You can never see how low a journalist can go to serve their corporate overlords until you open theverge, poor iRobot, has only 46% of the market, really needs to be backed by a marketplace/ecommerce de-facto monopolist
iRobot is coasting on reputation at this point. None of their offerings are competitive with the Chinese manufacturers. I expect them to get sold off to someone for the Roomba brand in the next 5 years.
Their last great move was the auto empty dock, which everyone quickly copied. No advantage left there.
Their dual brush system was better. It let them use less suction so they got better results while being quieter. But the patent just expired, so that advantage is gone.
Their VSLAM navigation can’t compete with LIDAR.
They’re in deep trouble. And if their big plan was “Amazon will save us somehow“ that’s gone too.
Sorry but was the auto empty not patented? Unlike software I thought you patented every small increment in the hardware world. If patented and still copied, was it their patent was not tight and allowed loopholes of modifications?
Unlike the brush thing I’ve never seen it discussed in regards to patents.
I think someone else had made one before them, maybe a few. But they didn’t work well. They made the first one that actually worked well. Because of that I’m not sure how much they would be able to patent. Honestly it’s effectively a vacuum to vacuum out your vacuum. Maybe it was just considered obvious by the patent office.
I do know that theirs could tell when it was full. Which is a nice feature. The Roborock docks, at least as of my model which is maybe two years old, couldn’t do that. Whether that’s due to design or just cost savings I have no idea.
I read the article in entirety and felt like the headline unnecessarily blamed Amazon. I would say the EC left Roomba with a huge mess to clean up, not Amazon.
I don’t think the headline is intended to mean “Amazon screwed over iRobot“ so much as “iRobot screwed by their mess since they can’t count on Amazon‘s as a bail out”.
Which I think is a good point. But the headline does not do an effective job of getting that across. It really does make it sound like Amazon was actively causing the problem as opposed to re-revealing it.
Maybe just shifting the order around would have been enough.
“Roomba left with a huge mess now that Amazon merger is off”.
Why is the blood on Amazon's hands and not the EU? Or uhh, the iRobot CEO for leading the company to a position where it had to be acquired or shrink massively?
I can only imagine how burnt out that founder must be at this point -- decades of being on the bleeding edge of commercializing new technologies with so many misses along with hits, and a last decade where global competition headwinds make consumer robotics competition heavier than ever from China.
> Why is the blood on Amazon's hands and not the EU?
What does the EU have to do with anything? If a company is faced with a scenario of either it's taken over by another company or it dies, having to comply with anticompetitive regulation is the least of the company's problems.
Keep in mind that the company you're depicting as a poor victim is the dominant market leader with around half of the whole market share.
You haven’t explained why it’s not the EUs fault. They constantly stick their nose in everything and people get on their knees to the EU blindly believing it’s doing a good thing. The EU is a failure, without America the EU would have been absorbed by Russia and China by now. The EU hasn’t prevented anything bad from happening. Just causes more headaches.
Roomba had first mover advantage by a mile and ~70% share of the robot vacuum market at its peak. The problem isn't Amazon but the fact that the company stopped innovating and let competitors with cheaper products and better tech eat its lunch.
I’ll never understand why they refuse to move to LIDAR. Is it some kind of NIH thing? The sunk cost fallacy of their VSLAM design that they “have” to keep?
LIDAR bots are really cheap. It can’t be the cost of components. And no matter what you could certainly afford to put them on the most expensive bots and leave the really cheap ones with the pointless camera system.
I left the brand over it. There were some things I liked better but their VSLAM implementation is fundamentally flawed.
Roborock. From what I can tell they seem to be the leader.
I wanted something that worked in 100% darkness, and LIDAR delivers that. So I don’t have to go around turning on lights, and I don’t have to worry it will get lost because I didn’t turn on lights.
Most things are a wash. The app is a little better than I remember the iRobot app being.
The auto empty dock works fine, the Roomba could tell you when the dock was full which I do miss. But that’s not an issue.
The mopping system doesn’t work for me due to how deep my carpet is. When the robot lifts the mop to travel it still hits my carpet. The Roomba system looks better where it lifts the mop all the way above the robot.
But I don’t care about the mop. That was just built-in so I tried it.
I’m happy I made the switch. I wish I didn’t have to. I was perfectly happy with my Roomba other than the navigation issue. But it was killer.
> The mopping system doesn’t work for me due to how deep my carpet is. When the robot lifts the mop to travel it still hits my carpet. The Roomba system looks better where it lifts the mop all the way above the robot.
The DreameBot L20 Ultra can disconnect its mops and leave them in the dock. Roborock's Q Revo seems like it was based on the DreameBot L10s Ultra, so I've seen some guesses that it may eventually come to Roborock as well.
