>> We built it to match the reliability standards of European upright vacuums, something of which we were very proud. Of course, we didn’t anticipate that our customers would run their Roomba once per day, rather than the once per week average the European standard set – and as the first generation of Roomba robots broke down two years ahead of schedule
This is a super interesting insight for when you're building consumer products. When you make something super-easy to do, expect usage to 10x or even 100x. I've seen high-unit economics consumer products build with cost estimates that assume an average user doing task X once a month. If we make it possible to do the task with a free app, even though it costs us $Y to do this, our total monthly cost per user is $Y. These estimates then get blown out the water when users start doing the task 10 times a month.
This may just be my personal experience, but my Roomba does a pretty mediocre job vacuuming my house. As a result, I have to run Roomba 3-4x per week the get the equivalent cleanliness of using a traditional vacuum cleaner once per week.
A long time ago I gifted my parents one of the early mid-tier Roombas that had beacons that you can place to avoid certain areas. I bought the Roomba plus several sets of beacons.
They were really excited to use it. We put beacons all around the house and then activated the Roomba on the hardwood floor near an obvious pile of dust in the middle of the living room. I figured that would be the Hello World test.
After about 10 minutes of watching it randomly bump into walls, get jammed under the couch, we started to get disappointed. But then it made a direct path towards the dust. We all got excited and then watched it simply go right over the dust without picking up anything. At that point I picked up the unit and kept restarting it over and over until it would pick up the dust.
We tried it on maybe two other occasions and it would just continuously get stuck within a few minutes (usually either between piano legs or under furniture that was raised about the same height as the vacuum). They re-gifted it back to me where it sat unused until I finally gave it away for free. That was well over a decade ago and I now realize that I had unrealistic expectations and possibly didn't give it a fair chance.
Have they improved much since then? My home has lots of hardwood floors throughout and I vacuum daily. Even though there's central vac access everywhere I prefer to use a Miele canister vacuum.
> I now realize that I had unrealistic expectations and possibly didn't give it a fair chance.
Sounds like it. We have one basic model. It also seems to stumble around rather randomly, but it doesn't, there is a movement patterns that makes it pass everywhere given enough time. It does not clean much with each pass, but it does not pass once. If you had let it run it would have cleaned the dust eventually.
> it would just continuously get stuck within a few minutes (usually either between piano legs or under furniture that was raised about the same height as the vacuum)
Mine gets stuck at the feed of an ikea chair. That's annoying and the only solution I have is to turn the chair around or to put it away. It's likely you have to prepare the space a bit before turning it on, but that's still a lot less work and time than doing everything manually.
> My home has lots of hardwood floors throughout and I vacuum daily.
Definitely buy one and stop wasting your time vacuuming :)
I don't have experience with the early Roomba models, but I am using a Roborock S50 (Xiaomi vacuum) for almost a year now and couldn't be happier. I don't have a carpet anywhere in my house and it works pretty well.
We bring out the regular Miele vacuum once every week or two to get to the spots that Roborock can not reach.
The only issue I have at the moment is that I am working from home and vacuuming takes a lot of time for these robots compared to using a regular vacuum.
In my opinion, that's the point of them. One Roomba run is not equivalent to manually vacuuming your house, but they don't mind cleaning every single day.
And maybe I’m just messier than average, but that means tidying up every little thing, strap, shoelace, etc that might be on the floor multiple times a week so the roomba can run. And lifting up my area rug because the roomba thinks any dark stripe is a “cliff” that it’s about to drive over (no way to tell it you live in a single floor unit and turn that off).
I’ve really stopped using mine for the most part, the continuous overhead of babysitting the roomba is more work than just vacuuming once a week with the cordless vacuum.
I hear you on this, I’ve been through similar issues. Few comments though:
- We have 3 kids, and you would think that would be a hostile Roomba environment but instead, it motivates them to keep the toys off the floor e.g. Legos. Sometimes we say “Better clean up your stuff or else Roomba’s gonna get it!”
- We only buy rugs that are Roomba compatible
- Our house is just one story with wood floors in every room which is also lucky and helpful
- Another positive is Roomba is much better than a vacuum in terms of getting under sofas and beds.
However, I agree with you on having to babysit Roomba. Roomba still gets stuck in random places - wedged underneath certain pieces of furniture. Sometimes it goes into a bathroom and somehow manages to close the door on itself. Sometimes there will be an obvious mess - small pile of dirt tracked in by the kids - Roomba will vacuum for 1 hour and travel all around the dirt and still miss it.
It’s also loud - not as loud as a regular vacuum cleaner but pretty close. And considering that I can vacuum my entire house in about 15 minutes and Roomba does an equivalent job in 3 hours (3 x 1 hour sessions)...
Bottom line is that we still use Roomba. But we also still use a vacuum once every 2-3 weeks or so.
I'm seeing a use case for individuals who are isolated and want something to care for. Give it big googly eyes and an old person name like Harold or something.
Legitimately, I could see people being super into that. They have to care for the Roomba by making sure it doesn't freak out because of shoelaces or the cliff you describe. Maybe it beeps and whistles.
Mediocre doesn’t cover it - mine just spreads dirt around, and then inevitably gets stuck on something super-challenging and unexpected in a home, like a chair leg.
I've been beating this drum about self-driving cars for a while. All these rosy predictions of traffic being better neglect the fact that usage will go way up.
The car could have a "unoccupied miles driven counter" that you reported manually or automatically once in a while. Much like how you report your electricity usage to the power company.
In 2045: “What do you mean you are going to DMV? You work there? WAIT. Are you still hand-steering that 2025 Prius!? And you still haven’t fixed that yanked off telematics!?”
(Separately I'm a bit surprised that they consider once a week vacuuming to be expected. I personally prefer once every 3 days. Wonder if I'm a bit OCD).
Once every 3 days won't work in my house, it's too big and cluttered with kids stuff to be feasible. But I wish I could vacuum even daily, especially now with all of this pollen in the air.
This is a super interesting insight for when you're building consumer products. When you make something super-easy to do, expect usage to 10x or even 100x. I've seen high-unit economics consumer products build with cost estimates that assume an average user doing task X once a month. If we make it possible to do the task with a free app, even though it costs us $Y to do this, our total monthly cost per user is $Y. These estimates then get blown out the water when users start doing the task 10 times a month.