I have some conflicting feelings on this, the CEO stepping down and the layoffs as soon as this was announced makes it seem like this was/is a company on the verge of shutdown or at least having serious problems.
At what point should an acquisition be allowed on the sake of something being able to continue to exist and possibly save jobs? Sure there would have almost guaranteed be job cuts with the acquisition due to redundancy, but would it have been the same amount?
However on the flip side, it feels like iRobot has been stagnating for years and entering some weird categories. I still fail to see why they entered the air purifier market and them selling a stick vacuum next to their iRobot is sure one way to say "our expensive robot doesn't do everything we claim it does".
I finally ditched my iRobot for a Roborock a couple months ago and it's been amazing. It is shocking how much better it is, when it was in the middle of a clean and I could tell it to go start a different clean and it just did it? It didn't complain or anything, I shouldn't be surprised by this but after the experience with iRobot feeling like it stands in my way every time this felt like magic.
It genuinely makes me sad to see iRobot not be what they used to be, it feels like they got complacent with Roomba.
>At what point should an acquisition be allowed on the sake of something being able to continue to exist and possibly save jobs? Sure there would have almost guaranteed be job cuts with the acquisition due to redundancy, but would it have been the same amount?
IMO, probably never. I think this would open too many shenanigans of running a possible acquisition into the ground or attempt to lobby whatever government agency would regulate this.
At some point, to make rules easy to enforce, you have to absorb some collateral damage.
US antitrust law has a failing company doctrine. If you can show that absent the merger, the company would almost certainly fail, and no other likely purchaser exists, then you have the right to buy it regardless of any competitive concerns.
> On 19th October 2023, Convoy ceased operations and laid off remaining staff. Remaining staff were given no severance and were told their stock options were worthless.[9] In a memo sent that day to employees, Lewis points to "a massive freight recession and a contraction in the capital markets" as major factors resulting in the company's failure.[10]
Nothing fades into oblivion. The company is obligated to liquidate its assets which includes IP. This gives a big opportunity to build new products that may be more economically viable. This would not be possible if the company would be acquired by the incumbent who will just acquire the company’s IP and sit on it.
How often does acquired IP rights just end up in a lawyers filing cabinet somewhere, with nobody in the acquiring company sufficiently incentivized to do something with most of it?
A lot of the time - especially with failing companies where the sale might happen at rock bottom prices, but otherwise too - the acquirer and seller may have very different ideas about which part of the transaction matters.
E.g. one company I co-founded sold off a business unit after we pivoted, and where to me at least the technology was the most worthwhile part - far better than the platform the buyer had. But to them the 6% of the userbase they were able to convert to paying users of their own service was what justified the sale price. And as much as I think the tech we sold them with the userbase was better, I get that to them - even if they agreed with my assessment, and maybe they didn't - it wasn't sufficiently better to them to justify replacing what they had and knew how to develop and knew how to operate (we sold the system, not the company, so none of our staff went with them).
Acquired IP gets used when it is the focus of the purchase, and the acquirer knows exactly what they want or need that IP for, but even then more so if it's e.g. patents rather than software. A lot of software acquirers thought they needed still end up languishing and eventually dying.
But I've seen so much IP "fade into oblivion" over the years. I'd say, I don't even know who currently owns the rights to the majority of the software I've personally developed in my career. Some would be easy to track down. Others near impossible.
> The company is obligated to liquidate its assets which includes IP
"We have no idea who owns this IP in order to ask for permission, because the company went bankrupt" comes up fairly often in discussions about copyright duration and video games.
Spirit being about to "certainly fail" is debatable, and JetBlue is not the only willing purchaser of Spirit.
One outcome is Spirit goes into bankruptcy reorganization and still operates, which is hardly unprecedented for an American airline. Nearly every major airline has filed for Chapter 11 since 2002, the lone exception being Southwest.
Small note: JetBlue was started in 1999/2000, so it would be included on the "exception" list. But overall, your point stands. Chapter 11 re-org is bizarrely common in US airlines. Warren Buffett has many funny quotes about the terrible return on investment for US airlines -- both debt and equity.
>Delta entered Chapter 11 on Sept. 14, 2005, amid high fuel prices and the burdens of high labor and pension expenses. Delta significantly reduced its labor and pension costs while under court protection.
It’s always interesting that Chapter 11 is a way out of pension promises. That someone can take employment at a certain wage, and then the company can renege on the back half of the compensation once the person retires.
Hence one should be wary of accepting the promise to be paid decades in the future by anyone other than the US federal government, or much more regulated entities like insurance companies. If the payer is not US federal government, stick to broad market index funds in 401k/IRA.
Why? How is market competition or the public served by forcing a company to go out of business instead of being acquired? The end result is the same (no competitor), but overall productivity is hurt. Why is that better for the public?
> How is market competition or the public served by forcing a company to go out of business instead of being acquired
How is market competition or the public served by companies whose only strategy is to fail and be bought by the ever shrinking number of ultra rich mega corporations?
Going bankrupt doesn't necessarily mean going out of business. Also, as another commenter said, "letting a company fail really just means letting it sink far enough that some other acquirer will pick it up."
Great point: In US bankruptcy law, "Chapter 7" is liquidation, and "Chapter 11" is re-org. Often, a well-managed Chapter 11 bankruptcy can allow a company to reduce debt burden and emerge as a stronger company, saving many jobs in the process. Chapter 11 bankruptcy is common in the US airline industry.
> them selling a stick vacuum next to their iRobot is sure one way to say "our expensive robot doesn't do everything we claim it does".
> I finally ditched my iRobot for a Roborock a couple months ago and it's been amazing.
I'm not saying those two sentences are totally incompatible, but Roborock's home page at https://us.roborock.com/ is basically half divided between "Robot Vacuums" and "Cordless Vacuum Cleaners"
The problem with allowing an acquisition to proceed just to save the company being acquired from failing is you end up with deals being structured to intentionally to cause harm if the deal collapses
Look at what Kroger is doing with Albertson's for an example. If that merger fails, it's very likely Albertson's will go bankrupt because the shareholders looted the company of all their assets to ensure it can only survive if it's acquired
If we wanted a society where the purpose of a business is to produce useful things, then we should not have the rules set up like they are.
You can't create an entire system of rules and regulations that set it up so the incentives are all aligned for companies to exist to make money, and then be surprised when those incentives work.
The phrase you're looking for is "Too big to fail". We tried that, payed the credit cards of a lot of bankers while a lot of people lost their homes. Make no mistake, people losing their jobs is bad, but saving a bad company doesn't make it better. Everything dies, we should let companies die too.
Banks have counterparty risk in the way that robot vacuum companies don't. Letting the banks go bankrupt would have destroyed a lot of perfectly viable businesses among their customers.
The cloud companies will count as TBTF too for the same reason. Although it's harder to see how Amazon might get into a "we'll have to switch the datacenters off tomorrow unless we get bailed out" financial position", since it's easier for them to trade as a going concern, if there was a risk of that happening they would definitely get a bailout.
Also, remember that the bailouts were in almost all cases loans.
This isn't a too big to fail situation. Amazon wanted to buy iRobot. iRobot wanted the acquisition to go through. The government stepped in and blocked the acquisition on the grounds that they'd rather Amazon and iRobot remained competitors.
But what actually happens now is that iRobot lays off its core staff in a desperate attempt to avoid insolvency. The regulators could wish all they want that iRoomba stay a competitive player in this space, but businesses don't run on wishes and rainbows.
Isn't this an implicit risk anyone who purchases a 'smart' device takes? Every company will eventually discontinue their cloud service for a product line when it suits their needs. We have seen this countless times in technology and that anyone assumes that cycle will repeat with all these devices is fooling themselves.
I have the same experience. I bought the most expensive iRobot and that thing sucks. You can’t irobotitfy your house enough for it to just run. I bought a Roborock s6 and it’s amazing. Immediately got one for my mom and she’s been raving about it for years already.
I did the same thing and it broke 1 month after the 1 year warranty expired. A cryptic error that means buying a new brain for it. Ridiculous that a $800 robot breaks.
Bought two sharks for $300 each. Not quite as good, but so much cheaper. And doesn’t require bags.
FYI: Cheap Roombas seem better than expensive ones. I have a random one which bangs around the house for a long time, and the house ends up clean. Push a button, come back an hour later, and you're done.
I agree with this that they are better, but actually before the expensive roomba I had a cheap roomba and it worked terribly. Insisted on shoving itself right under the perfect height furniture. My house is pretty basic. But my brother had similar roomba and I know he had better luck than me, but now has a shark.
I have a cheap (well, also old, there wasn’t too much else back then, it’s 10 years old) iRobot Roomba 620 and am very happy with it. Extremely repairable, which is not something I read about modern ones of any manufacturer.
I have a successor, almost identical, but perhaps two generations newer. Upgrades:
- Bigger, better dust bin
- Slightly less dust makes it into the HEPA filter
- Slightly better / cheaper roller design
... and similar details.
A friend gave me their smarter vacuum (which they didn't use), and I hated it:
1) It tried to overthink things and was pretty demanding.
2) It didn't clean as well. My Roomba has a pretty anaemic vacuum, but cleans very well by virtue of going over every place many times in random directions as it bumps along for 30+ minutes. The smart vacuum plotted a course which covered everything once, finished up in record time, and nothing was actually clean.
What's odd is that even now, 2+ decades after launch, so little has improved. What I really want is "cyclone operation," as in any modern dumb vacuum, so most of the dust doesn't make it to the HEPA filter. The design is stupid simple:
- Air comes into a circular container from a hole in the side, so the air spins.
- Suction comes out a hole in the top at a half-way point in the radius of the dust container, while most of the dust wants to stay at the inside or outside
- If you're even more clever, you put the suction at half height, because dust naturally goes to the bottom.
The annoying thing is cleaning or replacing filters.
I had one and it got trapped and strangled itself regularly and ran over things and was totally useless. I pretty much wouldn't recommend those basic robot vacuums.
The "run over things" is almost a feature for me. I run the Roomba a few times a week, and I need to tidy up before. Mess never builds up. It means I keep my floors clean!
The "gets stuck under furniture" is a bug. However, I don't have much furniture at Roomba height. If I did, it'd make the device useless.
I think they are utterly ridiculous. Get a decent canister vacuum that plugs into the wall and you'll have clean floors in 15 minutes (or less if your house is small) with no frustration, no ugly charging station to trip over, no batteries to catch on fire or require hazmat disposal when they don't work anymore, no apps, no accounts, no spying.
I think it's pretty fair to assume that anyone buying a Roomba knows about normal vacuums, and still prefer the room as for reasons that are obvious.
( Also lol at the "batteries" that catch fire, as if that's actually a thing that people should worry about. Might as well be scared of your canister vacuum's motor burning out and destroying your house, or never buy a laptop!!)
Honestly? This isn't even a question of time. My house could take 5 minutes to clean and I still wouldn't find motivation to do it every week. Here I just push a button and at least the floors will be cleaned and mopped, and when I have more motivation I can clean in a deeper way.
