the want to safeguard your data, but having smart navigation and obstacle detection just makes the product better.
Are you implying that internet access is required in order to have "smart nagivation" and obstacle detection? If so, could you clarify what you think the connection is?
No, I'm implying mapping is useful. I'm certain you can have local only mapping. But OP seemed to put the mapping as well as the rest of the features in the "unnecessary" bucket and my problem is that I consider mapping super necessy.
Ok, I see. I think that you're right.
Maybe mapping is very useful to you. The lack of it hasn't bothered me in the slightest. You also don't need mapping (or internet access) for obstacle detection. But I find that the old dumb roomba's bumpy nature is a good motivator to keep my place somewhat free of obstacles, which has other benefits.
YMMV.
I like being able to tap my phone a couple times and tell it to clean out e.g. the area around my cat's toilet, or my kitchen floor after I spill something, etc...
You can still find ones that don't need to be registered online and will work without WLAN or app. They will not remember the room layouts and you won't be able to lay virtual fences, but apart from that they work fine.
Roomba should have taken Detroit's approach and asked the government to make any of the better vacuums cost 3x the price of a Roomba
I wonder what happens to the app and cloud functionality.
> Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganized company. The company’s common stock will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan.
Hopefully they keep the lights on.
I had a roomba i5 fully stop working earlier this year. It said it couldn't connect to the internet but I believe what it meant was "some aspect of the remote server has decayed to the point that it no longer works with this platform". I threw it in the trash, vowed to never let this happen again, and got a valetudo machine.
I think the lights have been off for some time already.
This is surprising to me because not long ago I bought a Roomba i5 specifically because it was one of the few robot vacuums that could still work fully off-line (in the "just vacuum everything reachable" mode, but I don't need anything else).
We moved this year and couldn't get my old(ish) Roomba i5 to work in my new wifi easily. I've been meaning to debug the problem further, but if it can be confirmed that it's an iRobot issue and there's nothing I can do, it would save some effort.
It sucks, though, that I can use my fucking vacuum cleaner because a remote server of the manufacturer has decayed. Does anyone know if there are robotic vacuums that work fully locally without remote servers?
I can't give 100% confirmation, but it was working one day and not the next, with no changes to my network along the way.
Yes, it is an absolutely infuriating state of affairs and one could claim we were naive to not see this coming. Needing to be this cynical is the root of crisis of trust. The only thing we can rely on is that everything is a race to the bottom.
That being said, there aren't many commercial offline robot vacuums. I bought a secondhand roborock unit that is on the approved list put out by valetudo. I got one that required some disassembly to flash, which maybe lowers the market price. It's been working great and the home assistant hooks are working. There isn't a company on the planet that is in between me and my robot vacuum now.
I have an i3 controlled by Home Assistant, it is on an "IoT" network without access to the Internet. Works like a charm. The integration allows to start, stop and view information like battery level, area cleaned, issues, etc. No mapping though.
The only caveat is that to associate it with a WiFi network, the legacy app is required. So if the app is pulled from the app stores, it may not be able to connect again after a factory reset. I don't think the pairing requires access to the Internet but it uses a bluetooth protocol that I don't think anyone reverse engineered yet.
Edit: I vaguely remember that mine also stopped working a year or so ago. I factory reset it, re-paired it and it has been working well so far.
You threw ewaste with batteries in the trash?
I pulled the battery.
As an aside, I will say that municipal waste has antipatterns for responsible waste disposal. Someone could:
A) disassemble their ewaste, remove the battery, look up which of 10 days a year they can drop it off, and pay a $50+ fee
B) quietly put it in their trash
I'll let you guess what most people are actually doing.
Contrast this with car batteries where manufacturers pay for batteries that are not responsibly handled and consumers are incentivized to dispose of them responsibly with a financial carrot. The manufacturer pays for the disposal, passes that cost on to the consumer, and the consumer gets the money back when they responsibly dispose of it.
