Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
news.bloomberglaw.com
news.bloomberglaw.com
Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too.
The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots already inside people's homes and offices.
More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.
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[a] https://www.ft.com/content/239d4720-aee4-443d-a761-1bd8bb1a1...
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Mine is from 2017 btw, still doing daily duty.
Politics aside, the FDA applies a very generous amount of regulation (mostly justifiable), not sure we want to pay multiples for our consumer electronics, as it (mostly) shows acceptable behavior and rearely kills anybody.
Voters on the right naively thought he'd work to fix it. (Wrong!) But it is very much bad for a very large number of issues. Maybe next executive will fix it? (Wrong!)
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".
but has routinely included "network and encryption related technologies".
It's just that these two worlds now, amazingly and probably incorrectly, overlap.
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 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.
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...
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.
Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.
People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
> Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA?
Where are the new ones?
Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing.
> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.
Zhaoxin makes X86 and countless make ARM and RiscV chips. SMIC being a foundry.
> The Chinese Microsoft?
Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance.
>The Chinese Boeing?
Comac makes passenger and Chengdu fighter jets.
>The Chinese NVIDIA?
Huawei makes AI GPUs.
>People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world
Considering the US never had its industry blown up in any war and could reap the benefits of 150+ years worth of stability, higher education, skilled immigration, compounding wealth, and taking over the vacuum and brains of Europe's post-war industrial powers, that's not really something THAT impressive.
>and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.
If it isn't halfway trying, why does it feel the need to sanction or ban chinese competitors?
Because it's easier than actually trying, as witnessed by this very story.
Germans also said the same thing about Chinese EVs in 2014. They ain't laughing now, especially in Dresden.
There isn't one.
AVIC owns Xi'an and Chengdu, who make large commercial aircraft and light bizjets, but they're in no way comparable to Boeing.
Unlike Boeing, they actually care about worker's rights, and product safety.
Manufacturer of what, exactly, though?
What do you export? What do you sell?
Food? Nope, illegal in most of the world.
Cars? Nope, uncompetitive in most of the world. "High end" American cars lack even basic features fitted to poverty-spec cars in the EU, like heated windscreens.
Computers? I'm typing this on a computer assembled in Scotland onto a Latvian-made chassis using a Chinese-made motherboard populated with Korean memory chips and an Israeli microprocessor.
What does the US actually make and sell, any more?
If you win? Good luck collecting damages from China, and have fun suing the next brand that starts selling the same machine in different plastic
Or, said another way: unwillingness to enforce.
But you're totally right that enforcing them is extremely expensive, slow and risky.
That said, Roomba isn't exactly a startup but wasn't a tech giant either, and did enforce their patents often.
And especially against imported infringing products, the ITC provides a much cheaper, faster mechanism to get protection via injunctions.
That's an opinion, and not one I agree with.
If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades.
Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example.
It's asinine to think you can outsource manufacturing of whatever object to some other company in another country, but that no one on the planet can make the same thing because "the idea is yours".
What happens at expiration is an important and intended feature of patents. They trade a legally guaranteed headstart against the requirement of publishing your methods for your competitors to learn from.
The fact that it takes decades for that to come about is harmful to society.
Lots of places sell unique/novel things that are not patented, successfullyn
* built a lithium refinery
* produces its own battery cells
* makes its own motors and drivetrains
* makes its own car seats
* owns and operates a fast-charging network
* sells direct, bypassing dealerships
* offers insurance integrated with vehicle data
* develops its own autopilot AIExcept it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.
A lot of Chinese EVs are much better and cheaper than the Cybertruck.
I think there are a lot of different reasons:
1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll even throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.
2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US anymore.
3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.
It's not that rare that Chinese products are sold below cumulative costs of Western equivalent products and services, let alone prices. Chinese(<-substitute this with appropriate East Asian nations past and future) economy just isn't coupled well with the rest of the world that USD converted cost calculations would work. This in economic theories is sometimes explained as exports of starvation and/or overproduction, but IMO that make less sense when they've been doing it at scale of multiple decades.
The craziest example of these is Chinese PCB prototyping services: as cheap as $2 per 5 pieces with $5 extra for complete assembly and $15 shipping. $5 each would be darn cheap in the rest of the world, even $50 each for the board and $150 per assembly work would not be so absurd. There's just no competing that.
Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors.
I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project.
In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.
There’s also a good after market ecosystem and 3D models you and print for various attachments.
I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products.
The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US.
But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.
Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that:
* is well designed
* can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing
* prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability
* uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit
If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
Isn't it more like "if society has time to think about and can afford those qualities"?
If most folks out there have limited finances (CoL-relative, of course) and are just scrapping by, they'll buy the cheapest thing out there that just does the job (vacuums) and tend to ignore any extra luxuries, even if those would be more economically advantageous long-term (repairs/maintenance part of the TCO). That's simply because of the focus - it's more on the account balance, due bills and next paycheck, than on the implications for a more distant future. Crazy volatility and all the global rollercoasters like pandemics, wars, and all the crazy politicians around the world doesn't help regular folks' sensible decision-making at all, of course. The more stressed one is, the less rational they act.