I think you're mad about something but I can't quite pinpoint what, because it's not frustrating, the charging station isn't that ugly and is out of the way (because the robot knows how to get back to it), and lithium batteries have not been a real fire hazard since the note 8. I agree that using them in the first place is kind of Not Nice for the planet, but since you brought up the points of frustrating and tripping over stuff: do you somehow think using a wired vacuum is a pleasant experience?
I run my robot daily and every two weeks we pay someone to come clean. Robot mostly does a good job of keeping the floor clean during those two weeks, but it can't do the counter tops, clean the toilets or dust everywhere.
Why is this downvoted? Sure, a bit emotional, but the content still stands. There are so many places where Roomba and friends cannot reach. I still was a washer / dryer than can fold my clothes and change the sheets on my bed. That seems like an almost impossible task for a robot.
Folding clothes, changing sheets, load/unload the dishwasher. Those are the things I'd pay good money to automate away. As much as I hate to vacuum, it's far down my list of the chores that annoy me most.
Meanwhile, e.g. loading and unloading the dishwasher annoys me enough that I must admit I have considered replacing my dishwasher with two slimline or drawer ones so I can use stuff out of one while filling the other...
My roomba was cleaning much better 4 years ago than last 2 years, their app was slick 4 years ago and clunky in last 2 years. Random Product innovations degraded the core product. They did get complacent.
Honestly, I’m not sure about “not what they used to be”: I don’t think Roombas have ever been very good.
The early ones were noteworthy for being novel, but (IMO as an early adopter) weren’t very good at cleaning. About ten years later I experienced someone else’s (then) modern Roomba, and it was still essentially the same crappy product, randomly banging into walls and struggling with carpet edges.
When the Roborock appeared with LIDAR, it was like the future in comparison, and frankly what Roomba should have already delivered years before.
When an established company with a big market share and opportunity for a technology lead is so out-innovated, it suggests that something is fundamentally rotten.
Has anyone innovated in the direction of privacy? "This is not a connected device, it does not talk to the cloud, there are no privacy considerations because we don't receive any of your data and never will".
I picked up a Roborock E4 a few years back, both because it was relatively cheap and a couple thorough reviews indicated it was one of the better devices out there. I initially spent a couple hours trying (and failing) to connect it to the Android app, only to discover (out of frustration) that pressing the start button on the unit would clean just fine! I was absolutely relieved that it wouldn't be uploading anything anywhere, the only "downside" was that I couldn't indicate which areas/rooms to ignore, although I'm not sure that would have mattered much since I constantly move things around.
I have no idea if any other models run without smartphone/tablet setup but if so, that would potentially eliminate any privacy issues ;)
Maybe it's time to create a public spreadsheet with a list of models that run without a smartphone, and potentially any downsides to doing so...
Yes, assuming this isn't vaporware. They're supposed to start shipping in March.
https://maticrobots.com
Edited to add this quote from the website:
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.
I bought into the Eufy ecosystem on the same premise, but it's still internet connected, so all you really get is a pinky swear that they're not copying your data for their own purposes. Just because it's on-device doesn't mean it's not also elsewhere.
Anoth quote from the website:
> The HEPA bag is designed to hold about a week’s worth of debris with daily vacuuming and mopping. Replacement frequency will vary based on your usage.
The "membership" (ie. prepaid refills) is advertised at $180. The best-case scenario is you're trading the always-online smart appliance debacle for the overpriced ink cartridge debacle. Pick your poison.
It doesn't even have to be a privacy angle, but complexity. There is nothing I would actually want a robot vacuum to do that requires a network connection, and few things that would even benefit from it (e.g. makes firmware updates easier, which you mostly shouldn't have to/want to do anyway).
I bet 99% people of who buy privacy invading products do not care. Yes, I know that HN loves to go on and on about privacy invasion. Yes, many educated people will tell you that they don't like companies monetising their personal info and habits, but if you watch their actions, they do not care.
That's not true at all. Consumer reports often has privacy as a quality category in device judging. Clearly many people care about privacy _in addition_ to other concerns.
I've had the LiDAR on three Neato Botvacs fail over the past 7 years. In Norway robot vacuums have to last for 5 years, so I essentially got a new robot every couple of years for free. Probably the reason they went out of business.
I think they did a great job. But VSLAM was a mistake. The fact that the robot is not reliable at navigating unless you have all the lights on in your house is just stupid.
LIDAR is clearly superior. There’s a reason every reasonable competitor is using it, even on very cheap models.
I’d be happy to go back to them but I’m not touching them again until they have LIDAR.
If you are an acquirer, and you suspect that the company you are planning to acquire is likely to go under, it can often be cheaper to wait for that event then buy up IP, and hire as many staff as you can for continuity.
For example, see Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable space station tech and then Sierra Space's tech. I don't have any inside knowledge, but I'd imagine the path Sierra is on is likely one similar to the above strategy.
There’s no moat on robot vacuums, they just had their initial brand recognition. Lots of companies should pay attention…
I love my Roomba, it’s been truly a life-changing invention for me and my go-to mental construct for how robots can improve our lives and how good design can be very simple yet effective. But I probably bought it used on eBay and I continue to buy batteries every 5-10 years for it on eBay when it needs a new one.
Have Chinese based electronics improved in the last decade. I remember the concerns about devices catching fire (hoverboards) and lead in vinyl and other materials (I remember an Amazon kids pencil bag that was recalled two years ago)
For a household product that runs autonomously throughout my house and interacts with many surfaces, and with small kids in the house, I want a reputable supplier, not just whiz bang features and a slick app.
Maybe Roborock is that, but there is so much opacity when dealing with Chinese companies even in cases where the govt is not involved.
Ignoring political concerns (which is a big problem); Chinese manufacturers make great products.
DJI, huawei and insta360 are three off the top of my head that are perfectly capable of going up against global brands.
Additionally, almost every high quality brand has manufacturing in China; Apple, Microsoft, Nikon, Canon, Dyson, the list goes on.
This is more a problem of “you get what you pay for”. No name hoverboards were a real problem because designing a compact, high power draw, lithium powered device is hard to do. Segway, ninebot, etc all make great ‘hoverboard’ like products.
this should read "A few Chinese brands make great products"
Most Chinese brands make low quality products; corner cutting is rampant.
> Additionally, almost every high quality brand has manufacturing in China; Apple, Microsoft, Nikon, Canon, Dyson, etc.
That is because the foreign brands set the specs and define the standard of quality, which the factory (i.e., Foxconn) follows to the letter. So Chinese _manufacturers_ can make great products (when required and paid) but Chinese _brands_ generally do not.
This is one reason why Chinese brand products are cheaper than their foreign brand counterparts even when the foreign product was also manufactured in China.
DJI and Anger are two Chinese brands that have worked hard to develop a good reputation internationally, and deliver top products. I wouldn't trust Huawei though.
So Chinese factories are capable of high quality manufacturing. And Chinese brands are capable of high quality design and manufacturing.
That’s what I was trying to get across. As I said earlier you get what you pay for. I can buy great products made in China by Chinese companies and terrible products made in Switzerland by Swiss companies.
Chinese can make great products. You can also lose your shirt with some sort of shanzhai abomination. And you don't always pay bottom dollar for that, you are just getting 不便宜，也没好货. This is why it is very important for China to develop some reliable high quality brands.
The Roborock vacuum experience is pretty good. We have a fearless cat and I've never felt it was unsafe around the vacuum. Generally it just works.
The only "issues" I've had to deal with are:
a) it'll eat cords so the cleaning area has to be picked up before vacuuming (or bad areas zoned off)
b) it can (rarely) get stuck so the cleaning area has to be picked up (ie. a step stool I left out)
c) it can (rarely) get lost if there are major changes to stuff in the cleaning area (ie. if a bunch of cardboard boxes are left out)
d) very rarely (less than once a year) I have to "restore" the map (I think if c happens it might start hallucinating new map area)
I don't know what the replacement part or customer service experiences are like though.
We've had our Roborock for 3+ years now, which isn't a huge amount of time but I wouldn't consider it poorly made. Maintaining it to clear out pet hair and such is simple.
Obviously, but there are some serious contenders here who are actually working on a reliable brand. But if you just buy a random generic bot...ya...it probably isn't going to work out well.
> Have Chinese based electronics improved in the last decade
You would surprised. The answer is yes and yes. Roomba like robots are dominated by Chinese companies and they are the most advanced manufacturers technology wise as well.
They can go back to their base station and self-empty/refill a water tank for mopping now, which is an amazing upgrade over just a vacuum cleaner. Or at least in theory it is, my DreamE somehow got progressively dumber with subsequent updates and now not only gets stuck and confused all the time, but usually can't even find its way back to the station. It seems the software on these things still has a ways to go.
If the company is on the verge of closing, clearly there is something wrong with the business model. So for it to actually save jobs they have to first have the 1.7 billion that Amazon was going to pay and then have enough capital and a business reason that makes the acquisition make sense.
There are not many companies like that out there, particularly for a company like iRobot. There was synergy between iRobot and Amazon.
I am not advocating for a monopoly, but clearly another company wasn't stepping up to take amazon's place.
Google! Maybe, but would the EU see that any differently anyway?
Yeah, there's not really a long list here. Maybe one of the non-US home automation companies might make sense, but they'd likely just put it on a glidepath to shutdown.
I feel like google acquired a ton of robotics companies and then completely failed at productizing any of them. They’ve sold them off now I think so I don’t think this fits with anything they’re doing.
Google likely wouldn't be allowed either, I mean they may not operate a store like Amazon but I highly doubt the idea of searching "robot vacuum" and iRobot always being the top or in a special box would fly.
I mean there is Microsoft who would have the money but it just doesn't really fit into anything they are doing.
Dyson? Sony? But yeah a non US company also opens up other questions that may block it.
Is this a thing that needs fixing, though? Isn't part of the goal of capitalism to let the different business models fight with the idea that the best ones win and everybody else fails and shuts down? Closing when something is wrong with your business model is the goal, not something to be avoided.
While you're not wrong, just because the model doesn't work doesn't mean there isn't still value there.
If you are presented with the choice to shutdown a company or have it live on in another company saving some jobs. I would think the second is the better option.
It is possible that the only reason the business model doesn't make sense is not having a diverse enough of a catalog so research in a specific thing can be justified by multiple products.
The technology can be sold. As for the people, they entered in a contract with a business. If the business does not pan out, I don't see why they should be "saved". If the failure was due to bad leadership, there will be another company in the same sphere. And the value of these skills is rarely tied to the product itself.
Workers rights are orthogonal to socialism for businesses. And there's more opportunity for abuse when companies are "too big to fail". Business survival should be tied to market fit and the ability to attract talent and retain them, not handouts and acquisitions.
