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Comment by patwolf | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered how iRobot hasn't been more successful. They have a cool name, brand recognition, first-mover advantage. It's been nearly 20 years since their IPO. I would have expected by now that robots would have taken over more household cleaning tasks, but it doesn't seem like the technology has improved much in the past two decades.

I gave up on my roomba because it would always get stuck in something before it could finish cleaning. I now use a Dyson stick vac.

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Leaving specifics of Roomba vs. competitors aside, the basic concept just doesn't work well in a lot of situations. My house ends up having a bunch of cords and clutter. And even on the "single level" ground floor which is fairly open and fairly heavily trafficked, there are a number of small level changes between rooms because of additions over time.

I'm with you. I considered a Roomba a few years back but came to the conclusion that a Dyson cordless vac essentially solved my problem by making it trivial to spend a few minutes pulling out and running a vac as opposed to hauling out a canister vac between housecleanings.

My brother, on the other hand, has dogs and has a newly constructed single level house that they keep pretty free of clutter. A robo-vacuum works pretty well for them.

I've always felt like these products were mainly designed for people who live in single-level small-ish apartments, but then it's confusing because manually vacuuming those isn't very hard either. I just don't understand the market.

It's mostly my kitchen/dining room/"mudroom" area that can use regular quick vacs between full housecleanings. But looking right now I have some shoes and other things scattered around and it's literally about 3 minutes to do a touchup with my Dyson stick vac which has been great.

It's for wealthy people who have large homes with large open spaces. People who have enough storage that they don't have clutter on the floor.

I grew up next to a neighborhood of 5000sf+ homes, and I never saw clutter in any of them. Some of them had house cleaners, but even the ones that didn't, they had storage everywhere, so everything got put away. A Roomba on every floor would be perfect for them.

I moved away before Roomba existed, but I imagine a lot of them have it.

I'm sure there's some correlation between wealth/space and lack of clutter. But my observation is that some people are just much more inclined not to leave a lot of loose things either on floors or table. I'm pretty sure I could have a house that was twice the size and it would still look very lived in.

I have a large home with large open spaces and little clutter on the floor. But I'd need something like 8 Roombas to cover it all because of the changes in levels, doors that are normally closed, etc.

Also, as a semi-wealthy person with a large home, I hire people to clean it including vacuuming, and I don't need an annoying robot roaming the house to do it.

Newer robots from companies iterating on the technology, like Roborock, can detect cables/shoes/stuff left on the floor and just drive around them. They're a lot better than what Roomba is selling, and much better at dealing with the average home. I've been really impressed with ours after having a similar, frustrating experience with one from iRobot.

This is accurate. Their competitor, the Ecovacs Deebot, just push an OTA update making cable detection way better. In a way the previous comment encapsulates all the misconceptions about robovacs. I was recently surprised to learn how good they are because my only basis for comparison was my friend's failure of a Roomba that's always getting into shenanigans.

Right–that's what I found so weird about the Amazon acquisition of iRobot is that Roombas are clearly a few generations of technology behind their competitors like Neato, Ecovacs and Roborock...but they must have a bunch of similar technology currently under development and on the way to market. What Roomba does have is name recognition, which seems to mean that most people think that robot vacuums aren't very good–I suspect Amazon sees they get tons of sales on their platform, has a good R&D team/patents, and smells an opportunity to own the space by pouring money into it and helping them compete (and, of course, putting them to the top of Amazon results, as they always do).

Yeah I had a Roomba 10 years ago. It was starting to age a bit (still working! but would always get stuck). So I was thinking.. it's been a decade.. time to buy a new model, surely they improved!

Nope, nothing is better, absolutely nothing. The "AI" (if we can call it that) to vacuum hasn't improved one bit. It somehow seems so suck a lot less on the carpet than the previous one. It's somewhat better to manage my cat's hair, but that's about it. Sure now I have wifi on it, to re-start it because it often stops too early before it's done. But nothing, no improvement in 10 years.. in ROBOT TECHNOLOGY!

Watch vacuum reviews on Vacuum Wars channel, tons of innovation, mostly not with Roombas though

https://youtube.com/c/VacuumWars/videos

Same experience. Bought a Roomba in 2008 and didn’t like it much. Bought another in 2021 and was shocked at how little it had improved in that time. It’s better, but not by much. And clearly behind the technology in some of the Chinese vacs.

They lost because the competition is better. Roborock and Ecovacs are superior devices to any of iRobots' offerings.

