alt Hacker NewsI don't think there are tens of millions still in use.
Unless you design your house and buy your furnitures taking these roomba into account, they get stuck nearly every where or at the first sock left on the ground by someone in your household. They have a number of wearable most owner will not even want to replace and will start being inefficient rather quickly. Add to that some battery wear and I don't think there is a lot of +5y old devices in the wild.
I and most people I know went back to regular vacuum cleaners. The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house. Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them and cleaning the bathroom and toilets correctly are both much more time consuming and annoying jobs.
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>Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them
With furnishing optimized for dust generation (less materials where the dust-shitting microbes live, like material curtains) and daily Roomba runs (plus eventual air filter running in the background) there is very little to dust off of surfaces. If there's little dust on the floor, it doesn't get kicked up and doesn't land on things. Ergo - Roomba makes dusting easier.
A lot of people probably bought them for the novelty and then decided they weren't really all that useful for their homes and lifestyles. At least that's what a number of friends have told me. Cordless stick vacs also came in and made a lot of vacuuming jobs quicker and easier.
Yeah - they don't work well at all. And work from home is definitely incompatible with roombas. Those things are loud and run for a long time. Both ours are in the storage room collecting dust.
I am one of those weirdos! I bought a roomba in 2015 and it's still going. Second battery, sixth set of rollers and brush, god knows how many filters. Mine's also a dumb one: no wifi or pathfinding, just boring old "drives around until it smacks into shit" navigation.
I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
> The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house.
Hard disagree, because vacuuming is something you often need to do daily. Spending 10 min/day becomes over an hour a week. That's a significant chunk. If you have smooth floors, running a Roomba kind of becomes a no-brainer.
On the other hand, I only need to dust once a week, and that takes all of 10 minutes. Cleaning the bathroom is similarly once a week (assuming you wipe/brush the sink and toilet bowl as necessary after use).
Reducing vacuuming time, to me, is the #1 thing you can do to save cleaning time, if you live in a Roomba-compatible space.