The fall of Roomba shows that capitalism is working exactly as intended. The company got complacent and stopped innovating. Their products stagnated, quality decreased and prices kept going up. Meanwhile competitors brought better products to the market. Roomba's market share started reflecting that reality.
What happens if they get taken over by Amazon? Investors get a big exit, and employees hold on to their jobs for a bit longer (before the inevitable layoff). Amazon then uses its massive retail power to push an inferior product and edge out the smaller companies doing better work and competing on merit, leaving the space worse for everyone.
Roomba strikes me as having a very similar challenge to many hardware companies:
1. Prove you can do something amazing
2. Raise a bunch of capital to scale it, betting on future revenue
3. Deliver! Great product, stellar growth, soaring revenue, re-invest in product
4. Flood of copycat competitors, drives up acquisition costs, eliminates higher price point, revenue tanks
5. Pivot. Try to sell another story, build the start of another product leap, loose traction in a new way, pivot.
6. Seek an acquisition before the music ends
7. FTC
In other words, product development (esp. app + hardware) is expensive, difficult, and constantly changing.
We don’t have a capitalist system competing on product merit but acquisition arbitrage. In almost all cases the inferior product wins.
> At what point should an acquisition be allowed on the sake of something being able to continue to exist and possibly save jobs?
Never? The entire point of private companies is that they take risk on themselves. If we have to bail them out we might as well just nationalize them. See: the entire american airline industry.
What if allowing Amazon to purchase iRobot harms the market and shuts down three other competing companies, sending many more people out of a job. Oh, and iRobot still lays of people because they can share a bunch of functions with Amazon now.
What Amazon acquisitions have put other companies out of business?
Amazon bought Eero, yet I haven’t seen other WiFi router companies go out of business.
Amazon bought Ring, then a competitor was so successful that Amazon bought Blink.
This notion that Amazon’s acquisition would put competitors out of business seems to be a weird dream. Especially when it is known an easier path to “unfairly compete” would be to just create an Amazon-labeled robotic vacuum and put that on the market.
Who says the layoffs wouldn't have happened with the Amazon acquisition?
Who says the CEO still had a role to play as Amazon VP and wouldn't have left soon after closing anyway?
These acquisitions tend to come with huge layoffs anyway.
I can't help but feel that a lot of these large companies are choosing not to fight regulatory agencies over acquisitions because after the recent tech correction the targets are now worth a lot less than what they bid for them (similar to Elon trying to get out of buying Twitter). Easier to pay the break-up fee and move on.
Something else that has happened since the initial talks of this merger is that Roomba machines have fallen far behind the competition who are both more driven and taking bigger risks offering better products for the same price or less.
I think this market is pretty much the poster child of how bad the consolidation and lack of anti-trust is hurting US economy right now.
You have a whole bunch of Chinese companies fighting it out on the market (as the founding fathers would have wanted for US!), offering better and better products, leaving Roombas in the dust. While iRobot sleeps on their laurels, barely innovates and at best is only capable of solving their flaccid inability to compete by... being sold to a monopolist which can push it via their store. That's what they wanted.
If US would still have this kind of healthy market of multiple (smaller) companies competing on product, not IP lawsuits and patents, the government wouldn't have to enact foreign sanctions to defend the economy.
Or: The "electronics industry" (essentially contract manufacturing) is much too low margin to make economic sense in a highly developed country like the US. Have you seen the wages in the hyper competitive electronics industry in China? They are awful. Design and marketing is where most of the value can be captured. Look at Philips N.V. They are essentially strictly design in advanced countries, and manuf. in developing countries. They are doing well.
I don’t know if they’re better, but from watching reviews I believe Roborock and Dreame are considered pretty good competitors. I’m certainly happy with my Roborock (which has no cameras, and their latest model also comes in a no-camera variant)
FWIW, production Roombas don't send pictures back to the mothership. The scandal was that pictures from development Roombas -- explicitly expected to be reviewed by humans -- leaked.
In what ways? The Roomba J7 I'm using is pretty amazing at what it does; the only thing I'd appreciate would be a remote control for some manual cleaning. The automatic stuff is pretty great.
For starters, the best Roborock supports improved mopping, including a dock with self-emptying container, self-cleaning mop and proper refills. Together with noticably better obstacle avoidance algorithm.
The new Xiaomi versions now even sport extendible arms to reach corners fully.
On mops: The newest Dreame model can actually disconnect the mops and leave them in the dock, so because of the relationship through Xiaomi people seem to expect that to come soon to Roborock as well.
Does it matter? We are talking about fun consumerist novelties facing a shrinking population with shrinking disposable income. No one needs these "things."
That’s the real issue. As far as I can tell everyone who wants a robot vacuum already has one, and if they’re crappy enough that you’d upgrade, they’re also crappy enough that you’ll likely just give up.
If they work, you’d not feel the pressure to upgrade.
It's a worrying trend, especially for those of us in startup land. With the Figma deal following through and less companies going public, the assembly line funding model is showing some serious cracks.
The entire model of startups taking on lots of VC funding, burning it over a few years to acquire customers and then having a big exit, all without bothering with a business plan or making a single dollar in profit, is basically over.
The reason VC funding is drying up, big unicorns aren't going public and acquisitions are halted is that investors are actually starting to drill into the numbers now, and finding nothing but hot air.
I'm okay with this. Very little good has come from this. How many of the social platforms would be where they are now if they had to fund themselves differently?
Real question: When will Stripe go public? That has to be the biggest unicorn in years. And barrier to entry is quite high, so they have built a nice moat. I wonder if the VCs push them to go public.
its only worrying if you can't make a sustainable standalone business at the end of the day.
Which should be the goal. A major acquisition should have always been seen as a last resort, only preferable to going out of business.
Startups hoping to cash out by selling to a competitor is its own kind of silliness in the first place and was largely fueled by lax regulation environments and 0% interest cash.
What ever happened to building durable businesses as an explicit goal
A lot of big businesses don't start off as sustainable ones. So they buy time, through venture capital, to become sustainable ones. This kind of news hurts the chances of that category of companies from being created.
I didn't posit that a business should start off as a sustainable one.
I asked what happened to building a durable business as a goal?
I understand the VC model enough to know that sometimes for years you run red because you need economies of scale or some other engine to finally turn over and then at scale the business will start to generate bigger cash flow once it reaches that tipping point. Even if a bit simplified as an explanation, this isn't what I'm talking about.
What I'm asking directly is why exiting to a big company became a goal in and of itself. Lots of VCs poured money into companies with the distinct hope that those businesses would at the very least be acquired. I think this is the silly part. Every investment should be from the perspective of can this be durable if standing on its own two feet? and a big acquisition is not something that should be taken into consideration as part of the investment and business building strategy of either the VC firms or the founders.
That all got lost. Building a durable business should be the ultimate goal, and selling the business to a big company should be seen as lower status than it currently is.
Its not that I'm saying acquisitions don't make sense sometimes, I'm not. However as far as goal setting and running a business is concerned, it shouldn't really be thought about as a viable fallback or exit strategy until its readily apparent and available, but that hasn't been true for some time now. VCs and founders often explicitly look at acquisition as one of their "success targets" and hopes for a business. Lots of people on HN have admitted that they started businesses with some hopes that they could possibly be acquired. That is the drift away from sanity I'm talking about.
Every single founder I know (and I know a lot of them) doesn't build a business for the specific reason to be acquired. Is it a thought that crosses their mind? Definitely. Is it something investors think about? Absolutely.
But the day-to-day, 12 hour+ grind for them is all about product-market fit and drawing revenue - the things that make a durable business.
Which big businesses are that? And how many categories of sustainable mid-sized companies creating a healthy competing market were hurt with VC cash flood, where VC fed companies dumped prices, killed healthy competition and then died themselves (together with whole product categories) when the VCs lost interest because they weren't a unicorn?
Those mid sized companies you refer to did fine for three reasons:
* If they were competing against venture backed companies, they were likely playing in big markets. My bet is they are still alive today.
* They got acquired by the bigger companies and ended up capturing even more short term economic value than they would have otherwise.
* These venture backed companies expanded the market, actually helping smaller players. I would bet money that VRBO's business increased as AirBnB got bigger.
I agree that there's something sleazy about injecting a ton of capital in a niche space; at the very least, it's distorts all the dynamics in it. But you can't deny that this short term chaos creates long term economic value for everyone else.
Uber demonstrated you could add a tech layer to the taxi business and make it more efficient for riders + introduce a whole new set of people to the driver business. Did this harm existing taxi drivers? Unquestionably.
I know it's hard to look at that business model as innovation but it is because now there's extreme price pressure on these companies (esp Lyft) to remove the costliest part of the equation - the driver. So as a result, you have a ton of very motivated energy towards solving that, via autonomous driving.
It took mediocre business innovation[0] (uber) to drive meaningful tech innovation (autonomous driving).
[0] - Purposely differentiating the tech innovation (which Uber deserves a lot of credit for) vs the biz innovation (which last I read is getting better, though still shaky).
There's just no world in which the market leader ought to be able to buy their #1 competitor, particularly in a deal where the economics ($10b on $300m rev) only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. I have no idea what these folks were thinking.
For the employees at Figma, their shot at cashing out evaporated when the Adobe deal was called off. I know people who were ready to leave Github in the past, but their manager told them to wait a bit, there’s a big acquisition coming and their equity would be worth sizeably more.
So here’s one of those scenarios: you’re working at Figma. Perhaps you’re burned out or just want to try out something different. This acquisition deal with Adobe has been signed and you’re grinding through the days waiting for your chance to cash in on the years of work with Figma that have nearly paid off. Then this happens.
This affects startups similarly. The non IPO exit path got that much less attractive.
Equity ETFs or bond ETFs? If equity, I guess the max you can get is 4% yield, which is still worse that money market, plus you take equity risk. If bond ETFs, they will tank when rates fall. I never understand the appeal of bond ETFs; money market funds are enough for my fixed income needs. They are basic, easy to understand, liquid, etc.
Temporarily-not-an-unicorn companies will need to raise more money to become a unicorn. If those investors don't see light at the end of the tunnel, these companies get squeezed.
I hope not. I'd like to see people start building sustainable businesses intended to last and stop the whole cycle of accumulating users and hoping to get acquired before the funding runs out.
I think the ecosystem is healthier for Figma and Adobe remaining separate.
VOO is up since the iRobot acquisition was announced, which would have resulted in the effective price increasing over time, the opposite of what they want.
Nasdaq is ~ flat since then, which also would not capture the economic dynamic desired (some tech valuations have fallen). The Nasdaq Tech 100 does an even worse job at capturing the dynamic: it's up nearly 50% since the deal was announced.
You'd have to use something a lot more specific, like a basket of specific stocks or some very small sub-index. But then a smaller basket could have a lot more volatility that may be endogenous to a small set of companies, and someone has to get paid for that volatility.
This type of structure creates risks around ability to pay which a well advised seller would try to avoid. You could design something which would mitigate that but it would likely end up costing more for the buyer to set up and run anyway.