Related username? ;) I think it was a figure of speech.
Remember that with the dorita980[1] project and similar you can liberate roombas from their cloud. I run mine with a ready made docker container.
[1] https://github.com/koalazak/dorita980
Honestly, the app has been stagnating and there is a glimmer of hope the new owners will invest in it! For example, myself and many others still cannot access the "Obstacle area review will normally appear here" error, so I have no idea what photos my robot is actually taking of my socks.
I bought a roomba because I associated it with quality. It's crap! I bought a nice mopping model. The cheap one I had before was even better with a simple only-turn-left algorithm. I'm not surprised by this.
Reading the comments, I'm glad the industry is way ahead, and I was just confused. I think I'm gonna sell and get a better one.
About time. They never iterated and made a better product. All of the roombas end up being bump sensor machines, the mapping is garbage. My $200 Roborock has lidar and works flawlessly compared to my roomba I bought 3 years prior for $700. Sure there is a gap on years but the difference is light years apart.
.. and iRobot _just_ introduced LiDAR, many years too late.
Too late and unless pricing changed too expensive.
I was amazed when I got this Roborock a year ago it was 2-250 on sale via Amazon. Just a vacuum but it has lidar. I remember it mapping the floor and was amazed how well it worked.
I got a Roomba Combo J7+ (auto empty, mopping) a few years back. Spent $700+ on it. A few years into ownership it ran over cat vomit, got it warranty replaced. And then just recently it decided to stop going home — it makes its way to the dock but stops shy of actually charging. I could get some module replaced but it's no longer under warranty, and I really don't want to deal with a dying company.
I've been seeing a lot of ads and talk about Roborock, and ChatGPT highly suggested that I upgrade to a Roborock Qrevo based on my household needs. I just don't want to spend $700+ on a new vac that will brick itself in a few years. Anyone have any recommendations? I see a lot of Roborock recommendations in the comments, but also Dream and Eufy so now I'm just overwhelmed.
I bought a Roborock after returning my Roomba, and it was the best choice I ever made. It works amazing, even in a house full of pets.
Sadly, the robotic vacuum market is quite saturated, there are multiple models by many manufacturers and no clear winner.
My brother has a house that is pretty much custom-made for a robo-vacuum. One level, no transitions, they have pets. And they like it well enough (not an iRobot)--and it still gets tangled up in stuff from time to time.
I have a 2-level house. Even after some house work, one room that probably still has too high a transition. A lot of different surfaces (And I'm not religious with cords and the like.) I'm guessing that my house is a lot more typical of a lot of houses of any size that would justify an iRobot type of device.
Decided a few years ago that a broom vac just made a lot more sense.
> custom-made for a robo-vacuum
If I was going to custom build a house around vacuuming, I'd get a central vacuum system, not a robotic one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_vacuum_cleaner
I was also dreaming of an opening in a wall where I can brush my dust into and it magically disappears... Since having cordless vacuum I no longer dream about that.
I mean even a plug which would let you plug in an elephant nose - I think that is more cumbersome than the cordless vacuum. I mean having to get that hose and hook it up every time I want to vacuum something? Meh. Easier to pick up the 21th century broom that makes dust disappear when you roll over it.
And manual brooming makes you give n passes over the same place to do the job... juck.
A friend has a robot vac and just puts it in a room, closes the door, and leaves it for a couple of hours. Avoids the issue of worrying about which areas don't have kids' toys around, Lego, cords, etc. Higher touch than is ideal, but if you're already working from home and the kids are at school, it can work.
I guess. If I need to vac a room, that's probably 5 minutes work to pull out a broom vac and do it.
You can typically select certain rooms to clean rather than “clean all” on decent brands like roborock or Dreame. You can put it on a schedule too.