People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.
The focus, thanks to years of advertising, is shifted towards features, new features sell, quality doesn’t, so to keep the price point and “innovate” manufacturers need to lower the quality knowing that a new version will replace the device soon, most consumers see this as normal so when a poorly designed and cheaply made thing for what there’s no replacement parts , no repair info, no software/ firmware fails is just an excuse to purchase the new shiny iteration with all the the bells and whistles (and AI!, copilot toaster!) wich is gonna last les than the previous one but now needs an “app” an activation and a subscription for the premium features .
You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.
Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.
So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.
You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.
I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.
Or - turn it into a subscription.
Isn't this why patents exist?
I remember when Apple finally cracked the idea that consumers would be willing to pay a premium for a more attractive computer. At the time, I thought they had a 2-5 year lead at best. Turns out they just kept making more and more high quality devices and not one organization has figured out how to compete with them, even now that they’re starting to lose sight of the values made them so great.
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.
My wife bought the Dyson garbage anyway because she can't ignore her instagram feed.
Having a robot do everything is just another step in the convenience direction. It is great if you have expensive floors that you want to maintain on a daily or bi-daily basis.
Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.
I guess this is how people felt when they moved from wired phones to wireless phones?
> Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.
And dragging the cord around, and having to plug out and re-plug the cord in again because you want to do a different part of the room.
As someone who used to sweep the floor of the family home as a chore, as a child, that makes me smile.
> 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.
This strategy has limits, and I think iRobot hit those, and they didn't didn't lower themselves to switch to the second strategy of selling cheap unreliable garbage (at least not before 2019, which was the last time I bought a Roomba).
> 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.
I'd dispute this in this case: Roombas may not have solved the vacuuming problem for everyone, but they solved it for me (at least), and they were built pretty well (reliable, modular & reparable design, etc.).
> 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.
1. I've got both, and the Roomba works a lot better than not vacuuming with the canister vacuum at all. It doesn't frustrate me, and it took far less time to Roomba-proof my home than vacuuming it every week for a year.
2. I agree with the IP address thing, but I think at only got added when they attempted to "get people to replace their machines with the improved ones." I have a couple of the older models that have no network connection (and had no plans to buy more due to the unnecessary network requirement).
Cords suck. So I bought a cordless vacuum, and was able to vacuum more. But I also needed a mop because vacuums don't do well enough on my laminate, stuff still gets stuck on. So I bought a cordless mop, so I could map more. This worked great for awhile but...
But it turns out if I did my vacuuming and mopping every night, I could keep my floor in better condition. I don't have time for that, but a robot from Eufy does and doesn't cost much compared to how much I would benefit from it.
Luddism on HN is a bit weird, but I get it, some people don't see the point of automating these tasks because their lives aren't complicated enough yet (e.g. they don't have kids, or have lots of free time and energy to spend on house work).
I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.
But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.
As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.
Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.
I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.
This is not to mention that the US also engages in data collection for coercion purposes.
Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.
When Twitter had its recent VPN reveal, what actually took me by surprise was how many divisive accounts weren't from China or Russia, but from regions of the world like Turkey, India, Africa, and South America. Sure, they could be spouting divisive politics to push an agenda of someone who is paying them, but the simpler answer might be that they spout divisive politics because it earns them money in terms of advertising dollars.
And that's the real problem, IMHO. The subversion of democracy isn't happening because of China, Russia, or any number of adversarial countries, but because our social media companies don't care enough about our country or the people living inside it to meaningfully crack down on ragebait engagement farming.
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.
Seriously, who cares about you or your house? Why do you think your personal example is the one to reason from?
iRobot sold 50 million robots, lets conservatively say 10% of those are internet connected and still in service. That's 5 million households. There's probably quite a few people in that 5 million who have something going on that Chinese intelligence is interested in, even things that may affect you personally, if indrectly (if that's what you care about).
Come on, do really you think iRobot they sold data like that to third parties? Like user-identified floor plans? Camera images from inside people's homes?
-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.
I will reference a quote I originally heard on HN years ago, though: the audio surveillance is magnitudes more valuable than the video.
To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some of these examples are just bat shit crazy well beyond paranoid
You seem to assume that they have somehow physically disabled access to any kind of remote activation. That seems extremely unlikely given the overall selling points of the roomba.
The roomba doesn't have to "run" in order to be using its microphone, which as noted is likely the more valuable data acquisition source here.
Turning on a microphone is not going to capture the required pics for this blackmail campaign.
X now gets monthly checks from Y. Done.
https://blog.avast.com/what-do-security-cameras-know-about-y...
Data brokers love this data, dont play with me I know you better than that
https://www.cloaked.com/post/the-data-broker-economy-will-hi...
HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.
Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.
We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.
GP is correct. "Roving camera/microphone" -> ??? -> "harm". What is "???" and what is "harm" specifically, and how the former leads to the latter, in specific steps?
I thought this was settled
People are walking around with self spy devices and putting them everywhere and giving all their private data to corpos.
That’s not new, we know it happens, we know companies use “anonymized” data for advertising. Its in public records for large companies balance sheets and there are thousands of data brokers who live exclusively on this data.