In private deals (one where the company being sold is not directly listed), the traditional way to solve this problem is via earn-outs.
In both public and private deals, using the purchasers' stock as the acquisition currency is also relatively common.
It actually puts ABK acquisition an absolutely perfect steal - due to their stock crash they were literally worse exactly as they supposed to be post correction. So the price was the ideal.
Is this sour grapes on behalf of large companies? They're _deciding_ "not to fight" because of the "tech correction" and not, "the regulatory agencies are finally waking up and applying the law."
Easier to pretend they're doing it by choice rather than by force of law, which is finally able to reach them, due to the "social correction" of no longer worshiping tech companies.
It's kind of the opposite of sour grapes, it's like signing the purchase of a car but then you find out somebody else is selling a similar car for 20% off and you feel like you don't want to buy the car anymore but you signed but then the other guy can't sell you for some reason and you're all too happy to let that slide.
This misses the point. The regulatory agencies have already applied the law. However, there are options to appeal these decisions, and companies choosing not to do so says something.
Furthermore, it is just common sense. If you signed a purchase contract for $1.5 Billion, and it is now worth $0.5 billion, no rational actor would want that deal to go through.
The progressive loss in consumer robotics company in the West to their Chinese counter parts has been disappointing. Much like drones, I suspect this is short sighted as the underlying technology eventually have national security concerns.
Now maybe these companies are likely just mismanaged and the cost of North American engineering is too high? That said, it still seems like there is a structural problem here that very few hybrid software-hardware companies succeed.
The problem is, Chinese consumer tech is full of extremely competitive and cut-throat companies. Some countries don’t like how their government is giving a tons of subsidies for them to progress like crazy (see BYD in 2012 vs now), but they’re delivering results. Combined with their low cost of engineering, the prices in the products are also pretty low, so it’s a no-brained for an average person to buy something for double the price for half of the functionality, just because it was designed in US.
It's competition. Competition made US what it is and now the US economy has moved from competing on product quality to competing on who buys a better lawyer and politician to block competing companies from existing. Or just buying them.
I wonder how much money is burned in the economy just paying people to write EULAs, laws and service agreements to more effectively avoid liability and screw over customers vs. how many is actualy going into improving products and services?
You're exactly right. I'm not asking for people to choose an inferior, pricier product. My thoughts is that China has the environment to have extreme competition which is leading to better product. This is distinctly not the case here. This is the structural problem that will eventually lead to a loss of competitive edge.
Your call out to BYD is a good one, because it is conceivable that even western-made cars will be made non competitive in 10 years and it seems that we are sleeping through the news (or even encouraging it). I hope I'm wrong, but the road ahead is filled with challenge because the direction is fundamentally wrong, and it will take a lot of effort to reverse course, if that is even possible.
A lot of western companies do not compete anymore - established european countries are basically oligopolies and their lunch is slowly eaten by the more aggressive chinese companies and Tesla. American companies - aside Tesla - is in the same situation. Rich on government contracts and control over their home market.
Basically a lot of established manufacturers are IBMs of this era.
Uh, Tesla got tons of money direct via carbon credits and indirect via consumer EV credits. They're actually in trouble for possibly lying about their range and getting more credits than they should have.
Yeah it sucks. We’re trying to play catch up game for manufacturing industry, but it’s abysmally hard to get it going. I don’t think we can easily pour down money and the talent and processes would just reappear in a couple of years either. So, my assumption is high-scale tech protectionism wars are going to start.
I think people focus on protectionism because that is the traditional tool to fight things like foreign government's unfair subsidy practices. However, you cant just have protectionism without fostering competition and innovation in order to succeed in creating a more competitive product/market. Example would be USA protectionism against Canada's bombardier. It only protected Boeing but didn't actually make Boeing make better planes, as we can see from all the recent issues.
So I think protectioism is fine as long as we properly setup an environment that allows for and encourages competition and innovation. However, that doesn't seem to be a path we are used to taking .
Absolutely agreed. I do think it will go the Argentina way if/when we start mass banning imports of Chinese consumer tech. Well, unless, as you mentioned we start heavily investing and encouraging local competition. I guess, time will show, but I hope we don’t cut ourselves out of good products just because “they’re foreign”.
It's hard to call it mismanaged when they did the playbook that is expected by prevailing finance and economic views since the mid 70s: paring down to one thing and increasing what you give to shareholders over time. Or perhaps that is the structural problem.
The problem is Chinese companies are subsidized by their government to manufacture things of little or no intrinsic or critical value. Automated vacuum cleaners and consumer drones are niche electronic novelties. Electric cars using solid state batteries are also novelty that will be obsolete once electric engines that use liquid fuels become mainstream (fuel-cells).
The purpose of subsiding what are zombie companies is to maximize employment to ensure internal stability. The wins these companies show are propaganda wins only and don’t make the country more competitive. Foreign manufacturing is also migrating out of China at an alarming rate as shown by falling exports and GDP growth.
None of the development in the Chinese technology sector is sustainable. These companies would never survive on their own without subsidies and are dependent on them. It’s a cascading failure waiting to happen in the Chinese economy and will likely be a global shock. At least the Americans may appear to take longer to develop winning companies but once they do they tend to be sustainable and long lasting as organic enterprises.
Edit: The American free market is working as intended because it rightly values robotic vacuums as useless devices.
> Electric cars using solid state batteries are also novelty that will be obsolete once electric engines that use liquid fuels become mainstream (fuel-cells).
This seems like a big statement, can other experts comment?
Current battery tech has a slow and steady progression of improvement. There is bound to be a market disruptor at some point in the future, but it’s far from a guarantee that it’s going to be hydrogen.
I believe the biggest hurdle to any changes to current battery tech is that it costs so much to develop an entirely new process and build factories. Most innovation is in the form of small adjustments. For hydrogen to overcome this hurdle it would have to either be extremely cheap or have some unique property. For cars I don’t see hydrogen having that much of an advantage, but maybe electric planes would be feasibly powered by hydrogen due to the much improved weight to energy ratio.
you have so much incorrect views of Chinese companies, the technologies these companies have, what is actually happening on the ground in China. You also vastly underestimate the real complexity of making today's products, even as mundane as a hair dryer or a toy. Chinese manufacturing makes making them look easy, people think all you need is bunch of cheap labor and you are set. No it's not. Also, for white label products, examples like hair dryer, washing machines, air conditions, its the Chinese companies who design, build and test, the entire lifecycle of the product, importers buy them and slap on their own brand.
Think what goes into a hair dryer? Exterior design, looks good and functional. How you make the plastic cover, do the plastic injection molding? How you design all the internal parts, fan, motor housing, heating wire, power circuits, micro-controllers etc, and make sure everything fits. Some companies even do individual components themselves, like the brushless motor, or there is a Chinese supplier that makes them, which provides much faster time to response. Then do the testing for each component, electric, heat, water, moisture testing. Then design a mass manufacturing system with automation and human labor that achieves really high yield and low wasted materials. This is the hardest part, its easy to make a hair dryer by hand taking 100 human hours and make sure it works. It's much harder to make 1M hair dryers per month, that is going to be used in all sorts of environments and with all kind of abuse, make sure they work well for a number of years so customers don't return them, or you go bankrupt from recalls and warranty, and make sure you only have to throw out the absolute smallest number of manufacturing defects, and really control your cost structure so you still make a profit when importers are squeezing your price. Then the supply chain and logistics, shipping from suppliers and shipping to customers. Then create a number of products for different markets. China can manufacture for cheap, but people don't realize manufacture for cheap and at massive quantities is a technology itself. It's also management, business process, even company and worker culture. China doesn't have the cheapest labor cost. It's the combination of everything that produces a physical product with the level of quality, fit and finish at the price point.
It’s only disappointing if you care about the relative power of national economies.
As someone who doesn’t care at all about stack ranking or any nation’s “national security”, as a consumer, more competition, and more and cheaper products is a simple and uncomplicated win.
Almost all of my favorite companies are in Shenzhen presently. I would move there if I could do so easily.
> Almost all of my favorite companies are in Shenzhen presently.
All my favorite devices were designed/engineered either in Japan or in the USA. I'd take good engineering over cheap manufacturing every time. And we could do with lower number of devices. While they are probably made in the same factory, I'd love a focus on quality instead of price.
Following your own logic, you'd never have had any Japanese engineering if everyone thought the same thing about japan in the 60s and 70s. It used to be considered the place where cheap stuff and knock offs were made, but it evolved from there. Same seems to be happening to China right now
As someone who actually care about those but not a US citizen, I welcome all of these! It's just funny seeing the free trade principles that's been repeated over the ages getting reversed like this. Now this is the end of colonization.
unless you are a descendant of Chinese or at least Asian people, if you move, you may find what "national security" is about.
countries compete, albeit on different rules - having a monopoly on violence and a centrally controlled money printer tends to do that - so your dream of 'just pure free market competition' can only ever be that - a dream.
With China's policy being what it currently is, we're going to feel the economic consequences, in the US and in Shenzhen alike :( Good thing if it's going to be only limited to economic consequences.
I hope iRobot manages to survive. I have one of their J9 robots with a camera and object detection. It’s amazing how it can vacuum our toy-riddled floor.
I’m very weary of buying a robot vacuum with a camera from a Chinese company. I don’t fully trust iRobot, but I trust them much more than I trust Chinese brands.
I also couldn’t see myself going back to a robot vacuum without a camera. After I got kids our old Neato vacuum robot got very little use since it always required that everything was picked up off the floor.
That being said I’m quite frustrated by my new J9. It’s supposed to have a feature called SmartScrub, but it’s not in the app. The robot is also supposed to drive back to the base to refill its water tank, but it hasn’t done that a single time since we bought it a month ago. The combination of vacuuming and mopping is also a bit unfortunate since it sucks up a lot of humid air when passing over areas that it’s already mopped, causing a buildup of wet-ish dirt in the air duct.
I'll omit the competitor that I use now. I'll just say that it has a base that empties the robot dust bin, refills the clean tank, empties the dirty water tank, washes and dries the mop. And the mop actually looks like something that resembles a mop (and rotates), it's far better than the 'swiffer' kind of thing that the Braava has, or that the J9 has. I don't see the same wet dirt issue because the navigation takes care of that.
It does have a camera and the parent company is indeed Chinese.
Neato is even worse and their robots aren't much better than they were 5 years ago. They started out really strong but any improvements were marginal.
It's probably a Roborock. I had a Roomba that I found disappointing for years and after reading positive reviews of Roborock here and on Reddit, I finally pulled the plug on an S7 MaxV Ultra. Worth every penny.
To be clear, the CCP definitely has a detailed map of my home. But man, I've got two dogs that shed a lot, and it's great. Sometimes you've gotta accept the tradeoffs, y'know?
