alt Hacker NewsRoomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
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It really is amazing that we keep letting our main geopolitical rival buy up our companies.
The "shareholder value == societal benefit" mind virus is easily the worst thing to come out of higher American academia in the last hundred years, and that's saying something.
Another argument for open source devices that are easily repairable and modifiable by the user (or a 3rd party shop).
My Roomba is about 10 years old, works great and I can still get parts for it. I guess that's where they messed up.
The DJI ROMO robot vacuum is amazing. It shows what can be done with today's technology.
My Roomba is just crap compared with DJI's. I'm not surprised they went bankrupt.
a ROMO video https://youtu.be/Iv7BYURURRI?si=gfaPPiFpEMj1SVaT
Recommendations for an alternative?
I bought a Roomba around 2006. It died within a month. Never bought again. Today I'd need to assume it would serve as a surveillance tool by the Chinese gov, or other bad actors, and so would also never buy one.
All of IoT is a security anti-pattern now.
iRobot’s largest creditor isn’t its Chinese supplier. It’s the US government, in the form of unpaid tariffs, some $3.5 million. Arguably it was Trump’s stupid tariffs that drove the company out of business. Rather than bringing manufacturing to the US, it allowed the Chinese to acquire an American company, leaving production right where it is.
I guess my romba is about to be banished to a private network now.
The problem is that all are quite tall which is a problem with some older sofas etc. Samsung did one "slim" model I think some time ago, but not sure if you can still buy it.
Non-paywalled article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-15/robot-vac...
iRobot's failure is that they made a bet to use CV instead of Lidar for their mapping robots for a long time until it was too late. That made their affordable, non-mapping robots far far worse than only slightly higher priced lidar robots, while their mapping robots were too expensive for mass appeal and were still worse at navigation than up-market lidar based robots. Ultimately they were simply outcompeted.
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Another success for EU antitrust law. By blocking an acquisition, they have allowed a bankruptcy purchase by a Chinese firm so that the market is between a few Chinese firms.
robot vacuums never made economic sense over a maid service
In one of the articles, they said Roomba were greatly affected by tariffs. Well, this company has been in business for a long time and should have figured out how to build roomba in the US, that would have been great innovation.
But like most US corp, they only cared about profits and stock price.
Maybe Lina Khan blocking the sale to Amazon wasn’t such a great idea after all.