Isn’t it known that Roomba was using the cameras to map items in people’s homes? Is that not one of the features that Amazon was interested in? I think it’s pretty clear why leadership thought that it was important to stick to cameras. But maybe I’m connecting dots that aren’t there?
The VSLAM system is (or maybe was???) an upward facing camera. It was basically celestial navigation using the lights in your ceiling. It wouldn’t do much good for spying.
The newer ones high end ones have front facing cameras. I don’t know if that’s a replacement or in addition to. And that’s the camera that might capture your stuff.
I think Roborock and others have copied the front facing camera. Seems like you could still spy with a LIDAR bit if you had that.
If company A spends millions on research and development to produce a product, and sells it for a 20% margin to attempt to recoup its R&D and make a profit, and a Chinese company is like “oh cool, let’s copy it, sell it at half the price, but we get a 90% margin cos we have access to all the cheap labour and resources with no R&D overhead” the problem isn’t not being able to be competitive at 46% market share.
A) you just described the Open Source dilemma. One I've been dwelling on for some time with little in the way of suggestions.
B) while your narrative is popular, the idea that "Chinese just copy" is rapidly becoming obsolete. I bought a Chinese inverter last year that is cheaper, and has a lot more features than the "established US brand". Equally Roombas have lagged in some areas, despite the R&D investment. It's this lagging which is hurting the cause.
>The European Commission, the executive body of the EU, launched a probe in July, saying that the proposed deal could result in Amazon hindering iRobot rivals from competing on Amazon’s online marketplace. The commission argued that Amazon could delist or reduce rival products’ prominence in search results or elsewhere.
Amazon more than once hindered competitors on their marketplace, so their previous behavior is the reasons for the objection by the EU.
I think they sold the story that they would become more than just a robot vacuum company and be a lots of kinds of robots company, and we're valued on that. In the end the robot vacuum industry just isn't big enough to justify all they sold to investors.
The roomba vacuum was a great product but there's nothing about that device that made me thing they would naturally just be able to make other kinds of robots (and just didn't for a while...). When I think of things I would want a robot to do the proven roomba form factor and tech just doesn't make sense for any of those cases.
You'd think the tech would be useful for any kind of navigating-a-fixed-environment robot - I can think of self-driving warehouse carts, home laundry robots (where the brand might help), maybe lawnmowers.
lawnmowers sure, but laundry is at least a decade from being doable by a consumer robot. manipulating fabric is the type of thing robots are pretty far away from being able to do well (for both hardware and software reasons)
Got another one in 2022. Thought it would have improved? Nope. All the same. Get stuck in cables. Always so dumb and so slow. Hair still get stuck in the brush.
Got an app for it, which was really just a fancy way to start/stop.
Sure it “worked” but I was left with the impression that nothing had improved in a decade.
My wife couldn’t handle how slow it was so we ended up getting a wireless Dyson. Yes we have to vaccum “ourselves” but considering how much I had to manage the roomba to stop from being stuck everywhere, I’m now saving time.
> My wife couldn’t handle how slow it was so we ended up getting a wireless Dyson. Yes we have to vaccum “ourselves” but considering how much I had to manage the roomba to stop from being stuck everywhere, I’m now saving time.
This was my path as well. I did not have Roomba, but similar brand and it was constantly getting stuck in cables and under furniture. I am now using a battery vacuum cleaner and I am spending less time with cleaning than constantly babysitting my stupid robot vacuum cleaner.
I think most people figured out these things just suck. For a quick vacuum a Dyson handheld does a much better job and I can do a large area very quickly, same amount of time I used to lose resetting the stupid robot or moving cords for it. For deep cleaning the Roomba couldn't handle it anyway, nor can any of the competitors.
So people here are complaining about Roombas, I like mine well enough. It encourages me to keep my place tidy enough that the Roomba (usually) doesn't get stuck*. I don't care about apps or schedules, because every day I just pick it up and put it somewhere in my place before I leave my condo (based on a location wheel I keep on my fridge).
* But despite my cleaning efforts, it does get stuck on wires. Sometimes it pulls out charging cables, and under my couch I have a bunch of those long orange power cables it sometimes climbs on and gets stuck on. Are there any competitors that can automagically avoid wires? Ideally ones where I will not need to use an app of any sort.
Roombas are over hyped expensive junk these things can't survive nor prove useful in my house and I image any house that actually needs it. It's way way way faster to just grab a vacuum quick and do the job.
I owned one of the early models of Roombas. I spent so much time removing hairs and threads from its brush & axle that it didn't seem to save me any effort.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 85.0 ms ] threadTheir dual brush system was better. It let them use less suction so they got better results while being quieter. But the patent just expired, so that advantage is gone.
Their VSLAM navigation can’t compete with LIDAR.
They’re in deep trouble. And if their big plan was “Amazon will save us somehow“ that’s gone too.