I don't know the parent's brand but I have a CECOTECT CONGA 11090 that fills exactly the description. CECOTEC is a spanish brand tho, and may not be available everywhere, and almost sure they manufacter the hardware in China so very possible the same specs are offered by other brands elsewhere, but those are my two cents
Ours is collecting dust because it was so flaky. You can solve the base problem by putting some grippy tape in the wheel wells. (They made the charging base out of some plastic that's impassible for the robot.)
I realized I was spending 30-60 minutes debugging and manually charging our roombas for each (usually aborted) run. Once the Amazon acquisition was announced, I realized it meant that they'd inevitably send upskirt angle shots of the family to Bezos for ad targeting and forwarding to local law enforcement agencies. That was the final straw.
Supposedly, the Chinese ones are slightly better for privacy because you can MITM their backend cloud connection and point it at a local version of whatever service the robot thinks it needs in order to work.
I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work. So were the older, dumber roombas (especially the square mops from the Mint acquisition). YMMV.
> They made the charging base out of some plastic that's impassible for the robot.
The _exact_ same problem Braava has. Whenever the wheels collect a small amount of dust, they slip too much and the robot can't climb. I actually added sandpaper to the base to help with the grip. Seems like such an easy fix; it's mind boggling that the same issue is present across models, for years!
> I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work.
Yeah, although, if you have pets, even a not so reliable robot will massively cut the amount of cleaning you have to manually do.
Roborock E4 (older model) runs without any app connection at all, not sure about other models but that definitely eliminates any privacy issues and is significantly easier than MITM :)
How is a company 10,000 miles away from you going to hurt you compared to a local one that has access to all government services (and vice versa)? I'd rather prefer Chinese or Russian companies to spy on me because what are they going to do with it that would matter? Will I get more spam in Mandarin/Cyrillic I can't decipher anyway?
This is completely ignorant of how influence works and how espionage assets are developed.
A foreign entity would have no obstructions to using collected information as ruthlessly as possible, whereas even a corrupt/politically-motivated/unrestrained domestic entity would have to weigh the comparatively massive risk of being implicated or exposed.
“what are they going to do with it?”
If you have valuable information or responsibilities, that could be motivation enough for foreign agents to seek leverage. If you don’t, then it’s equally fantastic to think the CIA gives a shit about you for some reason.
We are talking about a vacuum cleaner that is 99% of the time parked in some closet. What kind of valuable information are they going to get? Now compare it with Amazon Echo, your TV with a webcam/microphone, your smartphone - those are far higher risks.
> How is a company 10,000 miles away from you going to hurt you compared to a local one that has access to all government services (and vice versa)? I'd rather prefer Chinese or Russian companies to spy on me because what are they going to do with it that would matter? Will I get more spam in Mandarin/Cyrillic I can't decipher anyway?
Don't forget – if someone unlocks your door and leaves it ajar, then anyone can get in.
Chinese companies are not well known for their cyber security practices. Even if you don't care how they could use this information (either individually, or in the aggregate across millions of people), you should also care about who else would be able to hack into the feed.
You don't want a "kia boyz" situation with a camera in your home. Imagine some kid finds an easily exploitable vulnerability and releases some software allowing anyone to tap into your camera? This has happened with security cameras already. It's even worse these days with cloud connected equipment, all you need is a vulnerability in the cloud command and control.
And, although most US agencies are not allowed to collect data from citizens in US soil, they can (and have) collected data procured from elsewhere.
The bottom line is, the same information can end up much, much closer to you.
Finding anything valuable in vacuum robot video feed might be similar to trying to find a needle in a haystack - who has the capacity to go through billions of hours of videos and analyzing if there is anything worth attention? Both companies and hackers would go bankrupt pretty quickly.
Roborock seems to be eating iRobot's lunch. Which I find fascinating as the now ex-CEO of iRobot is was so cocky about avoiding using lasers (LIDAR) for navigation and sticking to cameras only (which had a real privacy issue). See this interview with Lex Fridman https://youtu.be/1d9Dj9dT_pw?si=j8CbM7GgRMm6Mu0m&t=1362. Lex pushes him on LIDAR and he doubles down on camera only. "Vision is the future, I can say that without reservation"
What kind of safety concerns are there around the use of lasers around pets/children? I don't think members of either of those groups understand the "Don't look into laser with remaining eye" stickers.
The LIDAR units used by these robot vacuums aren't powerful enough to damage cat/children's eyes. I trust that they wouldn't be on the market if they were.
I hope you realize you are born, fed, sheltered, and survive because of corporations. Corporations's goals can easily align with the well being of yourself. Trust is one part of many stats a company has to maintain like an RPG character, and it doesn't come for free.
Like in any RPG, you can take hits to that trust and lower its score. It takes several rounds to slowly let that score build up. So, what's your point exactly?
The point is if the company RPG character is to survive itself the trust stat must be at a certain level which means statistically there's a level trust you can have in most companies otherwise they would all be dead because everyone would be DIYing everything and "efficiency of scale" or "efficiency of markets" wouldn't be a thing :)
I think we all agree it's not that simple. But ycombinator comments isn't the greatest place to debate this kind of thing either, so I apologize. I get your side too, and unfortunately I dont think either of us has the time to unravel everything lol x)
Your blind faith in "just because a product is available means it is safe" makes me wonder if you're familiar with the concept of a recall. Across all industries, companies have done something to the point that it is in the public's interest to remove that item from the market. There are so so many e.coli cases, listeria cases haunting the ice cream maker of my childhood to the point i never buy their brand now, and so many other food products that have been recalled for various reasons. I kind of wished I lived in your world that exists in your mind.
I'm replying to the comment "I don't trust any corporation in any matter". But that is hard to do in practice. It would just take too much time for an individual to test every food they ever eat. Likewise I'm not going to take apart every product that is CE or CL certified to make sure it meets standards that I'm not even educated on.
I don't have blind faith, I have some faith that trusting the certification processes in most matters is more cost effective for me than to verify everything myself. Especially for lasers that have strictly defined classes based on power output. That sort of trust does take on some risk. But I'm content with that level of risk. Things seem much safer now than they did when I was a kid.
Yes, because no decision made by any gov't body has ever "missed" something. In fact, recalls happen only because of the existence of these bodies. The FAA allowed Boeing to make the MAX series of planes. The CE and CL have certified products that have later been recalled. These agencies aren't perfect. The FDA has allowed things like Olestra. There are plenty of other examples.
What's the difference between trusting any corp and trusting any agency? I'd say anyone trusting any corp/agency without any doubt would be somewhat delusional.
I think I understand what you are trying to say. You are saying that me saying
"The LIDAR units used by these robot vacuums aren't powerful enough to damage cat/children's eyes. I trust that they wouldn't be on the market if they were."
Equates to me trusting every corporation on every safety issue AND that I trust the certifications to be perfect AND I trust nothing ever gets missed. But all three of these is clearly (to me the author) not what I'm saying there.
"The LIDAR units used by these robot vacuums aren't powerful enough to damage cat/children's eyes. I trust that they wouldn't be on the market if they were."
My elaboration on this is that I trust that those lasers are of low enough power to not damage cat/children's eyes because consumer grade lasers are one of those things that I believe to be well regulated and certified before going on the market. I also happen to think that competitors would be tearing these things down at launch and if they found they were out of compliance they'd be very vocal about it.
Then I go onto say "Do you eat any food made by corporations? Or grown by any corporations?
Both lasers and food are regulated in the USA by the FDA AFAIK." specifically to someone saying "I don't trust any corporation on any matter". I just find that to be a hard position to take in any practical sense. Society only functions with some level of trust between supplier or consumer.
your trust that things would not be on the market just seems very rose tinted glasses to me, but maybe my hesitancy in agreeing is slightly misplaced. rather than the blind trust, maybe it would be the "shocked to find out" something slipped past the regulations. we see this happen all the time. for me, the trust isn't there. i'm honestly shocked at this point that i don't get sick from mass produced food, or hurt by any other product. i just let the other animals in the herd go first more than trusting the regulators
EDIT: here's a headline from just within the past hour recalling 50,000 cars with a "DO NOT DRIVE" warning[0]. that's from a very heavily regulated industry. these types of things are precisely why "trust" is not really warranted on my part. it's more of just blind acceptance, not trust.
In the clip linked, just after the time-point linked to, Lex asks him about autonomous vehicles and LIDAR vs Cameras only. He goes on to say his robots have a harder environment to navigate than cars. Take that as you will.
Taking this with a lot of salt, at least cars are expected in decently defined pathways. Interpreting the activity around the roadways is definitely complicated, but the number of possible paths to take is fairly well defined. It doesn't have to find the walls that restrict it's path. I can see a bit of validity to his thought process. The obvious bit of overlooking the fact the robot doesn't have the ability to kill people does make it look silly
His argument is that a t-shirt can be on the floor and there are stairs etc. But a truck could drop anything on the road, any sort of animal could cross the roads, sink holes could form in roads etc. I feel he is conflating what is often a problem for his robots with what is often a problem for autonomous vehicles. Rather than what each of them must be able to handle irrespecive of how often they happen. Then there is weather etc etc.
Europe, where the largest business is a luxury handbag company, has now essentially declared acquisitions illegal, and is eagerly regulating American tech companies after completely failing in developing their own tech sector.
A bit dramatic. This is simply pushing back against the consolidation of markets into the hands of a small number of mega corporations that are more interested in acquiring the tech to use for other purposes.
It’s hardly a good thing that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. soak up so many businesses into their already vast portfolios.
I do like my tech device ecosystems working seamlessly.
What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. This is much harder to do across companies.
Take for example, Beats headphones integrate seamlessly with the iPhone, MacBook Pro, and AppleTV.
Or Nest integrating with Google Home
Or Ring integrating with Amazon Echo.
There are tradeoffs to be made that benefit the consumer.
Because those tech companies intentionally make it unnecessarily hard. Rather than creating an (open) standard they dig out an extra moat around their walled garden, and make it essentially impossible to release well-integrated products without paying the Apple/Google/Amazon Tax - if they even allow it at all.
Just compare it with a standard like Wifi or Displayport: it's orders of magnitude more complex than pushing some audio to a headphone, yet it works seamlessly across dozens of vendors. When was the last time you had to worry about your computer with a Windows Ethernet port not being compatible with a router providing Apple Ethernet?
Ironically, Google has come full circle on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Chrome was the antidote to IE6 back in the day, packing more performance than Firefox could muster at the time. Now it is Chrome that has adopted MS's position, especially with web standards and their moves to try and block ad blocking (manifest v3, web integrity, etc.).
I like Apple hardware, more so because the developers has put out great apps on them. But yes, it's mildly infuriating when considering how closed the ecosystem with no reason other than control. I have a 2011 mac mini I used as a server and Linux Mint works beautifully on it. But no proper support for Linux on M1. And HomePods not having line in. At least Apple has a Right Way (tm) for using their devices. There are worse limitations on other's device (Kindle not supporting epubs, smart TVs being smart first instead of being a TV,...)
Standards help get ecosystems working seamlessly more so than consolidation does. See, for example, cell phones and televisions.