Depends on your tolerance for filth (not a value judgement). You don't know how messy your enviroment is untih you see a robovac fill cannisters of shit each week. Having baseline for cleaniness helps with allergies. Like everything you can optmize for some big QoL gains, i.e. i basically just whip crumbs from surfaces straight to the floor knowing it'll get picked up. The solution for 2 level homes is 2 robovacs, cheap second hand, going to get disgusting anyways, replace filters and bristles. A few 100 dollars to have 80% clean floors is pretty life changing. Does not replace need for manual vaccing nooks and corners every once in a while.
Definitely, but my experience with Roomba has been that it picks up far less than 80% of the dirt, I'd say more around 50%. I can just use a classic vacuum once a week and actually do a good job, plus not have to worry about a noisy robot pulling cabled stuff of my desk.
Perhaps these Chinese ones actually do a good job?
iRobot hasn't really done anything about that for quite a while so I'm not at all surprised by the headline. Not to mention insane prices for consumables (filters, bristles, etc) - I got Aliexpress replacements at 1/10 of the cost and there's literally no difference in the end result.
TBH after a while I optimized things around robovac, or tidiness levels. I have hardwood floors, woven carpets, just stuff where vacs pick thing sup very effectively.
I don't know if Chinese ones are any better in terms of performance, suction levels only matter when you're on carpet and then it heavily depends how worn out or well maintained your brush head is which is where cheap consumables start to matter. For me the easy surfaces get 80%+ clean, the harder surfaces get 50% but even with very highend vaccuums I can still scrapes tons of hair out with a fur brush. But part of it is also I have a ancient magic high performance furbrush (random plastic junk for 30 years ago) that somehow digs out more fur than any other brush.
Having white socks stay white has been a breath of fresh air. Love my roller mop robot.
Probably fair. I have a pretty high tolerance for both a level of floor droppings and clutter until I pull out my broom vac every week or two. And I do have a housekeeper every 3-4 weeks to do a deeper cleaning--a lot of which wouldn't be handled by a robovac.
Anyone have experience with https://valetudo.cloud?
Seems like could be a good solution to using best rated (chinese) vacuum's while mitigating privacy concerns.
I am bummed that US robovacs aren't that competitive. Rooting for Matic, though currently don't seem to be as good as Dreame / roborocks [1] (can't go under furniture, apparently take longer to clean same area, tout "vision only" as a feature while charging more - you would think having fewer sensors / no lidar would bring costs down).
[1] https://vacuumwars.com/matic-robot-vacuum-review/
Yup, been using it on an older roborock s5 for several years now. It's excellent and works flawlessly with home assistant. Cannot recommend enough. The robot running its own webserver while it cleans my apartment is still so funny to me.
I had a Roomba about 10 years ago. It was OK but required a lot of “handholding” to not run over cords, kids toys, etc. It just was not really worth it to use it in an environment where you can’t keep everything nailed down and off the floor at all times. Relocated it to a basement level where we had much more empty but sill finished space. The cat angrily pooped just outside her litter box and the Roomba ran right over it and shredded them turds all over the floor. Since then it has lived in my mind as the dumbest smart product.
The real problem for me has been that I want something to straighten out my living spaces, not to vacuum the floors. Vacuuming is quick and a good vacuum cleaner (old school bagged kind, not a silly filter one), will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways. But a robot capable of picking up the toys my kids like to leave out, or bringing abandoned coffee mugs to the sink (can you tell I live with multiple adults and children?) would be worth quite a bit to me. A robot capable of washing my dishes and putting away my laundry would be worth more. One capable of preparing meals would be worth more to me than a car.
Of course they would have to be 100% open source with easily replaceable and repairable components, which is where I think most of these types of projects go wrong. I remember seeing the Chefee demo and it was very cool but the main problem is that you aren’t buying a product, you are investing in the idea that the company behind it won’t go belly up in two years and brick your $60,000 chef/cabinet/fridge thing and that it won’t sell itself to e.g. Google which will cram it full of ads and spyware.
