I have a few iRobot vacuums that are several years old and never get used due to ineffectiveness. It is easier to spend 5 minutes manually vacuuming vs letting the iRobot wander around randomly for an hour and still not clean well.
They are. Xiaomi owned Roborock is years ahead of the big western competition (iRobot and Neato) in terms of cleaning chops and value for money.
Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, but there's also no guarantee yet that the lesser western brands will pinky promise to keep your data private and not sell it to advertisers for money or leave it in some insecure S3 bucket for hackers to steal because they outsourced the SW dev work to the cheapest body shop, which is the norm in SW development for consumer electronics.
At least on most Roborock models you can root them and run them locally via Valetudo insted of their proprietary cloud, so you get the best of all worlds: cleaning, value, privacy.
In practice, how is it to actually run Valetudo on a Roborock? I have one of the supported models but quickly noped out when I skimmed through the "short these jumpers on the PCB" part of the installation instructions
> Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook [...] Robot would share test users’ data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices’ front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. [...] These workers then shared at least 15 images—including shots of a minor and of a woman sitting on the toilet—to social media groups where they gathered to talk shop.
To be fair, when the photo of a woman taking a shit was shared on facebook, her face was blurred.
Once something is online there's also the (less important but perhaps more likely) risk they'll send software updates that remove features, add adverts, force you to set up an account, and other nonsense like that.
> Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom.
It's not just a floor plan, it's a video overview of everything in your living space.
Most robo-vacs don't have cameras, but lidar/IR sensors so all they get is a 2D map of your floorplan, not video footage.
There was a funny video on social media, of a home surveillance camera capturing the pet taking a dump in the middle of the living room, and then the Roomba smearing it everywhere as it did its rounds. If you're a pet owner who's companion can do their business in your house, having the robovac smear it everywhere is a nightmare you'd want to avoid at all cost, and that can only be solved using cameras.
One of the reason I never connected my Neato is that I had no interest in having a map of my flat uploaded to the company's servers.
Privacy is why I would never own a vacuum (or most any other device) that requires an internet connection. For me, the only benchmark required is "does it have to connect to a server somewhere to work?"
The newest Roborock vacuums don’t even have cameras. On purpose. Unlike iRobot. So it seems China is actually ahead in privacy. Which is sad.
You still need to use their apps to control the robots, and the apps send the commands to the robot only through their proprietary clouds instead of directly. You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.
If it has no camera and no microphone, the worst case leak is way better than what iRobot has already been caught doing:
(The toilette videos) https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
Given that I use roughly the same number of cloud and government services as other people, and live in a city, to me this is privacy. Without cameras or microphones it falls within my tolerance for information that third parties know about me given the risk of those third parties abusing that data (either directly or via hackers).
Sorry to break the bad news to you but your personal standard for privacy is way out of line with what the vast vast majority of people consider privacy nowadays. Up to you if you want to spend your life living in anger at that or not.
I'm not living in anger, I'm just not comfy sharing my data with Chinese companies and their random cloud services. I think that applies to most people actually.
Yes the ship has long sailed on the online privacy of the Average Joe who's already knees deep in Google, Meta, Tinder, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, but that doesn't mean I should just bend over to more of those from China as well.
Privacy is not binary, as in you either have it or you don't, but you can actively control and limit how much you give away once you're educated on the subject and willing to invest a few clicks through cookie banners, ad blockers, etc.
You're probably not an Uighur.
Kind of surprising, but it also got me thinking about how many of those options aren't available in western products.
I have had the same experience with an i3+, which is just a vacuum but with a self-empty base. This i3+ originally didn't have room mapping but they added it after I purchased it. It goes home to charge and empty itself and cleans in a reasonable pattern.
I've previously owned the 350 series and some other similar one and they were more toy than utility.
This is my first one with a self-empty base and I'm surprised how much I like it. I don't think the pre-mapping self-empty units would have worked very well for me because they would usually get stuck, but I've been quite impressed at how well the j7 manages to avoid that.
It does have an annoying quirk that it won't run if it's too dark, so I have to schedule it a little carefully or leave the lights on and schedule them to turn off. But I'm really happy with it overall.
My Roborock S7 is light years ahead of my girlfriends iRobot, which just drives around running into everything, gets stuck pretty much every time it runs.
Meanwhile the Roborock maps my whole home and plans a route. I trust it enough to have it set to run every week automatically without intervention. The only work I do is to empty it and add water to the mop tank.
Maybe someone else will buy them to extract the last few $$s before turning out the lights. sigh