More, look at how non-integrated much of the big companies are. Sony used to amuse the heck out of me for how isolated all of their products were from each other. Microsoft, similarly, had some odd screwups in their own ecosystems. Often by trying to present it as if they had a set of APIs that would work on all of their offerings, but with hard to reason about restrictions based on what you were targeting. Amazon was similarly run as a series of different teams/companies that all happen to be under the same umbrella company name.
> If it's truly difficult to use non-Apple headphones with the iPhone
Huh what? At least the large brands have pretty much zero issues.
The exception is battery power indicators (AirPods don't show power level on Android phones, and JBL's PartyBox and Anker's SoundCore don't show power level on iOS/macOS devices), and for older wired headphones the behavior of the buttons may be weird depending on if they have been designed for Apple or for Android.
Yeah but that's common across all headsets, including AirPods. As soon as the microphone is enabled, it falls back from high-quality AAC to the ages old SBC profile.
If there's one thing I can't understand about modern wireless voice comms, it's this. We can push megabits per second of pixels, with low latency, over wireless with miracast, but can't figure out how to push 16-20 kHz of 8-bit audio signal full duplex? It makes zero sense.
You can switch audio from your phone to your Apple TV with a single confirmation click. No need to unpair and then manually initiate a connection on your desired device.
I don't know how competition law enforcement is going to make Bluetooth work better?
But your solution would be to make Apple technology worse?
FWIW, I've found outside of the apple ecosystem that Bluetooth just works. Everything supports pairing to multiple devices. I have a M1 MBP that I sometimes use non-apple Bluetooth headphones with and I can't say it is any different than android or windows.
You will get problems if you buy no-name things from Amazon, but you always get problems when you buy anything no-name off of Amazon.
You will also get problems if you use Linux of course (even with good headphones), but that obviously goes without saying. Yes yes I am sure you can get Bluetooth to work reliably in Linux by just recompiling the kernel and change your alsa config to use jack to remap your output to yada yada yada... No thanks.
Bluetooth isn't as finicky as it appears when you use non-Apple products. After the initial pairing process, I can connect any of my devices to any other device with a bluetooth radio, and all I need to do is occasionally tell one device what my intent was if it connects to the wrong thing (say, connecting to my car instead of my headphones. Or connecting to the wrong TV).
Some cheaper devices are more difficult (I have a super cheap bluetooth receiver for an old car where you need to turn on the BT on the phone before turning on the dongle) but nothing along the lines of "unpair, repair, unpair, repair".
The behavior of Apple devices interacting with non-Apple devices is an intentional design choice by Apple to NOT support seamless interoperability. That's very different from the underlying tech being inferior to Apple's proprietary solutions.
Glad you mentioned nest integration. Something that played well with other companies/open source until google bought it.
There is nothing preventing cross company integration but these companies themselves. That behavior should not be rewarded by customers or allowed by regulatory agencies.
Why would headphones need to integrate seamlessly with one set of computing devices but not another? This sounds like a market failure rather than a nice thing - anyone should be able to make headphones that seamlessly integrate with all platforms.
Amazon Music the app integration with Alexa is… non-existent? I can’t play music on my phone and move it to an echo device. I’m now resorting to posting on HN and hoping that a product dev or PM notices.
Google, Meta and Slack have all had their hand in EEE'ing XMPP, which for a long time was the standard for open messaging. Slack and Discord have gone a level above and locked IRC behind their walled gardens, despite their very existence being based on IRC.
A healthy market would see casual interop between these services, and they all started with that interop before slowly strangling it out and monetising through adverts, tracking, data mining, and exclusivity. Open protocols allow you to bypass that though, which is why each of these networks are locked down.
There's no reason why your Airpods should talk over a proprietary Apple protocol and your web apps only work 100% effectively on chrome browsers, having inferior functionality by design if you don't commit fully to the landlord of your walled garden of choice.
Because it is a big market. Technically the US companies could proceed with the acquisition but then they might be prevented from participating in the EU market.
> Europe, where the largest business is a luxury handbag company
I was confused by this because most rankings say Volkswagen is the biggest company in Europe, but it looks like LVMH is currently #2 by market cap (behind Novo Nordisk, which I assume is flying high thanks to the semaglutide craze). Considering that #3 is ASML, I'm not sure this ranking especially supports your narrative.
I was going to be snarky and say "Europe, where the largest airplane manufacturer isn't plagued by egregious safety failures," but that fact correction is probably better.
I have been wondering for a while now, what benefit to the general public do acquisitions actually offer? I'm increasingly convinced that actually making acquisitions illegal is good policy.
Mao, durring the cultural revolution thought the same thing. That villages could be doing all their own metal work. No one needs a major steel or iron works so break those up and let things be produced locally.
It backfired spectacularly.
There are things that can only be done at scale (steel). There are things that you can let have more linear growth as you scale (accounting), IT.
You get very interesting things when companies get very large. Bell labs, gave us unix (that ATT gave away cause it was a monopoly). Xerox gave us the modern GUI. ML foundations emerged out of google. The funding for 23 and me came from google founders and helped push squencing (capital into that market).
Innovation tends to come from taking smart people throwing piles of money at them, and letting them do their thing.
This was the realm of the aristocracy, then the university, then the government and now it's in the hands of private business. Everyone may hate on musk but rockets that land is progress that got made because he got stupidly rich and beat the incumbants.
If you want something different, you can have that. You can start your own company, run it in the style of Mondragon (cool corp go check them out) and claw your way to the top.
We can also accept that slower, more gradual levels of invention and innovation is the price of not setting ourselves up for avoiding sliding into a corporatist techno-dystopia.
By "slower, more gradual levels" do you mean falling behind and taken over by some other foreign company? History showed time and time again (in every sphere) that more aggressive, more hungry competitor (company, person) will win in the end. Europe is the notorious "old man" of the world.
I'm firmly of the belief that they are negative value in most cases. Consolidation is an economic and social disaster. It's slowly been choking us out for decades. Certainly I think a corporation the size of Amazon making an acquisition is always negative value.
I think they should be assumed harmful, and burden of proof should be on the acquirer to demonstrate public good.
I agree, but the challenge is defining when a company is big enough to be a problem. Intuitively, Amazon, Google, and MS are all too big for their acquisitions to be considered anything other than anti-consumer. But if you want to regulate it, how do you draw the line? What metrics, what limits, etc.
Larger companies can get better deals from their suppliers. It can be a nice alternative to bankruptcy for a company which is unprofitable on its own. It would allow for integrations which would be all but impossible with separate companies.
Of course in practice it rarely works out like that. Megacorps usually do acquisitions to get rid of competition or to obtain technology. The smaller company is almost always completely gutted within a few years, to the detriment of their original customer base.
That's not how it has to be, though. If we were to legally allow smaller companies to collectively bargain with suppliers to drive prices down, maybe that could work.
Or maybe not. But the point I'm making is that we don't have to solve the bad features of our economic system in ways that make things worse, just because that's how it's always been done.
A country could benefit from having behemoth monopolist companies, as long as they're pulling plenty of money from abroad into the country.
If Facebook and Google have a duopoly on online ads, and businesses in India and Saudi Arabia and Russia and Europe who want to advertise online are sending money to America, and the companies are making lots of their American employees rich - that sounds like a good thing for America?
Do you think there might be negative effects for other american businesses if two companies control digital advertising and collude with each other to limit competition?
Of course there'll be negative effects for other American businesses.
But so long as the collusion has a greater negative effect for foreign businesses, and most of the money extracted from American businesses stays in America - that's more money for America.
Hypothetically. At least, this is what I assume American legislators are thinking when they ignore competition issues.
That's not how the system works, though. Digital ads in foreign markets are foreign income, which means that there are not domestic benefits. When Google sells an ad in Saudi Arabia, that ad revenue goes to Google's local company and only benefits Google. Even though they're an American company, that revenue is not taxed or repatriated in any way.
There's a current SCOTUS case about this exact question and it looks likely that it will be decided in favor of these companies to repatriate their revenue without paying a single penny in taxes. In other words: they racked up hundreds of billions in revenue and just held it overseas until they can claw it back without paying their fair share.
There is no company that has a monopoly on robot vacuum cleaners though, and it's unclear how Amazon would use their positions in other markets to unfairly leverage themselves in the robot vacuum market. How are the EU's actions here protective of the market/consumers?
It's blatantly and obviously clear, and the article addresses this: Amazon will give their own brand of cleaning robot preferential treatment in Amazon product searches.
I'll grant that the ones using RGB cameras for SLAM have potential for exfiltrating information, but floor plans are literally public record. What value could that possibly have?
You can probably tell roughly number (and size) of sofa, chairs, tables, shelving units in each unit. Amount of carpet vs floor space. Total floor space.
That lets you build a dataset of these numbers correlated with all the other things Amazon knows about you. Then target you for ads.
Maybe, it notices that your coffee table is smaller than average than other similar people/apartments. They also know you have previously bought dark colored fake wood furniture before. So they advertise dark colored coffee tables to you, in the price range you would be able to afford.
I would be more concerned about this scenario if Amazon was also capable of discovering that because I purchased 1 door mat, does not mean that I want acquire a hoard of door mats, for my house made entirely of exterior doors.
Floor plans aren't public record, only a rough outline of building size. Go pull up your county's record of your house. At most, you'll get a box diagram showing sizes of different sections of your house, but nothing to indicate the actual layout of anything. These robot vacuums collect much more detailed information than that on millions of houses.
Even where they are public record, there are often limits. San Francisco limits you to six requests per day, costs $0.10 per page, and must be applied in person or via mail.
you mean basically the exact same information that you can get by going to an assessors website or office (in the USA anyway), and looking at the property record card they publish when setting your tax rates? Not to mention when you apply for a building permit, with plans - that all becomes public information.
The comment said "transcribe the floor plan", and this distinction is relevant because there are multiple options for robot vacuum cleaners without cameras.
my snark compensates for the absolute lack of depth of thought in your position. nothing personal — I am simply incredulous at your stance in the face of well…how data and capitalism works, historically.
> you have no idea what amazon would do with a spatial and/or topographical map of your living space updated almost daily? you cant? damn. you might wanna do some creativity exercises instead of crapping on your keyboard for everyone to see. embarrassing for you. truly.
Why do you care what data Amazon has about my living space? If you don't like it don't by a Roomba. Why do you always assume that people are rubes who are being duped by corporations, as opposed to people who are making a conscious tradeoff?
> Why do you care what data Amazon has about my living space? If you don't like it don't by a Roomba.
How many people have bought Roombas without knowing they would be sold to Amazon in the future? A quick search came up with 40 million units sold so far. Will Amazon offer a full refund to every person who doesn't want their data with Amazon? Or will they offer the option to completely stay off of Amazons systems, keeping the existing Roomba systems running?
If not, do you expect people to somehow accurately predict the future when making purchasing decisions?