That's my experience as well. We got rid of our Roomba because you need to remove pretty much everything from the floor, only for it to spend 20 - 30 minutes vacuuming at incredible volume. Getting the 20 year old Miele vacuum from downstairs, vacuuming and putting it back takes 10 minutes, you just move stuff out the way as you go, and it clears better too.
A robot capable of preparing meals also has a similar hazard matrix to a car.
Absolutely no way I'm having something cloud-connected - with human-body level degrees of freedom and the actuator strength to pick up a knife and chop a carrot - or anything else it might want to chop - in the house.
Plus, anything that smart is connected by definition. It doesn't need wi-fi, it's got eyes. Open-source-ness is somewhat moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.
A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.
Why would the food prep robot be humanoid? There is no reason for that. And my point is that I wouldn't want it to be cloud-connected at all. No reason for that either. I don't need it to be intelligent. I need it to have recipe-following, and specific functions like measure(), chop(), dice(), grate(), mix(), etc.
For laundry, have you considered that not everything is a T-shirt? Suits, socks, onesies, pajamas, sweaters, halter tops, lingerie, long johns, bedding, etc. And drawers are only suitable storage for some types of clothes. Putting a suit into a drawer is for example a terrible idea.
I was agreeing with you on all accounts but seriously doubt they’ll be open source. I think the average person will barely clock this as mattering, and will pay up. The market has shown time and again that consumers prefer highly integrated environments that work seamlessly vs open source, especially for hardware.
I also agree it’d be worth more to me than my car, and I’d hope much like modern cars such an expensive consumer purchase will end up with similar warranty protections and eventually a third party market for replacement parts.
Much like cars, I’m guessing it’ll be a better idea to go with a large company that’ll be able to honor that warranty without being financially ruined. The first few generations will see lots of experimentation and thus be more risky for the consumer before the market settles out with a few big winners (as is often the case).
I honestly am not sure why hardware startups do not adopt the open source model more frequently. At the very least they could do a software escrow where if they go belly up, the software becomes open source. The point is that it is a huge marketing point that they could use but do not. You are right that if let's say Samsung started selling completely autonomous kitchens then it is less likely that in two years they go belly up. But they also will want to cram it full of ads and spyware. Why can't a hardware startup position themselves against this and keep hammering their marketing with how they are open source and do not want and will not to show you ads or spy on you.
I think the point is that consumers never have a choice in these things so even if they cared, what would be the outcome? For phones, TVs, laptops, cars, if I do care about not just privacy but repairability, what options do I actually have? For phones there are various attempts at libre phones but they are all unusable in some way. Dumb TVs exist and so do open source media players, but something that lets me stream all my video subscription services + local media and does not have some phone home cloud thing built in just doesn't exist at all. Laptops are maybe as close as you can get with things like Framework, etc. and I think this is where I am surprised at the lack of serious marketing. Finally, cars are a complete mess. I have seen one or two open source ECUs but it is so far from plug and play it's not even on the horizon.
Basically, consumers don't care because they aren't choosing between a libre phone and Google Pixel. They are choosing between a Google Pixel and a buggy prototype or a dumb phone.
> will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways.
Running my 1.2kW vacuum for <2 minutes is guaranteed to defeat the roomba from a work capacity standpoint. These products are fundamentally unserious to me.
The big thing for me was that hauling out a canister vac was just a big PITA. But I concluded that a 10 minute job with a broom vac (Dyson) dealt with 80% of the headache (and I had a monthly housekeeper anyway). A robovac just didn't really do anything for me and would have had various issue with cords or random stuff on the floor.
given your requirements, I'd advice marriage.
I think anyone getting married with the intent of treating their spouse like a maid is in for a bad time with that whole "70% of marriages end in divorce" statistic.
