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.