Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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.

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 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

Especially as the N of datasets grows.

With that being said, I specifically got a roborock device with only LiDAR and no camera just in case.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.

Also, is it still difficult to bring profits back to the US?

Damn'd if you do, dam'd if you don't.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...

> if you are not moving, you are dead.

I understand the point you're trying to make, but there is some irony here.

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.

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.

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

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.

plus it can void your warranty

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.)

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.

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.

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.

YMMV.

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.

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.

Too bad our American leaders sold us out.

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).

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..)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

https://maticrobots.com/privacy-policy

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-...

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.