> The cat angrily pooped just outside her litter box
This cracked me up, as it implies the cat had thoroughly planned her skirmish :)
i watched via camera 12 years ago roomba spreading my dogs diarrhea all over living room (thanks god to tile floors). I connected to camera first time in a months just few seconds before roomba took first swipe over the poop. Still remember feelings of paralysis, despair and lack of control.
Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.
latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".
The camera based object (and poop) avoidance actually works pretty well in my Roomba j7+, bought in 2022.
The cloud-based software for everything else has degraded in quality, tjough. I'll probably upgrade to a lidar-equipped competitor model if this continues to get worse after this bancruptcy.
Doesn't/didn't iRobot have a defense business as well? Or am I confused here. I don't see anything about it in the article.
This is one of the reasons why data collection is such a big problem: companies either sell the data, or they get bought themselves. If you trust a service with your data, all you need to do is wait.
After a long time of being skeptical that a $1300 robot will work well enough, I bought the Eufy X10 for $500 CAD. It's insane to me that this thing sells for so little and yet it works incredibly well and has all the features I'd want. The UX is also really, really good (my full-time job is real-time map UI for robot fleets). What impresses me the most is the maintainance section that has "X hours left" for a dozen things you maintain on the robot. Tap one and it shows you a visual step-by-step for how to perform maintainance on that component. It feels like China will be very hard to compete with.
Before clicking through I read the url as bloomber-glaw and thought it might be a phishing / fake news type of thing.
Not a particularly useful comment but curious of others also have trouble reading that domain.
I read it the same way as you did
Does anyone have recommendations for a robot vacuum that can handle dog hair and won't sell my floorplan to advertisers?
https://maticrobots.com/
And for the privacy aspect:
> At Matic, we believe your data should stay within your home.
> Matic's intelligence is localized on the device, and it never sends any of your data to the cloud for processing. That means no user information is ever sold, shared, or even collected in the first place.
https://maticrobots.com/privacy-policy
That's great, but I'm not sure I'll ever feel comfortable putting a camera attached to a mobile robot inside my home.
I’ve been hoping these folks do well.
I'm quite happy with the product, it performs really well for the most part
If you are in Europe and on a tight budget, Lidl's Silvercrest models are surprisingly good.
Find a vacuum that supports valetudo[1] and a brush/roller like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F54134JY
[1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
Word to the wise: installing Valetudo can be a nerve wracking task even for the tech savvy. On my model, a Dreame L10s Ultra (there’s about three similarly named models and only this exact one is valetudo compatible, and isn’t sold any more) you are strongly recommended to use a custom pcb and to use Debian to run the commands, and not in a VM. If something goes wrong you can permanently brick your device. I ran into all kinds of esoteric sounding errors, and I half gave up and one point since I was burning valuable free time on evenings and weekends to get it done (busy family with small kids and stressful job). The robot sat unused for several months but I eventually got it done. I’m glad I did it but it was an ordeal.
Not too surprising. iRobot was all into SIFT for 15 years before the patent expired in 2020. Meanwhile, Chinese robot vacuums reverse engineered/stole/copy Neato's XV-11 lidar and made it better over the span of a decade (RIP Neato). iRobot joined the lidar party recently but it was too little too late. Product was too expensive and their brand was soured by the poor VSLAM performance. I had one of their mopping robots during the pandemic and you had to keep the lights on to mop. It would often get really lost if it went under a table. I got rid of it and replaced it with a roborock shortly after.
As far as I can tell cheapish 2D lidar for mapping and robot navigation were a bit earlier than the XV-11; they were made by Hokuyo in 2006. I remember that their lidar module was made by some other (American?) company that in turn competed with Hokuyo, people would take them out and use for their own projects.
It's ultimately not very complicated - it's a laser rangefinder that you spin on a motor. It's such a simple - and old! - technology which would obviously get significantly cheaper with time, it was definitely the right horse to bet on. I never understood iRobot's vision strategy.