I think someone else had made one before them, maybe a few. But they didn’t work well. They made the first one that actually worked well. Because of that I’m not sure how much they would be able to patent. Honestly it’s effectively a vacuum to vacuum out your vacuum. Maybe it was just considered obvious by the patent office.
I do know that theirs could tell when it was full. Which is a nice feature. The Roborock docks, at least as of my model which is maybe two years old, couldn’t do that. Whether that’s due to design or just cost savings I have no idea.
I did not get that from the article at all.
Which I think is a good point. But the headline does not do an effective job of getting that across. It really does make it sound like Amazon was actively causing the problem as opposed to re-revealing it.
Maybe just shifting the order around would have been enough.
“Roomba left with a huge mess now that Amazon merger is off”.
The pun holds even better.
So who is to blame?
I can only imagine how burnt out that founder must be at this point -- decades of being on the bleeding edge of commercializing new technologies with so many misses along with hits, and a last decade where global competition headwinds make consumer robotics competition heavier than ever from China.
What does the EU have to do with anything? If a company is faced with a scenario of either it's taken over by another company or it dies, having to comply with anticompetitive regulation is the least of the company's problems.
Keep in mind that the company you're depicting as a poor victim is the dominant market leader with around half of the whole market share.
LIDAR bots are really cheap. It can’t be the cost of components. And no matter what you could certainly afford to put them on the most expensive bots and leave the really cheap ones with the pointless camera system.
I left the brand over it. There were some things I liked better but their VSLAM implementation is fundamentally flawed.
I wanted something that worked in 100% darkness, and LIDAR delivers that. So I don’t have to go around turning on lights, and I don’t have to worry it will get lost because I didn’t turn on lights.
Most things are a wash. The app is a little better than I remember the iRobot app being.
The auto empty dock works fine, the Roomba could tell you when the dock was full which I do miss. But that’s not an issue.
The mopping system doesn’t work for me due to how deep my carpet is. When the robot lifts the mop to travel it still hits my carpet. The Roomba system looks better where it lifts the mop all the way above the robot.
But I don’t care about the mop. That was just built-in so I tried it.
I’m happy I made the switch. I wish I didn’t have to. I was perfectly happy with my Roomba other than the navigation issue. But it was killer.
The DreameBot L20 Ultra can disconnect its mops and leave them in the dock. Roborock's Q Revo seems like it was based on the DreameBot L10s Ultra, so I've seen some guesses that it may eventually come to Roborock as well.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
The newer ones high end ones have front facing cameras. I don’t know if that’s a replacement or in addition to. And that’s the camera that might capture your stuff.
I think Roborock and others have copied the front facing camera. Seems like you could still spy with a LIDAR bit if you had that.
A) you just described the Open Source dilemma. One I've been dwelling on for some time with little in the way of suggestions.
B) while your narrative is popular, the idea that "Chinese just copy" is rapidly becoming obsolete. I bought a Chinese inverter last year that is cheaper, and has a lot more features than the "established US brand". Equally Roombas have lagged in some areas, despite the R&D investment. It's this lagging which is hurting the cause.
My point is China doesn’t do a lot of the up front R&D. They ride off the back of copies. But they are really good at improving them.
>The European Commission, the executive body of the EU, launched a probe in July, saying that the proposed deal could result in Amazon hindering iRobot rivals from competing on Amazon’s online marketplace. The commission argued that Amazon could delist or reduce rival products’ prominence in search results or elsewhere.
Amazon more than once hindered competitors on their marketplace, so their previous behavior is the reasons for the objection by the EU.
Who to blame for that?
Roomba has been struggling to develop that. A lawnmower with the same navigation challenges as a Roomba vacuum is terrifying.
Got a standard roomba in 2011.
Got another one in 2022. Thought it would have improved? Nope. All the same. Get stuck in cables. Always so dumb and so slow. Hair still get stuck in the brush.
Got an app for it, which was really just a fancy way to start/stop.
Sure it “worked” but I was left with the impression that nothing had improved in a decade.
My wife couldn’t handle how slow it was so we ended up getting a wireless Dyson. Yes we have to vaccum “ourselves” but considering how much I had to manage the roomba to stop from being stuck everywhere, I’m now saving time.
This was my path as well. I did not have Roomba, but similar brand and it was constantly getting stuck in cables and under furniture. I am now using a battery vacuum cleaner and I am spending less time with cleaning than constantly babysitting my stupid robot vacuum cleaner.
* But despite my cleaning efforts, it does get stuck on wires. Sometimes it pulls out charging cables, and under my couch I have a bunch of those long orange power cables it sometimes climbs on and gets stuck on. Are there any competitors that can automagically avoid wires? Ideally ones where I will not need to use an app of any sort.
Amazon and iRobot call off their planned acquisition
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39176297