There are multiple compelling and popular documentaries about this.
What’s the push back here?
The book Surveillance Capitalism wrote about this a decade ago: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791
If people are still skeptical then they are ignoring reality.
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?
Also I would assume it's a lot more dangerous and expensive to send someone in when you can just put an innocuous robot into a room which has cameras and microphones that can watch + listen 24/7 and auto-recharges when the battery is low (unlike surveillance devices).
(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.)
Did you weigh data collection, persistence and transferability before purchase and then conclude that the risk/benefit was there?
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.
What do we do with companies/products like Tesla, short of shutting them down? Fully open code and absolute full control seems like it's going too far. Idealistically I like it, but practically I can't see it working.
As non-car owner, I also dislike the Tesla cameras around me. Maybe one solution would be to not have fucking cameras everywhere, if the owner's exclusive access can't be guaranteed, abuse can't be prevented and legal consequences are not enforced. Maybe there should be standards and certification.
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.
Can you provide more info/got any links? I would love to try some open source software on it
They were unimaginably unreliable compared to our older Roombas, and I was kind of shocked how little we missed them.
Anyway, I looked into getting a secure (or at least not malicious) alternative. At the time, the best bet was to get a Chinese model, then MITM its connection to the cloud + run your own server locally.
At that point, I realized it was less effort to just manually vacuum the house and moved on. I'm certainly not the only one, given the size of the modder community for the Chinese competitors.
Now, I wonder how far the modders are from buying a handful of commodity components + just 3d printing the rest of the robot, since that's less effort than dealing with enshittification.
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...
But answering as a hypthetical roomba owner: As I am from the EU, this new ownership would actually be better for me. The US already mandates spying with devices like these, and has been caught multiple times doing so already. It is also known to share info with the domestic services, the latter point not being true for China.
China absolutely shares info with all of its national police services, intelligence services, and military. Depending on the company these PLA may literally own some / most / all of the organization.
I am not in the US or China, and on balance I am less worried about the Chinese blowing my house up, but don't pretend they're nice, or that they're your friend. I don't want them having my data any more than I want the NSA, Research & Analysis Wing, or the NK Reconnaissance General Bureau.
Again, the root problem of course is that there is any data to share in the first place.
Depends on where you live. If you are living in North Korea and somehow you got to own a Roomba, it would be surely a bad thing.
But living in a western country, I would hands down prefer giving all my secrets to the North Korean government instead of my own one.
As an American, I'd much rather a Chinese company have data on me than an American one.
The American government and FBI and police don't have access to the Chinese company's data. But with a subpoena (and sometimes just with a friendly ask), they sure do have access to an American company's data.
Now if the US is at war with China and you're a politician or in the military, then of course get rid of every device in your home and workplace from China that could be used to spy. But if you're just a normal citizen worried about your government collecting information on you, it seems preferable to stick to foreign companies, like Chinese ones.
But if you live in an area with little exposure to these communities, I doubt the Chinese government would care about your private information.
But no matter who I am I certainly wouldn't want North Korea to have my private information, because they'd have no qualms about finding ways to use it to empty my bank account.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/chinese-spy-speaks-out-enquete...
Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets.
What is the concern?
Second, why assume a random Chinese tech company will manage to keep this information to themselves? I wouldn't exactly bet against some terabytes of videos appear on some torrent indexer. Now, combine with modern AI tools for sifting for what you are interested in, and it might hit closer to home for someone.
I never assumed American companies kept this data to themselves so nothing has changed in that regard.
I don't really care if the camera is American or Chinese, I just don't want a camera/mic in my home that I don't control. And yeah, the smartphone counts but it's a lot harder not to have one.
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
But if you have this from 2-3 people, you can start inferring if they are meeting sporadically, meet a lot, possibly live together.
Or, if you add information about the services in the vicinity of cell towers, you can start deducing changes in a persons life. Suddenly the phone is moving more, to places with a doctor nearby, a gynecologist nearby, clothing stores, furniture stores, ... eventually a hospital. Start mixing in information about the websites they visit...
This incremental discovery of information about a person is surprisingly powerful depending on the data you have and hard to predict.
I guess that's why the vacuum doesn't worry me. The phone really does.
Just stop leaking willingly leaking bits for little or no upside instead it's much simpler
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.
With that being said, I specifically got a roborock device with only LiDAR and no camera just in case.
The old company could have done the same thing. I recognize that China is a u.s. geopolitical adversary, but when it comes to politics domestic adversaries are just as ruthless.
I'm not making moral comparisons; I'm just saying that the motivations of the PRRC and Coca-Cola are different.
And just because a corporation is based in China doesn’t automatically make it some kind of government managed communist entity.
Suppose the Chinese gov has access to my robovac data. Given that I reside in the US, how is that worse than ICE having access to my data?
That depends entirely on the politics in question. It's well known that corporations are willing to abuse their power for political ends if it serves their interests to do so.
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.
Especially as the N of datasets grows.
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...
But it turns out that an economy based on rent extraction and enshittification can’t in the long run compete with one based on a real economy of industry, agriculture, and public services.