I think the XV-11 was the first affordable (as in, affordable enough to be part of the COGS and reliable enough to be in a product) for consumers. It helped how there was a cult like following (understandably so) and everything got reversed engineered from schematic to firmware. By principle, a lidar is simple but most things are. The hard part is how to make a product out of it. One of the main things Chinese suppliers improved on 2D LiDAR is having the laser portion completely wireless. Induction powered, and LED light pipe for data communication. This removes the need for the slip ring which wears out and is hard to package.
So the FTC blocked Amazon's acquisition of iRobot in January 2024 and now China gains control of the assests for a bargain? Another stupid application of antitrust.
From Bloomberg:
> Earnings began to decline since 2021 due to supply chain headwinds and increased competition.
I know that there's a slight difference between Chinese-state owned enterprises and Amazon, but isn't a sale to either one worrying?
In what sense is a sale to Amazon “worrying” compared to bankruptcy?
Years of layoffs after swearing to not so layoffs that shells out the assets and then leaves a carcass in 2025 instead of a corpse.
China might at least make some products out of this purchase. Most of these US companies would just sit on it.
I believe it was the EU rather than the FTC which killed the deal.
I would assume the US market was a bigger concern, but hard to know for sure: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
IRobot says it was the EU:
https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...
Wrong link? I don't see how that applies to the EU more than the US.
Read the italicized paragraph at the very beginning of the article.
Doh! Thank you.
Seriously, and it's not intended to troll.
To all those making catastrophical scenarios, how would a Chinese entity start streaming data from your robot cleaner and, more importantly, how will this be a security breach at your home or worse, nation?
A comment like this belies a complete lack of imagination. Having a view inside the house of anyone remotely in power can be used in all kinds of ways ranging from espionage to simple blackmail. A video of infidelity, large purchases, guest lists at your domicile etc. can be catastrophic for someone that wants something from you.
In home automation circles, Roomba is generally regarded as worse than other brands.
Anyone know which brands work when you completely block internet access? I think Roborock is one of the better regarded robot vacuums, but I think I read that they shut down when they can't phone home.. maybe Dreame?
This is a shame. Unsure about later models, but my Roomba 620 is eminently repairable. Just last weekend I replaced the wheels with some original (from iRobot).
It'll still be going in another 10 years, but the AliExpress sourced parts are never of the same quality.
i have a roborock and pretty much every moving part is replaceable and unofficial parts are available on aliexpress for dirt cheap
It was bound to happen. I had bought two different robo vaccums at two different times (in 2022[irobot], then 2025[eufy], both upwards of $400) - they both were pretty terrible and I ended up returning both of them. I can't believe people are still using these things. They get stuck when there is no reason to get stuck, they miss dirt that should be picked up.
I got a cheap Chinese one (no camera, wifi) in 2024 and it's been a game changer. Yeah it's kind of dumb but it runs every day and picks up an unholy amount of dust, cat hair, and the like. Maybe if you were already vacuuming every day they're pretty useless but for me it's been night and day. As another commenter said, they're also surprisingly repairable, and I bought a ton of spare parts before the tariffs went in.
As a friend described the first generation: they're way worse than hand vacuuming, but way better than not vacuuming. So they're really only valuable for people who don't enjoy cleaning and don't have servants clean for them.
The only ones worth getting have Lidar. I've had a 'random path' one before and it was like you described. My Lidar one runs every day with only a rare issue when I leave a cord strung across the floor or similar.
That's what I thought and hence I bought the eufy model with a lidar; I also thought maybe the technology in 2025 is more mature but it wasn't the case. It would complain about obstacles even thought there was nothing on the ground. Maybe I was unlucky both the times but I am just way more satisfied when I clean the house with my $100 hand held vaccum haha.
your anecdote doesn't have much to do with the reasons presented in the article?
And yet, mine works just fine (i7).
Didn't Amazon acquire iRobot?