I don't think people can predict what will happen to the products they buy in the future. But I do think people can choose to use or not use the products they buy based on new information. And my point is not that this is a good or bad thing (for the record I think it's bad but so is the company going out of business), just that more often than not the loudest consumer advocates seem to have incredibly dim views of consumers themselves. It must be the case that consumers don't know or don't understand the tradeoffs they are making, rather than that consumers simply place a lower value on "privacy".
Is you having the option to choose lower privacy worth 40 million people having lower privacy? That seems to be the dichotomy here - consumer advocates don't just care about new buyers.
> you have no idea what amazon would do with a spatial and/or topographical map of your living space updated almost daily?
Well of course, but the EU already has plenty of privacy laws to deal with that. That's no reason for the EU to object to this acquisition on those grounds.
It seems the primary issue here is that Amazon might be incentivized to disadvantage competing robo-vacuums on their marketplace. Which is not an unfair observation, but a bit strange given how many other Amazon-brand products it is already selling.
Seriously horrifying. If the acquisition went through, Amazon would know exactly what was going on outside AND inside your house since they also own Ring.
Well since the business is now laying off 1/3 of the workforce they have achieved a smaller business. This is a win? Regular people are losing their jobs because European bureaucrats decided they didn’t want to allow a deal the management team called essential.
If a business cannot survive without an acquisition, then that business should not survive. An acquisition should be an avenue for success for the owners, but it should never be the endgame of a business (in my opinion).
Also, I bet $20 Amazon would have laid off a sizable portion of the iRobot workforce anyway just like Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft.
>If a business cannot survive without an acquisition, then that business should not survive.
This is exactly what was happening here, the business was being acquired. Now what I would assume is next is a slow death and then their tech being picked up for cheap after bankruptcy proceedings.
It doesn't really seem like its working. Incredibly bad growth numbers, almost no companies that are growing at a good pace, mediocre performance in aerospace, rise of far right groups everywhere who seem to be winning actual power.
Why does everything have to grow all the time? Isn't there some version of 'we are making enough money and our customers are happy' that can exist? Is it possible to be fine with having enough to live decently, or do we we have to classify everything that doesn't grow constantly a failure?
seemingly is doing a lot of work in that sentence[1]. Europe 's manufacturing output is larger than North Americas. On a per capita basis the manufacturing output in Germany is almost 4x higher than in China. That's not dumb because it's a generalization, that's dumb because it's wrong.
I am not sure how defenseable manufacturing is alone when China has been making massive strides in the past 10 years. The whole point of this original thread is that the EU is blocking an acquisition of a failing company where no real competition exists domestically. China is eating everyones lunch in the robotic vacuum space and its a comical defense to block this purchase. I believe these policies will hurt the EU in the long run, time will tell.
I don't have a citation for those being imported to China but the last decade has been a massive change and many of those precision tools have been copied in excellent quality in China now. It is only a matter of time.
> And Europeans are seemingly happy lagging behind the world in most areas of manufacturing, technology, research etc.
Huh what? Biontech is a German company. The German Mittelstand literally runs half of the "hidden champions" worldwide - companies that everyone else depends on, that have utter dominance in their niche market. German cars are of a hardware build quality that makes anyone else - particularly Tesla - be dead in the water (although the software side of German cars is just the other way around, I'll admit that). Germany literally created the market for cheap solar panels by massively subsidizing them during the Schröder years. MP3? A standard developed by Fraunhofer in Germany. CERN and ITER? European based. Europe as a whole has an actually working high-speed train network. The maglev train? A German invention. Brutal and effective collective worker action (aka strikes)? A French patent. Chip-and-PIN? Introduced in Europe. A ton of ISO standards? They are actually extensions or adoption of German DIN, including the paper size that almost everyone but the US uses. Metric/SI system? An European invention. MySQL? A Swedish invention. Linux? Invented by a Finn. Half of mobile communications dates back to stuff from Nokia and Ericsson.
The only area where Europe lags behind is providing insane amounts of insanely dumb capital to startups.
Sorry you missed the second part of my statement. Generalized statements are dumb. It was half satire and half serious.
Of course there are winners in all regions of the world. Most of your examples are pretty biased though. Japanese cars > German cars. China is probably more relevant to the massive cost reductions in solar panels. Europe has a high-speed train network because of its age and size. Not practical in many parts of the world but I would say China's network is much better than Europes. Maglev trains were not a German invention.
You are missing the bigger picture of my half serious side. I am not talking about specific inventions but that 1) making a generalize statement is pointless and just introduces useless strife and 2) the EU is starting to get eaten away by Chinese manufacturing and innovation. There is a balance between regulation and free markets and if I was wanting to HQ a company I am not sure I would pick the EU.
Cookies banners are malicious compliance. Companies could refrain from doing drive-by data collection of the population, and everyone would be better for it. But now every website wants to know which fonts I'm using in order to fingerprint me. If they could take a screenshot of my display or record with the mic and the webcam, they'd try to do it too. These behaviors were in the realm of rootkits and other malware and now they're common practice in the industry.
I'm ok with them, this way I can see what an a**oles are those sites. Some could not show banner at all, some could do it minimally intrusive but most choose to make our lifes worse. The only downside of the regulation is that it wasn't strict enough to penalize those that create this banners with dark patterns
Which ones are monopolies? You'd have to go down to #22 (Nestlé) to find one without serious competition.
Of the entire top-100, there are maaaybe 10 or 20 in a monopoly-like position, and that's mostly because they intentionally dug out a very specific niche.
>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
iRobot is more than 30 years old. It has sold more robots than anybody else in history. It was a big success for a long time, and made its founders and backers rich. I don't think their stagnation can be blamed on Brooks. Companies come and go.
However, I also don't think it's success can be attributed to Brooks either. He's not very good for much of anything, except making himself be known as a famous roboticist. The company was successful due to other folks there. It is failing for the same reason.
Brooks was a fine figurehead, but that doesn't make a successful company.
That indoor drone was one of those WTF moments for me. I envisioned one of those meetings with nothing but sycophants and nobody with a dissenting opinion where the most ludicrous pitch was green lit.
I use "Alexa, tell Roomba to clean the bathroom" on a regular basis, and it does a great job. This is coming from a long-time iRobot customer who is increasingly dissatisfied with other aspects of their product.
To me this all seems warranted. Please read the European Commission report [1]:
> On 6 July 2023, the Commission opened an in-depth investigation to assess if Amazon's acquisition of iRobot may
> (i) restrict competition in the market for the manufacturing and supply of RVCs; and
> (ii) allow Amazon to strengthen its position in the market for online marketplace services to third-party sellers (and related advertising services) and/or other data-related markets.
> As a result of this in-depth investigation, the Commission is concerned that Amazon may restrict competition in the European Economic Area (‘EEA')-wide and/or national markets for RVCs, by hampering rival RVC suppliers' ability to effectively compete.
iRobot and their Roomba product line is riding on their namesake only. Roborock and other competitors are miles ahead of them when it comes to technology. It took a top of the line Roomba from 2021 about 4 hours to fully map my downstairs. Meanwhile the top of the line Roborock from 2022 did it in 15 minutes with its Lidar. And this is just one example. My roborock literally mops, cleans and dries its own mop, refills itself, empties itself, I can two way video call with the damn thing, it's just insane.
iRobot has not innovated their products in any meaningful way in over a decade.
I read an interview of the founder of roborock a long time ago and it was clear at that time that he had so much attention to detail that the product turned out to be superior. These days roborock behaves like it has definitely "solved" the robot vacuum problem and has transitioned to researching hardware for self-driving cars. I cannot yet decide if that's a brilliant strategy or a monumental waste of money that will hinder their continued development of robot vacuums.
> iRobot and their Roomba product line is riding on their namesake only. Roborock and other competitors are miles ahead of them when it comes to technology.
Yeah, I was looking for a robot vacuum a couple years ago and figured surely Roomba was the top of the line. Nope, not even close. The big killer, like you mentioned, is not having Lidar, so instead the Roomba has to bounce off of walls and obstacles repeatedly in order to map the room.
I ended up buying a Dreametech Z10 Pro, which I combined with a rooted firmware and Valetudo. No more phoning home to China!
iRobot also lost the thing that made them a little better than Roborock, the dual brush design patent. And as soon as that expired Roborock had one ready to go.
darn, I bought a Roomba Black Friday this year, and didn't know about Roborock.
To be fair, though, I don't really care about the speed of vacuuming operations. It's easy to schedule it when I'm out of the house, and it's not like I'm paying the robot an hourly wage.
Have their vacuum models improved? When I was in the market about an year ago, it seemed that Chinese robot vacuums were light years ahead.
I have a few iRobot vacuums that are several years old and never get used due to ineffectiveness. It is easier to spend 5 minutes manually vacuuming vs letting the iRobot wander around randomly for an hour and still not clean well.
>it seemed that Chinese robot vacuums were light years ahead.
They are. Xiaomi owned Roborock is years ahead of the big western competition (iRobot and Neato) in terms of cleaning chops and value for money.
Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, but there's also no guarantee yet that the lesser western brands will pinky promise to keep your data private and not sell it to advertisers for money or leave it in some insecure S3 bucket for hackers to steal because they outsourced the SW dev work to the cheapest body shop, which is the norm in SW development for consumer electronics.
At least on most Roborock models you can root them and run them locally via Valetudo insted of their proprietary cloud, so you get the best of all worlds: cleaning, value, privacy.
Do we think an amazon owned iRobot wasn't going to use the computer vision to catalogue all the shit I owned in my house and suggest things I am missing lol...
Privacy is not a cameras or no-cameras dependent binary.
You still need to use their apps to control the robots, and the apps send the commands to the robot only through their proprietary clouds instead of directly. You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.
> You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.
Given that I use roughly the same number of cloud and government services as other people, and live in a city, to me this is privacy. Without cameras or microphones it falls within my tolerance for information that third parties know about me given the risk of those third parties abusing that data (either directly or via hackers).
Sorry to break the bad news to you but your personal standard for privacy is way out of line with what the vast vast majority of people consider privacy nowadays. Up to you if you want to spend your life living in anger at that or not.
>but your personal standard for privacy is way out of line with what the vast vast majority of people consider privacy nowadays. Up to you if you want to spend your life living in anger at that or not.
I'm not living in anger, I'm just not comfy sharing my data with Chinese companies and their random cloud services. I think that applies to most people actually.
Yes the ship has long sailed on the online privacy of the Average Joe who's already knees deep in Google, Meta, Tinder, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, but that doesn't mean I should just bend over to more of those from China as well.
Privacy is not binary, as in you either have it or you don't, but you can actively control and limit how much you give away once you're educated on the subject and willing to invest a few clicks through cookie banners, ad blockers, etc.