We should have privacy laws including mandated user control of user data. In my view, scaremongering around China just demonstates how uncompetitive the US is, in the long run. We should set our sights higher than merely begging to trade one form of technofeudalism for another.
Your pricing model should reflect your real-world costs. If it doesn't, then update your pricing model.
If consumers can't do the new pricing model, then your real-world costs are probably out of wack. Which they would be in this case - there's no reason a vaccum should require expensive backend services.
the problem with disc shaped vacuums is adapting your whole home to make their labor saving make sense. not maps or china or all this other bs.
https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/dreames-new-...
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.
I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
It's an interesting idea but it just didn't work for me and I wouldn't consider buying another.
I don't know that I'd buy another, especially because the new ones creep me out with all the cameras and such, but as long as I can keep this one running, it does a good enough job.
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.
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.
People that don't vacuum that frequently, I'd assume, are also the type of people that don't clean a litter box for a week instead of daily.
I would not personally vacuum daily but having completely automated, vacuuming and mopping, every day has produced wonderful floors. Less work than what we did before too.
There's no germs involved here. Dustin on the floor is dirty socks, and you can peel crumbs and other things under foot under foot. It all goes away if floors are cleaned daily.
We also have building ventilation that is sadly unfiltered, so we have more dust than normal coming in.
We don't vacuum everything daily but a robot would really help us, we just won't buy an internet connected one or something that's very pricey. Our existing vacuum is crazy efficient and quiet.
Some people install domotic, always choose escalators and elevators over stairs, do everything they need to not move their ass during the day only to pay for a gym pass and spend more time at the gym than they have provably saved avoiding "living".
And I'll show myself out…
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.
I mean to say, this should not be any more alarming than if, say, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon bought Roomba vs. any random Chinese company.
I say this not to say that China has no human rights issues to worry about, but rather, that the US and other Western countries have just as many concerning human rights issues (including privacy, freedom of speech suppression, and police state) that we're just more familiar with and used to, compared to the Other that is China.
Basically, 6 of one, a half dozen of the other.
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.
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.
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.
Does comparing sales to households make any sense though? You'd need to figure out (40MM - Roombas in landfills) / average Roombas per household.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was a total dealbreaker for me. No vacuum cleaner needs that.
If people ask me what's wrong with the so called modern technology, this is it.
Local-first system paradigm should be made mandatory and default, not optional [1].
[1] Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud:
iRobot was in a distressed state then, and immediately laid of 1/3 of staff when the deal fell through. I knew a survivor of that mess. Now this.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-ac...
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.
I doubt it though
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.
The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.
In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. The platforms themselves barely innovate, yet they rake in enormous revenue streams by taxing all other participants and being the central connection point for all economies.
Is it healthy that we only have two smartphone providers? That they can extort every industry - including crazy unrelated industries like fintechs, automotive, various entertainment industries, etc.?
Is it healthy that the "URL bar" now means Google search in 95% of the panes of glass humans use to access the internet? That a search for a company's products are now a competitive bidding zone where every market participant is taxed on basic branding?
Healthy capitalism should be brutally competitive. It uses regulation to ensure companies do not grow too big to escape evolutionary pressures. Google, Apple, and Amazon ought to be sweating - not sitting by the pool, relaxing. And they certainly shouldn't be able to become invasive species in other markets when their entry amounts to dumping.
I love capitalism. A healthy dose of antitrust regulation makes it more distributed and less antifragile. It makes sure lots of stakeholders can pursue lots of objectives rather than concentrated labs that are merely the lavish luxuries of titans. It prevents laziness and ossification by forcing everyone to be nimble.
I have received better treatment from the worst monopoly companies like Comcast etc than the services from the US government.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-room...
I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.
They want control of Taiwan and are building way more capable hardware than Russia has.
Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future.
So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.
China isn't going to physically invade the US. They want to take our place as the world's cultural leader and relegate the US to approximately the current state of the UK.
Companies like Amazon want to increase the wealth of the owners at any cost including domestic political capture. They would see the country being run by oligarchs like Russia.
Would you rather live in the UK or Russia?
Yeah, I'm going to need some examples as to how Amazon is worse than China.
I don't mean to make light of what Amazon actually does. Their logistics are incredible. But, really, that's what they are. A logistics company. Your money still goes to China and you pay more so an American company can get their cut too.
Have you actually used AliExpress? I use both Amazon and AE, and the former definitely offers a lower-deceit, easier to use, and better customer experience. Amazon powers most of the web, whereas AE regularly has massive bugs (I was completely unable to sign in for over a month due to a UI bug last year).
What makes you feel otherwise?
Opposing the merger in this case necessarily meant embracing iRobot going out of business. Their financial position was clear, and no one else was in that business vertical but iRobot and Chinese companies. So either iRobot folds and the market is owned by Chiense companies, or iRobot folds and its IP is bought by Chinese companies.
> but I would guess the Chinese buyer does not have the same market power that Amazon does
In home robotics? They own the whole market.
> Warren is opposed to this purchase, too, but no longer has the influence to stop it.