No, the deal was killed:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
"[..] the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into the merger. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and several Democrats in the House of Representatives sent a letter to then-FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying "the FTC should use its authority to oppose the Amazon–iRobot transaction."" [0]
Thanks, I guess? Better to let China buy the husk than evil Amazon, right.
[0] https://reason.com/2025/10/31/irobot-faces-bankruptcy-after-...
Last sentence of the article: "A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns."
They went bankrupt even with all the personal floor map data they sold?
Golf clap. Well played.
How bad were they doing? I thought this is a good time to be in robotics and was actually thinking roomba could be the big beneficiary in the new AI personal robot craze. Very surprising to see they filed for bankruptcy, could they have not just raised private equity with some ai buzzwords?
Clearly a sign that AI is even taking the tradbots' jobs now.
For all these "Please charge Rumba!!!" in the middle of the night, good riddance.
>A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns.
I never understood why the US objected to this. Amazon was not in that business.
But you see acquisitions like Paramount that will eventually turn US media into a near monopoly with probably 2 or 3 players. Now we have a fight over who will pick up WB, I am sure who ever wins the fight will have the merger approved. But Amazon, denied.
FWIW, I have no love for Amazon, but they were not trying to buy a company like Walmart which will be far worse then buying iRobot.
It appears that it was the EU which blocked the deal rather than the US.
Do you have a source to back this up or you're just assuming? So far I've only seen FTC statements on this and they wouldn't have been too pleased with the merger.
Yeah, iRobot's press release:
https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...
"Amazon's proposed acquisition of iRobot has no path to regulatory approval in the European Union, preventing Amazon and iRobot from moving forward together—a loss for consumers, competition, and innovation."
What is alienating to me is how a “chinese” owner seems so much worse than any other nationality in this discussion.
How is this different from anybody else?
Is there a good, alternative robotic vacuum to the Roomba that is not cloud connected?
Why does a robotic vacuum cleaner need to connect to the internet at all? Mine doesn't (Neato Botvac D85) and it works fine.
Found my rumba vacuum in unexpected place in my house, then saw the news 0_o.
Guess who has the largest dataset on the inside of American homes?
Well, time to see if valetudo (or some other "free the vacuums" project) can help me replace the firmware on mine...
I wonder if they would still be in business if they worked offline.
The chinese robots are gonna love this !
Maybe Lina Khan blocking the sale to Amazon wasn’t such a great idea after all.
One more proof that you need real industrial policy, not just 'let the market handle it'. Otherwise you end up as a consumer of products designed and manufactured somewhere else.
The good thing is that China has proven that there is a way to turn not-industrial country into industrial one. So there is a blueprint for that.
Industrial policy was what stopped Amazon from buying Roomba.
People worried about Chinese ownership of their Roombas, but completely OK with Alexa and Google devices in their homes.
I don't want lead in my tapwater, but regularly pour poisonous liquids over ice for drinking.
Not all dangerous things are the same thing.
It really is amazing that we keep letting our main geopolitical rival buy up our companies.
The "shareholder value == societal benefit" mind virus is easily the worst thing to come out of higher American academia in the last hundred years, and that's saying something.
Another argument for open source devices that are easily repairable and modifiable by the user (or a 3rd party shop).
Now all their customer data will be sold to the highest bidder.
Makes sense, 20 years of needing to have no rugs, cords, toys on the floor, masquerading as a cleaner
:(
The DJI ROMO robot vacuum is amazing. It shows what can be done with today's technology.
My Roomba is just crap compared with DJI's. I'm not surprised they went bankrupt.
a ROMO video https://youtu.be/Iv7BYURURRI?si=gfaPPiFpEMj1SVaT
Recommendations for an alternative?
My Roomba is about 10 years old, works great and I can still get parts for it. I guess that's where they messed up.
I bought a Roomba around 2006. It died within a month. Never bought again. Today I'd need to assume it would serve as a surveillance tool by the Chinese gov, or other bad actors, and so would also never buy one.