Unless China can use it's data on me to perform blackmail directly I could care less. Now the US government or US companies are a different story. They can correlate tons of data, impact life decisions (credit scores, medical coverage, insurance rates, etc.), cause significant impact (suspect in police investigations, tax audits, etc.), go after me for perceived damages (in court or less legally like those ebay executives, etc.), etc. The police of any country put innocent people into jail every single day. Them I'm worried about not some nebulous threat from China.
iRobot is catching up to their Chinese competitors in many ways, including privacy concerns. Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom. In iRobot's (IMO weak) defense, the woman or someone in her household had opted into third party data sharing
In practice, how is it to actually run Valetudo on a Roborock? I have one of the supported models but quickly noped out when I skimmed through the "short these jumpers on the PCB" part of the installation instructions
I had Roborock with a camera and it had more privacy protections that I've seen in Roomba - the camera remote access was locked out, when cameras was on it had a loud "recording" warning, the API worked locally from app to the vac (which is not the case for iRobot), the map was stored on the robot itself, etc.
Kind of surprising, but it also got me thinking about how many of those options aren't available in western products.
> Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked
Privacy is why I would never own a vacuum (or most any other device) that requires an internet connection. For me, the only benchmark required is "does it have to connect to a server somewhere to work?"
> Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook [...] Robot would share test users’ data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices’ front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. [...] These workers then shared at least 15 images—including shots of a minor and of a woman sitting on the toilet—to social media groups where they gathered to talk shop.
To be fair, when the photo of a woman taking a shit was shared on facebook, her face was blurred.
Once something is online there's also the (less important but perhaps more likely) risk they'll send software updates that remove features, add adverts, force you to set up an account, and other nonsense like that.
Some fancier models use cameras for obstacle detection and avoidance. They try to identify stuff than chokes and clogs the robovacs so they can avoid them, like socks, USB cables or Lego on the floor, or my personal favorite, pet poop.
There was a funny video on social media, of a home surveillance camera capturing the pet taking a dump in the middle of the living room, and then the Roomba smearing it everywhere as it did its rounds. If you're a pet owner who's companion can do their business in your house, having the robovac smear it everywhere is a nightmare you'd want to avoid at all cost, and that can only be solved using cameras.
I haven't personally owned the other brands, but I bought a refurbished j7+ (not the mopping kind) for about $300 a few months ago and it has been a spectacular improvement on their earlier models - I've owned about five thus far over a long time. Roughly the same vacuuming performance (it uses the same rollers and filter as the e5 that it replaced) but the mapping and obstacle avoidance are a really big improvement and I can use it in my kid and cable-messed environment. I was pretty close to giving up on iRobot too.
Interesting that you're being down voted for answering the question while all the ditto comments are not.
I have had the same experience with an i3+, which is just a vacuum but with a self-empty base. This i3+ originally didn't have room mapping but they added it after I purchased it. It goes home to charge and empty itself and cleans in a reasonable pattern.
I've previously owned the 350 series and some other similar one and they were more toy than utility.
This is my first one with a self-empty base and I'm surprised how much I like it. I don't think the pre-mapping self-empty units would have worked very well for me because they would usually get stuck, but I've been quite impressed at how well the j7 manages to avoid that.
It does have an annoying quirk that it won't run if it's too dark, so I have to schedule it a little carefully or leave the lights on and schedule them to turn off. But I'm really happy with it overall.
Yeah, iRobot seems to have entered mega-corp death spiral, terrible year on year "improvements". Looking at their $1400 option it appears about on par with $900 Roborock.
My Roborock S7 is light years ahead of my girlfriends iRobot, which just drives around running into everything, gets stuck pretty much every time it runs.
Meanwhile the Roborock maps my whole home and plans a route. I trust it enough to have it set to run every week automatically without intervention. The only work I do is to empty it and add water to the mop tank.
I wonder if any of this is related to iRobot spinning out of MIT Robotics. If the people running the show were spending too much time and energy on robots and research, and not enough on the economics of manufacturing the product and managing their market.
That's the crazy thing about this ruling. It looks like the company is likely to enter a similar death spiral, similar to what happened to Neato Robotics. A stale product line with a trimmed down staff to maximize profitability based on their name and reputation while their products are steadily supplanted by stronger competitors.
Maybe someone else will buy them to extract the last few $$s before turning out the lights. sigh
If iRobot was really in a situation where it was acquisition goes through or "the CEO and a half of the employees will be laid off the day the news breaks out", then I can't imagine they were in an economically viable state to begin with, and it certainly shouldn't be the EU's job to fight said economic forces.
But that's not a real value created by the company, but value that would be extracted by self-dealing placement of their products on Amazon. I'm quite happy that EU is siding with the consumers, not the shareholders.
Is yet another company getting hoovered up by Amazon better for society than it going out of business? Honestly I don't know that's as obvious as you're making it sound. Hyper consolidation is arguably the biggest economic issue facing developed economies right now.
IMO there's no valid reason to allow a company the size of Amazon to make acquisitions, and instead the conversation should be about urgently trying to break Amazon up.
Yes. It isn't just any company, it is basically the last of its kind based in the US. This is a direct benefit to Chinese competitors in the space and a direct detriment to American workers. The effect in Amazon is marginal at best.
> Our in-depth investigation preliminarily showed that the acquisition of iRobot would have enabled Amazon to foreclose iRobot’s rivals by restricting or degrading access to the Amazon Stores
Seems like the EC just declared that Amazon is no longer allowed to make any acquisitions of companies that make products. At the very least they left a pretty high bar for Amazon to get over for any future acquisitions.
I can't help but feel that a lot of these large companies are choosing not to fight regulatory agencies over acquisitions because after the recent tech correction the targets are now worth a lot less than what they bid for them (similar to Elon trying to get out of buying Twitter). Easier to pay the break-up fee and move on.
Roombas are a joke. My house is one floor. Engineered flat hardwood. A few low pile flag rugs. The best model Roomba just EATS them on the corners, dragging them around the room, getting stuck and causing chaos. It's 2024. We all don't live in carpeted 70s.
I worked at iRobot some years back. I'll tell you exactly why iRobot is struggling: iRobot, at its core, built robots.
Does that seem contradictory? Consider that their innovations, what they're known for, lies in robotic morphology. iRobot's Cool Stuff Museum in their HQ has some groundbreaking robots which still are awesome (like a ocean buoy robot powered by the waves). They cut their teeth doing research grants and developing military robots. Their ethos was rooted in service; when 9/11 happened, they packed up a prototype robot and drove to Ground Zero to use that robot to search for survivors in the rubble. Still, their military robots were controlled by humans, and the original Roombas turned at random angles to fully clean a room.
Around 8 years ago, iRobot spun off their military and commercial robot divisions into independent companies (Endeavor Robotics and Ava Robotics, respectively; Endeavor was eventually acquired by FLIR) to focus exclusively on the consumer market. The consumer robotics industry was shifting, so iRobot needed to change. They bought Evolution Robotics to acquire computer vision IP and started doing research in that area. Advanced software capabilities were now important, so they shipped vSLAM (monocular SLAM representing state using pose graphs; they've published quite a few papers on this), persistent mapping, automatic room segmentation, and much more. They kept researching new consumer robots, including a home security robot which didn't make it out of the lab.
The thing is, consumer robots will ALWAYS be a luxury item. Nobody NEEDS a Roomba, and the iRobot folks understood that reality. So, iRobot leaned into that and worked to make the Roomba the premium option: a refined industrial design language with their main products appealed better to the high-end market, and they released an autoevac Roomba. I'm guessing that their primary market segment saturated, so they figured they'd release new physical products, but that puts them in direct competition with Dyson (who utterly failed to produce a good robot vacuum cleaner, mind you), so good luck there. I don't believe iRobot ever resorted to selling their customer data, which I'm sure Chinese robotics companies regularly do to increase revenue.
I also think iRobot's failure to launch their robot lawnmower really hurt them, probably hurting morale than anything else. Tons of people worked on that project, and the technology stack was genuinely impressive for seven years ago (using UWB beacons placed in the yard for localization and mapping). UWB was still an emerging technology in 2017 (still a few years before AirTags released). It makes me sad they couldn't ship it in the US, since the technology was better than virtually all other robot lawnmowers on the market.
iRobot manufactures their robots in China, but if I remember correctly, that's exclusively because the Chinese restrict exports on key electrical components like resistors. There was a desire to onshore manufacturing, but because the Chinese cornered the market, it was basically impossible to make the costs work out.
The bottom line is, the robot vacuum market is basically a solved problem, and there's a very good reason that floor cleaning robots continue to be the only viable consumer robot product.
I have fond memories of those good and kind iRoboteers. I wish iRobot all the best as they move forward and try to find a well-constrained everyday problem which can be solved by a low-cost robot.
I got a Roomba to replace an Eufy, assuming it’d be better because it was more expensive.
Well, it was not! It had similar effectiveness to the Eufy, but lacked manual controls. It also refused to go places the Eufy would (like a dark carpet) and constantly tried to return home after only a cursory clean.
That kind of turned me off on Roomba. Not saying this is why they might be having trouble, but it reflects my experience and feelings toward them.
Maybe an opportunity for OpenAI to acquire a robot vacuum company on the cheap. Seems like an easy way to gain access to tonnes of physical sensor and movement data to integrate into a giant multimodal model.
(To parody the email that I get from every startup that got bought by FAANG)
“As a consumer I am proud, delighted and outright tickled pink that this acquisition has failed as having competition in the market will, in the long term, result in better products and lower prices”
I know the EU gets a lot of hate on HN, but its clear they're the last force on Earth trying to actively save it from the woes of unchecked capitalism.
A common sentiment appears to be "Amazon (maybe Big Tech in general?) shouldn't be able to make any M&Rs ever again", as if every acquisition is anticompetitive.
Unfortunately for the EU, there are still places in the world that are comfortable with success. Every time the EU tanks some local company, or prevents it from being viable in the first place, that productivity just goes to the US or China.
Yes, China is basically doing the opposite of what the EU is doing (acting in the economic interest of domestic firms) and they're eating the EU's lunch as a result
> David Zapolsky, the Amazon general counsel, said: “Undue and disproportionate regulatory hurdles discourage entrepreneurs, who should be able to see acquisition as one path to success, and that hurts both consumers and competition – the very things that regulators say they’re trying to protect.”
At what point should an acquisition be allowed on the sake of something being able to continue to exist and possibly save jobs? Sure there would have almost guaranteed be job cuts with the acquisition due to redundancy, but would it have been the same amount?
However on the flip side, it feels like iRobot has been stagnating for years and entering some weird categories. I still fail to see why they entered the air purifier market and them selling a stick vacuum next to their iRobot is sure one way to say "our expensive robot doesn't do everything we claim it does".
I finally ditched my iRobot for a Roborock a couple months ago and it's been amazing. It is shocking how much better it is, when it was in the middle of a clean and I could tell it to go start a different clean and it just did it? It didn't complain or anything, I shouldn't be surprised by this but after the experience with iRobot feeling like it stands in my way every time this felt like magic.
It genuinely makes me sad to see iRobot not be what they used to be, it feels like they got complacent with Roomba.