Warren is too blindly ideological and frankly stupid to have pieced this together.
This company would have probably flourished if it had workplace democracy but instead it was a centrally planned dictatorship and failed.
Maybe that is the real lesson here.
Ahh yes workplace democracy, famously tenable for high tech companies.
I also have zero faith in tech leadership as they have been the major driver of mass misery across humanity. Not only should they be stripped of their positions in their companies, but leadership should be directly given to the workers.
It's the only way to right to the wrong. If it's good enough for executives (voting for other executives, pay packages, and company direction), it's also good enough for workers.
Do chinese police even carry firearms? edit: most don’t (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...)
So, given that, I would choose 100/100 times to deal with Chinese police over the US ICE/police murder squads if I had an option
The US has the largest prison population.
China has plenty of problems but no country matches the depravity of the US “justice” system.
Oh and that’s just the “formal” system, go to the south and you’ll see what it is.
The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but that ship sailed here centuries ago) but they do send vans to harvest the organs of dissidents. And Google “persecution of Uyghurs”.
They’re not a benign organization just because they shoot less, they just get shot at less.
Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist.
However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you include the global war on terror and the modern prisoner slave market encoded into the constitution (13th amendment)
If you wanna go all the way back to the cultural revolution then absolutely fine but my argument there is going to be that’s no different than any of the culls that the United States or any other country have done. So they don’t get a pass but they aren’t worse
Ultimately all you have to do is put up the “death toll” from state action both inside the nation and outside the nation to compare numbers. I’ll let you go ahead and do that exercise.
No that the communist party has only ruled in China for less than 100 years but the same structure in America which has been completely depraved since the founders of the country were alive and actively shaping the politics of the US is coming up on 350 years ago.
I mean for Christ sake we bought the southern United States from France in order to maintain our slave plantations as the French were getting rid of all their slave holdings worldwide. And then after the Civil War which was supposed to solve that ethical burden they completely gutted the entire process of reconstruction in order to prevent the full completion of it because the population was so racist they did not want to do it. As a black person in America I will tell you the slave population in jails is higher than it ever was anywhere else.
If that’s not a disqualification on its own of any type of ethical foundations I don’t know what is.
I won’t engage the insanity of calling anything we’re doing genocide (I guess we’re just really bad at it because the targeted populations are growing while we do it despite all our weaponry) because what’s the point? But if you think Amazon is more evil than the CCP because police shoot more Americans than the population of China, my only hope is that you learn to use logic as coherently as the language.
It is, however, about as likely as my Roomba assassinating me because the CIA ordered it to. I say this without malice and not as an insult: therapy can help. This is likely trauma response.
Yeah HN is a weird a place I’ve been messing on a long time.
I treat these discussions like if I was taking the hardest to defend positions.
Despite whatever you might think of Louis CK he taught me the idea that you try and lose the audience early snd then win them over then you have the best joke. I think it’s the same for intellectual sparring and I love causing chaos.
It’s a good critic in my actor-critic model. Plus I have an insane amount of experience so most of my ideas are kind of nested complexities and I don’t like to translate to college level.
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."
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).
Second, preferentially selling it on one retailer does not suddenly make all the competition go away. Amazon is not a retail monopoly or anywhere close to it despite Lina Khan's bullshit paper that went through some mental gymnastics to create that myth. If anything, the synergy with the retail storefront can reduce overhead and decrease prices to the consumer.
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.
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.
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.
Now instead China is using it to spy on people. Glad I didn't buy one I guess.
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.
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.
The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
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.
The west was extremely foolish to think that IP would scale beyond national markets for very long.
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.
That gets mocked by rich people in rich countries in the short term but then leads to disruptive innovation from below, cheaper, simpler items growing and eating the market.
However, batteries as a commodity are a good example where china is leading as volume and R&D leader
They are more than capable. I have just looked at what BMW, Mercedes and Audi have on offer. Then compare what Zeekr and Xpeng has on offer (7X, G9). Quality wise they feel the same or even better.
While I agree as a "complete car" the full package might not quite be there yet. But that is from a European perspective as they mostly are focused on their home markets. But this is changing. This is then simply iterating for product/market fit.
Personally I find the major problems in chinese cars are the software. That is the easy fix and they are getting closer with each iteration.
So much that today I would choose a Zeekr 7X but choose to postpone as the software was too annoying (adaptive cruise control, lane assist, sign recognition, auto brake, audio cues).
The big loss we have with EVs are servicability. But that is a universal problem with all automakers.
The main problem I see (beyond my i4 just being significantly nicer to drive) is replacement parts. The chinese EV companies are replacement parts and a qualified repair network. Replacement part availability is rather bad across the board, which has a number of cascade effects, but primarily higher insurance premiums. To add, there is also the fact that it looks like the EV market in china will consolidate not too far in the future, most likely compromising long term maintainability.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
Chinese companies compete with eachother ferociously. And Chinese society itself is dog eat dog. Everyone wants to make money.
Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.
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.
Everything wrong with the western tech academic/industrial complex in two sentences.
I thought that was the difference between "invention" and "innovation"?
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.
That’s basically Apple’s MO
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> if you are not moving, you are dead.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but there is some irony here.