All of IoT is a security anti-pattern now.
iRobot’s largest creditor isn’t its Chinese supplier. It’s the US government, in the form of unpaid tariffs, some $3.5 million. Arguably it was Trump’s stupid tariffs that drove the company out of business. Rather than bringing manufacturing to the US, it allowed the Chinese to acquire an American company, leaving production right where it is.
I guess my romba is about to be banished to a private network now.
The problem is that all are quite tall which is a problem with some older sofas etc. Samsung did one "slim" model I think some time ago, but not sure if you can still buy it.
Non-paywalled article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-15/robot-vac...
Non-paywalled: https://archive.md/7DyNA
Nope, still got a paywall
will be replaced by humanoid robots soon
You gotta love the idea of a humanoid robot, shuffling around and bumping into everything to navigate while wiping up a bit.
Reminds me of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcNIWPkNzA
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zBCu8HmXoRo
iRobot's failure is that they made a bet to use CV instead of Lidar for their mapping robots for a long time until it was too late. That made their affordable, non-mapping robots far far worse than only slightly higher priced lidar robots, while their mapping robots were too expensive for mass appeal and were still worse at navigation than up-market lidar based robots. Ultimately they were simply outcompeted.
Neato, which had a robot vacuum with LIDAR, shut down in 2023. That's not the key problem.
Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It's short range compared to the inter-camera distance. Vehicle object ranging at distance is much tougher and can be fooled.
> Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum.
It could be, but it just is not. VSLAM robots were practically significant worse. There are a lot of limitations to multi-ocular vision for a robot vacuum, for example the relatively featureless walls and few features across the horizontal binocular axis.
Neato was never as big as iRobot. They didn't fail from commanding heights, they never were that successful to begin with, for entirely different reasons. If they had managed to get to iRobot's level of ubiquity and distribution they would have had a much better shot of still being around nowadays.
> relatively featureless walls
Right. The cheap solution to that is projecting a pattern of IR dots on the walls to give them some features. One version of Microsoft's Kinect did that.
Didn't Matic solve this (non-Lidar robot vacuum)? People seem to rave about them.
Yeah matic is vision only
Reminds me of a certain self-driving car company.
Is it one with P/E > 300?
Another success for EU antitrust law. By blocking an acquisition, they have allowed a bankruptcy purchase by a Chinese firm so that the market is between a few Chinese firms.
The US FTC was also against the merger.
We are forever in debt to Lina Khan as well for this success. Clearly an action of great regulatory foresight.
robot vacuums never made economic sense over a maid service
I'm not sure that's fair but you need the right house layout and right practices in terms of cords/clutter/etc.
Depends on where you live. In Poland the house cleaning costs ~$15/h. The robot vacuum would pay itself off within a year.
But I am aware that in e.g. some parts of Asia the maid service is dirt cheap.
In one of the articles, they said Roomba were greatly affected by tariffs. Well, this company has been in business for a long time and should have figured out how to build roomba in the US, that would have been great innovation.
But like most US corp, they only cared about profits and stock price.
That guy from smarter every day had a great youtube video about why that's basically impossible in the US right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
I'm not a fan of big coorps either, but these changes happened gradually over time, starting way back in probably the 50/60s. The blame is with the companies and the US government back then for allowing this critical knowledge to be lost. But Roomba didn't exist back then, and the problem is bigger than a single company.
The only real solution is for the US government to invest heavily in regaining this capability for the coming 25 years. But doge and trump axed any chance of this happening so though luck i guess.
Won't happen. In one of those videos, they showed earnings of metal workers and other such professions. It's downwards.
Unless US can solve the problem "That job doesn't pay", there is no way forward. And it can't.
It's just like a textile industry. The only way is if it's all done by robots.
Until this administration there was no mandate to move manufacturing home, and importantly why would any company forgo significant profit to match an ideological framework, unless the ideology is what they sell or market?