Maybe they were so successful that some MBA decided to maximize shareholder value by cutting on superfluous R&D?

That seems to be the Neato story right now.

Their robots started to suck after a while ! They are more interested in extracting more from their customers than creating better robots. Best example is their mopping robot that they try to market using a kind of "subscription" model with proprietary pads. The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release.

> The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release.

Are you buying multiple robots over time?

Christ, and here I am thinking $1000 CAD is a lot of money.

Selling stuff you no longer use is a thing. Not everyone just throws stuff out, or donates to goodwill.

I will keep the roborock for a while as it seems to be mature enough and checks all/most of the boxes. I sold the old robots for 59-60% of their value. The reasons for my upgrade path was: better nav, mopping and self cleaning.

Roborock does all 3, the 3rd is not perfect so I guess I will upgrade it once more (after 2 more iterations to make sure they fix properly)

Their mopping robot was an extreme letdown. We bought the nicer one and it has such a tiny tank that it can't clean my downstairs without needing refilling halfway through.

Plus any cleaning solution besides theirs breaks the robot. Plus the cleaning pad it uses to mop needs to be replaced after every run Plus it's a lot more aggressive than the regular roomba and slams itself into things, knocking all kinds of things over.

The cleaning solution is very expensive. The pads have DRM and are very expensive. The robot is very expensive.

Thanks to all it's drawbacks it's not really able to be automated. So you wind up with a mop that you still have to manage, direct to run, and feed expensive soap and cleaning pads. In reality, I have the robot, and it's been plugged in for 4+ years and probably not been ran for 3+ years.

I have mine dry mop to keep the dust down rather than wet mopping every day. It's much less work than wet mopping, I just need to change the pad once a week.

It still takes a long time to mop and gets stuck more often than my i7 but it's mostly hands free.

> Their robots started to suck after a while !

I dunno, I would hope they started to suck right out of the box.

(Old MS joke...)

It's a funny joke if you're making a pun on its vacuum function being "sucking", but if you're just using it as a joke that applied to Microsoft then you're not using the pun and just making an almost-joke of "their product is bad".

I'm making a pun, just as the MS joke used the same pun.

For people who don't know, the joke is"

"What is the only product that MS can make that won't suck?"

"A vacuum cleaner."

Fair enough, my bad!

I wonder how much of it is also people like me. I work in tech, but I despise single-purpose household "gadgets." I have a vacuum cleaner and a set of working eyes. I can clean the floor in 5 or 10 minutes, rather than having a "robot" roaming the room randomly, bumping into things, and making noise for an hour. When I'm done, I store it away in a closet and don't have to look at an unsightly lump of plastic parked in a charging station. Bottom line, these cleaning robots don't solve any problem that I have, and they make my home less enjoyable to be in.

The technology has come a long way in these years and the modern models are pretty good devices. I use a Miele canister vac for the deep cleans but I also have a Eufy and a Roborock robot vaccum, one does the random bouncing and the other uses LIDAR to map and clean intentionally, and they're both great. I run them several times a week and the amount of stuff they pull out of the carpet, rugs and off the hard floors is incredible. I would never bust out the Miele several times a week.

It's hard to compete with China. Willing to live on lower margins, more r&d, and cheaper cost to do r&d.

> cheaper cost to do r&d.

Is this a euphemism for outright IP theft?

They are ahead of the US when it comes to robot vacuums.

This is a simplistic view of IP theft. The Chinese are much more advanced. Steal from Roomba at the beginning. Surpassed Roomba? Steal something from BMW that's secret Lidar navigation work. Steal something from Samsung for circuit design, steal something from Tesla, steal something from Mobileeye, etc.

I meant cheaper engineers.

Also faster iteration. Back in my mechanical engineering days, we'd design prototypes and then have to wait months for them to come in (of course they were built off-shore).

Doing it onshore was difficult (few could handle our requests, or they were exorbitantly expensive and couldn't scale, and terrible quality control.)

Thus we'd take a long, long time to work out design issues. A Chinese company can iterate much faster because of this.

It wasn't just China. Roomba was really slow to move mapping technology into their lower end products. There was a lot of reputational damage done by making mediocre products their primary volume sellers.

Well it's more about how much does the state invest. That's how innovation exist (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State)

As far as I can tell, first-mover advantage is a myth. The most successful products seem to rarely be the first to market.

horrible execution most likely..... the lawn mowing robot has been a joke internally since 2011

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