Antitrust is like anti camping mods for the server.
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.
Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.
The camera/microphone is more worrying.
Also, is it still difficult to bring profits back to the US?
Damn'd if you do, dam'd if you don't.
Or do they publish all their IP on a government site for all to see?
Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions. But now they're getting to the point that they can start to lead the conversation.
Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
0: https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/steal-book-elegant-o...
Funny how that works.
> Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions
Like making it mandatory to have a Chinese co-owner own 50% for all businesses created in China? I don't remember seeing that in the WTO rules.
> Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
Thanks for the book recommendation!
I'm not sure what this hat to do with IP laws, could you explain?
> Funny how that works.
It seems to make sense to me, but what are you suggesting?
How do you know they’re not?
Nothing happens in China without State approval so maybe the penalties for encroaching on a State backed entity are quite severe?
1. Chinese companies steal IP from each other all the time.
2. The Chinese economy is growing quickly and Chinese companies are out-innovating their US competitors in many segments.
And the question then is: do strong IP protections actually benefit innovation? Because China seems to be a counterexample.
Today the vast majority of patents are not intended for any kind of licensing and they might be even completely useless if licensed, but they are only intended for preventing competition in the market where the patent owner is active.
In order to be useful, a patent system should start to require again that the inventor shows a working prototype that demonstrates all the features claimed in the patent. Moreover, the patents should expire much faster, certainly not later than after 10 years from being issued. Perhaps a longer validity could be accepted for patents owned by individual inventors, but in any case not for the patents assigned to the employers of the inventors, as most patents are today. Also, patent owners should offer "Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing" (FRAND), otherwise the patent should be invalidated.
The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US!
On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places.
Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things!
People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymore, and in the same breath get pissed that China doesn't kneel to our absurd IP laws!
The US COULD compete if we put building shit ahead of rewarding some shithead capitalist for someone else's work.
Also a lot of research is already done at, or in cooperation of universities, or with research tax breaks.
Let alone the fact that a lot of patents are absolute bullshit. There are patents on UI elements, even black rubber handles with a hand grip. Not white ones, mind you. It’s insanity and stifles innovation.
But if patents and trademarks and copyright are so incredibly important for innovation, I guess that’s why stuff like math and theoretical physics has the lowest amount of innovation, right?
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.
No it isn't and this comes across as a straw man. Competing on price, build quality, distribution, aesthetic, service support etc etc are all very real.
> Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
How/why did we ever develop anything prior to 1710? And we can add first movers advantage to the list of "real" protections, as well as prestige, marketing etc.
> And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long?
Define superpower here? It seems to me that Western powers became global powers first because of colonialism, which A) was driven by materials not by IP, and B) caused direct harm to China.
> China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West?
Was China in a bad position before the Europeans arrived? Since the Opium Wars they've been forced to play along or risk being wiped out completely. Where could they be without the west indeed.
> Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done?
Haven't they? It seems that they are very competitive for a host of practical manufacturing reasons that could have been implemented elsewhere if there had been a will or long term vision.
> Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
Japan was completely neutered and propped up by the US for half a century while they "recovered." It's not a comparable situation.
> there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Is there? Did Britain become a superpower because of its free and cosmopolitan society? Is being a superpower our end goal?
> Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
This isn't an argument at all, just an ad hominem not in keeping with site guidelines. I'm happy to discuss but strawmen and as hominems are very off-putting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their bullet trains are also excellent.
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...
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
I've had my Miele vacuum cleaner for 15 years now, and I bought it second hand. I can still buy bags and filters for it, and when the floor roller piece broke (something heavy fell on it) I was able to buy a replacement one for cheap. I see no reason why it can't go another 10 years.
It feels like a very low probability that a robo-cleaner I buy now will come from a company that (in 10+ years) will a) exist and b) support 10+ year old vacuum cleaners.
I don't really use many of the smart features, but the ability to set up cleaning zones in valetudo has been really nice. Same goes for "do not clean" zones.
plus it can void your warranty
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.
You're thinking about it the wrong way around. The manufacturer has to prove that the custom firmware is the reason it broke, you don't have to prove anything. Username not accurate.
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'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.
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.
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.
Imagine having a blowtouch that you can't extinguish or touch which is likely rolling around.
"Hey, the worst case is that you get jets of super-hot flames that are impossible to extinguish!"
Otherwise you're just creating a fire hazard.
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.
Obviously no guarantee that Miele will exist in a decade, but I wouldn’t bet against them personally.
Can't vouch for their newer models just because this one has worked so well for years.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It’s weird that you have identified this business opportunity with such confidence, but you are also unwilling to take the money.
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).
As for modern vacuums I have no idea what happens if you never set up their WiFi.
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.)
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?
You've apparently been off the web and out of stores for over a decade. Home Depot sells a bluetooth-connected shower head (just the head - it doesn't turn the water on). There are smart thermostats that are wifi connected so you can change the temperature of your house from anywhere in the world... for reasons...
It often feels strange when I peak out my head into the real world as it exists today.
https://www.kaercher.com/us/home-garden/robot-vacuums-and-mo...
