Hacker News Reader

Comment by theplumber | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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 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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com