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'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.

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

[1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

As for modern vacuums I have no idea what happens if you never set up their WiFi.

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.

It's MY home! I don't want anybody filming it or recording it or selling maps of it. Full stop!

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'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.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

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.

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.

Can't vouch for their newer models just because this one has worked so well for years.

https://www.kaercher.com/us/home-garden/robot-vacuums-and-mo...

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 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.

This cracked me up, as it implies the cat had thoroughly planned her skirmish :)

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.

Now instead China is using it to spy on people. Glad I didn't buy one I guess.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.

latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".

> 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?

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.

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.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-room...

Now a Chinese company is buying them and there's no problems.

is that the background on that?

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.

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...

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.

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".

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.

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.

Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets.

What is the concern?

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.

They might be great designers and talented engineers, sure.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...

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.

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).

Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.

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...

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.

> if you are not moving, you are dead.

I understand the point you're trying to make, but there is some irony here.

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 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.

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 doubt it though

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.

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.

[1] https://github.com/koalazak/dorita980

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.)

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-...

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.

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).

However, just this last update, they added support for a new set of vacuums, Midea/Eureka that don't require that PCB.

https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo/releases/tag/2025.12.0

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.

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.

  > 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

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.

Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.

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.

Also, is it still difficult to bring profits back to the US?

Damn'd if you do, dam'd if you don't.

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.)

I think the lights have been off for some time already.

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.

YMMV.

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.

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

It’s weird that you have identified this business opportunity with such confidence, but you are also unwilling to take the money.

plus it can void your warranty

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'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.

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.

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.

That’s basically Apple’s MO

The camera/microphone is more worrying.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Especially as the N of datasets grows.

You had all the right reasoning but came to the wrong conclusion. That is exactly how it works, and people should not use iPhones.

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.

yes.

> 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.

also yes.

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...

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.

    how worn out or well maintained your brush head i

China might at least make some products out of this purchase. Most of these US companies would just sit on it.

I'm not talking about a long term storage drawer for the laundry system, more like a large pull-out in which dry, folder items are dispensed. And I wouldn't put a suit in a washing machine full-stop, I don't know what they have where you are but the ones in this country would wreck a suit jacket very quickly, we take jackets for dry-cleaning once a month or so.

I’m not saying you are a racist but this statement never really holds much weight.

I’ve met plenty of western expats in Asia that are married to locals, have mixed raced children, and yet still say the most racist things about the locals.

I thought that was the difference between "invention" and "innovation"?

Everything wrong with the western tech academic/industrial complex in two sentences.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Too bad our American leaders sold us out.

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.

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..)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.

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.

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.

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

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.

  Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back.

   And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.

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.

https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...

What makes you feel otherwise?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.

Certainly "vile", but that's not a noun.

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.

The west was extremely foolish to think that IP would scale beyond national markets for very long.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

Their bullet trains are also excellent.

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.

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.

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.

Antitrust is like anti camping mods for the server.

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?

Otherwise you're just creating a fire hazard.

Most techies vastly overestimate how much money most people have available for nice-to-haves like 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.

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.

Robot vacuums with lidar don't even need internet connections to work.

I have two dogs that shed HEAVILY. I fear to even turn my robovacuum on, since getting them.

I NEED THIS!!!

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.

Chinese companies compete with eachother ferociously. And Chinese society itself is dog eat dog. Everyone wants to make money.

Now think about what the American government can do to you.

Amazon isn't on your side. They would have sold this access to China if they could make a buck on it.

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."

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.

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...

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.

-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

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.

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

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.

Nah, they just had access to more capital. That hasn't been true in a while tho.

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."

I mean, their teenage kids certainly lobby for them, at least as far as iPhones go...

I'm a follower of Cory Doctorow's anti-enshittification ideology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkaS389W-g). Amazon is well-known for giving preferential treatment to its own products, while squeezing other sellers to pay for placement (Amazon ads).

If you want something more data-driven, see "Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings" (DOI 10.1257/pandp.20231068), but this one is about everyday products. I'd expect Roombas to get more blatant promos like Kindle, Fire, and Ring products get. For example, if I search for "doorbell" on Amazon, the very first thing I get is a huge promo for Blink products (an Amazon company), four results from random brands nobody heard of, and then another huge promo for Ring (Amazon brand).

Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.

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.

How many US homes have a Bosch/Miele washer/dryer vs LG/Samsung? (Outside of NYC).

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.

Can you provide more info/got any links? I would love to try some open source software on it

Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.

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.

(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.)

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?

I will reference a quote I originally heard on HN years ago, though: the audio surveillance is magnitudes more valuable than the video.

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".

Or do they publish all their IP on a government site for all to see?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

And I'll show myself out…

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.

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.

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.

Mine is from 2017 btw, still doing daily duty.

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.

Prevent them from buying their competitors, for sure, but don't kid yourself into thinking that there are many neat ways to parcel these companies up into neat little independent business units. There is at best a very small number of ways to do this and the government will not get it right, just look at their most recent attempt with Google to strip out Chrome of all things.

Just to be clear on my stance,I agree that blocking the irobot deal was absurd. Context matters in a big way, clearly they were struggling and were basically alone in the market as an American company.

I think you also need to apply that context to Google and Amazon and consider whether the government would do so wisely.

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?

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.

Imagine having a blowtouch that you can't extinguish or touch which is likely rolling around.

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.

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.

It's an interesting idea but it just didn't work for me and I wouldn't consider buying another.