The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table? How much would Charmin pay to know I have two rooms with tiled floors?
What iRobot actually suggested was more mundane: that there could hypothetically exist a protocol for smart devices to share a spatial understanding of the home, and that their existing robot was in a favorable position to provide the map. The CEO talking about it like a business opportunity rather than a feature invited the negative reception.
It didn't help that a few years later, photos collected by development units in paid testers' homes for ML training purposes were leaked by Scale AI annotators (akin to Mechanical Turk workers). This again became "Roomba is filming you in the bathroom" in the mind of the public.
The privacy risk seemed entirely hypothetical—there was no actual consumer harm, only vague speculation about what the harm could be, and to my knowledge the relevant features never even existed. And yet the fear of Alexa having a floorplan of your home could have been great enough to play a role in torpedoing the Amazon acquisition.
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.
Robot vacuums with lidar don't even need internet connections to work.
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 mean, their teenage kids certainly lobby for them, at least as far as iPhones go...
It's MY home! I don't want anybody filming it or recording it or selling maps of it. Full stop!
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.)
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.
It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily customize routes or focus on specific rooms; do a shockingly good job at self-emptying; and best of all you don't have to rescue them from the exact same sliding door track every single time you run them.
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.
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.
when i did robot shopping year ago, based on reviews and feedback it (vacuum before mopping) doesn't always work and the more polished your floor is, the worst the outcome
You can also mix a non-foaming detergent with the distilled water to have an even more thorough cleaning (or just ask the robot to pass more than once). Robot mops are typically rougher to compensate for the lack of detergent, though.
It's the same for professional car cleaning - it's done with distilled water. If what you said was true, it would be impossible to clean cars as they are much more polished than tiles.
this is why floor buffers exist. to buff the floor so it will be nice and shiny.
professional car cleaning usually made with deionized water. much easier than bringing distillery. but even with usual water on my car there will be usually no marks after wiping it with towel.
Most of it is picked up since it is retained by the mop, which the robot can then clean at the station.
And unless your flooring is made of mirrors, you'll hardly notice after two passes, or if you run a deep mopping mode, especially everyday. Tiled floor in houses is typically not mirror-like in order to absorb sound.
Most industrial robots cleaning shopping malls work like this and don't have additional equipment to wipe the water dry.
I have two dogs that shed HEAVILY. I fear to even turn my robovacuum on, since getting them.
I NEED THIS!!!
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
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.
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.
They might be great designers and talented engineers, sure.
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.
Certainly "vile", but that's not a noun.
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.
This is called dumping. Long-term dumping but it is what it is.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
Now a Chinese company is buying them and there's no problems.
is that the background on that?
Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
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...
Too bad our American leaders sold us out.
Roborock and Eufy (and other competitors) clearly either stole or reverse-engineered the tech.
If the IP had enough value then I’m sure Vorwerk would’ve pursued it in court.
But here we are.
Also, I recall Neato was often purchased and cannibalized by researchers for its lidar.
This was all cutting edge 10+ years ago. Even today, the features it supported offline then is just matched at best today in 2025/2026.
Not exceeded; and often crippled when offline.
What made cloudless Neato amazing was how many real-life edge cases it handled well. That’s where the innovation was.
It’s the integration of the vacuum and sensors along with great software that allowed it to handle furniture shifts and creeping up to stairs without being confused.
I think of it this way: Tesla’s core tech were batteries and electric motors. Nothing groundbreaking. But integrating the core tech as a vehicle took real effort and trial-and-error; then more, in order to make a manufacturing pipeline.
Sorry if I sound bitter. I fell in love with the product on my first purchase and was mortified when the market utterly failed to reward them for the innovation.
[1] at least 30 years ago, now many of them do also another paid work (not Vorwerk-related) on top of unpaid house chores.
Zero creep factor (ignoring later cloud offering)..
Last versions, with big LC touchscreen, recipes on a cartridge o downloaded from Internet, and now I read that latest one can reach 160C to caramelize things or can do slow cooking.
I mean, I don't feel like they sat on the product, although the other day I saw a cooking robot from some other (japanese?) manufacturer which had 2 bowls in the same machine to cook 2 things at the same time. That seems an interesting feature Thermomix is missing.
Example: I buy an iPhone over the competition because it's a superior experience. Their walled-garden (RIP) made for a less appealing attack vector than Android, their commitment to privacy is real (a reflection of Tim Cook), and how they as a company project those values against government entities are all positives.
Before then, I never imagined buying Apple products; and always believed they were overpriced (in many respects, yes) but there are other harder-to-quantify benefits.
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.
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).
Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.
Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.
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.
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.
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.
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..)
How many US homes have a Bosch/Miele washer/dryer vs LG/Samsung? (Outside of NYC).
You do pay premium for the quality. It is worth it though. My parents' Siemens Washer-Dryer combo is still strong after 15 years. A couple parts needed to be changed last year but after the replacement the machine works very well now.
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.
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".
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
If you were happy with your Roomba you could keep it running for many many years. You only needed to buy a new Roomba if you wanted new features.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I never understood why the US objected to this. Amazon was not in that business.
