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Comment by eichin | Hacker News Reader

Because above a certain feature and price level (self-emptying and persistent mapping, for example) they aren't made without cloud support, by anyone? At least the roborock S7 (a) doesn't require you to actually set up any of the cloud features, you can still just push a button and it Does The Thing (b) is supported by valetudo, and generally kind of hackable. But the general market hasn't rejected it, even with the irobot image leaks...

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I stay away from such devices and if i did buy them i’d rate them accordingly for missing “offline features”. Mine is “offline” but indeed doesnt do self emptying or persistent mapping. Some people feel the urge to shop anything new without considering the implications, but there are alternatives out there.

Got any actual products to suggest? Requirements are vacuuming+mopping, self-emptying, and enough brains to recharge and continue (which implies some level of internal mapping.)

The roborock S7 barely makes that minimum requirement, and I've never found a second one - as far as I can tell, the alternatives are not out there, and I'm waiting with credit card in hand to be proven wrong :-)

Check out maticrobots.com. I am obviously biased as I am one of the co-founders but we truly have built the next-gen 10x better, fully autonomous mopping and vacuuming bot.

We have everything you mention above and have HEPA bags.

We went against self-emptying because 1) those docks looks ugly - my wife calls them rocket ships and don’t want it in our home. 2) building vacuum that cleans vacuum and makes a crazy loud noise just seemed so inelegant.

Heh, the "drive up to trashbin and call for help" approach looks workable if the bags are big enough. Looking forward to hearing about it again when it doesn't need an iOS device.

Cloud support - fine. Cloud requirement to be of any use - one should only buy it if he's ok with a Chinese company knowing his name, where he lives, when he's at home and when not, which room is the kids', and pretty much everything else.

s/Chinese/any/

A company in your own country is subject to at least some responsibility for misuse, mishandling, leaking etc your private data. Chinese companies just funnel everything they have to CCP for whatever mining they want to do.

The same could be said of other companies, especially for non-residents of the USA. In either case, they have no business making maps of my own home, especially when I can't even access those maps myself to see what's going on with my roomba! /etc

As a US resident, it's not like a domestic vendor would be any better - we don't have anything you'd mistake for data protection laws (and security breach notification requirements primarily emphasize equal notification of shareholders, not consumers.) So, yeah, I'm not going to turn on any of this (and I worry about cheap ubiquitous 5G leading to boxes that don't need to be configured for my wifi to phone home - fortunately, the US is mostly network deployment backwater and it'll be years before that's a real threat, but not for any good reasons.)

But "they have no business" ... isn't particularly stopping them, is it?

I wonder if it's going to stay legal to foil-wrap such boxes.

As for stopping them - there's no-one but yourself to stop them.

> But "they have no business" ... isn't particularly stopping them, is it?

In this case, "they have no business..." means it's my personal belief, which supports my own justification into not buying these products. No matter what country the company comes from. I of course make this decision on a product by product basis because in some cases it's hard to avoid them or other factors come into play...

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