But you see acquisitions like Paramount that will eventually turn US media into a near monopoly with probably 2 or 3 players. Now we have a fight over who will pick up WB, I am sure who ever wins the fight will have the merger approved. But Amazon, denied.
FWIW, I have no love for Amazon, but they were not trying to buy a company like Walmart which will be far worse then buying iRobot.
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."
> Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganized company. The company’s common stock will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan.
Hopefully they keep the lights on.
I think the lights have been off for some time already.
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.
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?
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.
The only caveat is that to associate it with a WiFi network, the legacy app is required. So if the app is pulled from the app stores, it may not be able to connect again after a factory reset. I don't think the pairing requires access to the Internet but it uses a bluetooth protocol that I don't think anyone reverse engineered yet.
Edit: I vaguely remember that mine also stopped working a year or so ago. I factory reset it, re-paired it and it has been working well so far.
YMMV.
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.
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...
Reading the comments, I'm glad the industry is way ahead, and I was just confused. I think I'm gonna sell and get a better one.
I have a 2-level house. Even after some house work, one room that probably still has too high a transition. A lot of different surfaces (And I'm not religious with cords and the like.) I'm guessing that my house is a lot more typical of a lot of houses of any size that would justify an iRobot type of device.
Decided a few years ago that a broom vac just made a lot more sense.
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 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.
how worn out or well maintained your brush head i
If I was going to custom build a house around vacuuming, I'd get a central vacuum system, not a robotic one.
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.
The real problem for me has been that I want something to straighten out my living spaces, not to vacuum the floors. Vacuuming is quick and a good vacuum cleaner (old school bagged kind, not a silly filter one), will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways. But a robot capable of picking up the toys my kids like to leave out, or bringing abandoned coffee mugs to the sink (can you tell I live with multiple adults and children?) would be worth quite a bit to me. A robot capable of washing my dishes and putting away my laundry would be worth more. One capable of preparing meals would be worth more to me than a car.
Of course they would have to be 100% open source with easily replaceable and repairable components, which is where I think most of these types of projects go wrong. I remember seeing the Chefee demo and it was very cool but the main problem is that you aren’t buying a product, you are investing in the idea that the company behind it won’t go belly up in two years and brick your $60,000 chef/cabinet/fridge thing and that it won’t sell itself to e.g. Google which will cram it full of ads and spyware.
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).
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.
This cracked me up, as it implies the cat had thoroughly planned her skirmish :)
Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.
latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
> 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.
[1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
However, just this last update, they added support for a new set of vacuums, Midea/Eureka that don't require that PCB.
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.
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.
> 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?
China might at least make some products out of this purchase. Most of these US companies would just sit on it.
https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...
Not a particularly useful comment but curious of others also have trouble reading that domain.
I've been seeing a lot of ads and talk about Roborock, and ChatGPT highly suggested that I upgrade to a Roborock Qrevo based on my household needs. I just don't want to spend $700+ on a new vac that will brick itself in a few years. Anyone have any recommendations? I see a lot of Roborock recommendations in the comments, but also Dream and Eufy so now I'm just overwhelmed.
Seems like could be a good solution to using best rated (chinese) vacuum's while mitigating privacy concerns.
I am bummed that US robovacs aren't that competitive. Rooting for Matic, though currently don't seem to be as good as Dreame / roborocks [1] (can't go under furniture, apparently take longer to clean same area, tout "vision only" as a feature while charging more - you would think having fewer sensors / no lidar would bring costs down).
The "shareholder value == societal benefit" mind virus is easily the worst thing to come out of higher American academia in the last hundred years, and that's saying something.
It'll still be going in another 10 years, but the AliExpress sourced parts are never of the same quality.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
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-...
Anyone know which brands work when you completely block internet access? I think Roborock is one of the better regarded robot vacuums, but I think I read that they shut down when they can't phone home.. maybe Dreame?
All of IoT is a security anti-pattern now.
To all those making catastrophical scenarios, how would a Chinese entity start streaming data from your robot cleaner and, more importantly, how will this be a security breach at your home or worse, nation?
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.
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.
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.
How is this different from anybody else?
The good thing is that China has proven that there is a way to turn not-industrial country into industrial one. So there is a blueprint for that.
Not all dangerous things are the same thing.
My Roomba is just crap compared with DJI's. I'm not surprised they went bankrupt.
a ROMO video https://youtu.be/Iv7BYURURRI?si=gfaPPiFpEMj1SVaT
But I am aware that in e.g. some parts of Asia the maid service is dirt cheap.
But like most US corp, they only cared about profits and stock price.
I'm not a fan of big coorps either, but these changes happened gradually over time, starting way back in probably the 50/60s. The blame is with the companies and the US government back then for allowing this critical knowledge to be lost. But Roomba didn't exist back then, and the problem is bigger than a single company.
The only real solution is for the US government to invest heavily in regaining this capability for the coming 25 years. But doge and trump axed any chance of this happening so though luck i guess.
Unless US can solve the problem "That job doesn't pay", there is no way forward. And it can't.
It's just like a textile industry. The only way is if it's all done by robots.