The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked
- Reference: 1766395811
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/12/22/irobot_opinion/
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The Roomba has been around for more than two decades, garnering great brand recognition and near-constant hardware and software innovation. It could turn a corner, but iRobot couldn't turn a profit. The company blamed a barrage of reasons for failure, including shipping delays, consumer timidity, and the joy of tariffs, with others pointing the finger at an army of low-cost knock-offs. Perhaps.
Roomba maker iRobot gets cleaned out in Chapter 11 [1]READ MORE
This is not a phrase you will have met before: [2]today's vacuum cleaner market is fascinating . A microcosm of much bigger trends, with robotic cleaners using AI and constantly evolving mechanical ideas in a battle with sucking tubes. Students of techo-social revolution won't be so surprised.
The first vacuum cleaners, horse-drawn contraptions that poked their hoses into houses, marked the dawn of domestic appliances that decoupled the middle classes from household servants. Rapid advances in the 20th century produced industrial giants like Hoover, and an addiction to being sold convenience. If ever there was a time and place for robots to further liberate the masses from doing their own domestic service, it's now. You know the score. AI backed by immeasurably powerful computing, manufacturing a miracle of computer-controlled finesse. The vacuum cleaner evolves from being a tool to becoming an agent. So what went wrong?
The machines themselves, for a start. The market leaders, the Jurassic herds of cylinder vacuums, can easily last beyond a decade. They're quite simple and don't see the heaviest use. Robot vacuums are vastly more complex, promise practically constant cleansing, and have a lithium addiction. Unsurprisingly, it's not unusual for them to conk out after a couple of years. Moving a domestic appliance onto a smartphone refresh cadence is a hard sell.
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Even when they have worked, robot vacuum cleaners haven't always lived up to their promise, and that's being charitable. Cleaning a house fully engages a human's senses and decision making. A household with mixed Homo sapiens, Felis catus, and Canis lupus familiaris, all at different stages in their life cycles, can throw up a very large range of materials in a very large range of places. The average promo video for home technology may feature young professionals in a sunlit minimalist fantasy apartment. The average real-life experience does not.
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Yet we live in an age of miracles. Clearing up after cats, toddlers, and a Friday night party in a cluttered den is a challenge advanced AI should relish. Even if it can't hack it today, Roomba's position as one of the first domestic AI use cases that made an impact should have drawn investors in like ants to a jam sandwich dropped behind the fridge. A track record, brand recognition, a solid body of hard-won IP, unmatched domain expertise. None of this, it seems, is worth picking up from the kitchen floor.
[6]Legal protection for ethical hacking under Computer Misuse Act is only the first step
[7]Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one
[8]Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)
[9]AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory
Reality crashed into robotics, and reality won. [10]iRobot had previously offered itself to Amazon , under the banner of a desirable smart home appliance. Amazon didn't complete the deal due to regulatory opposition.
Household appliances, it turns out, are immune to smart homesmanship. Look through Amazon's own website for Alexa-enabled cookers, fridges, microwaves, washing machines, or anything beyond lights and plugs, and the choices are few, the prices ridiculous. Reality met the smart home, and reality won.
This is why iRobot failed, in a market where investment in AI and hype about robotics are off the scale. It bears the stigma of reality. Its promise was simple to understand, easy to want, easy to buy into. Once.
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Like all other consumer robotics, with the arguable exception of the time-shifting VCR, it could not take very much reality. The AI investors know this. They know there's too big a gap to bridge to make Roomba the next Hoover, and they know actual consumer experience means we know it too.
Hence the concentration by the reality-exempt community on humanoid robots that will be beyond consumer experience for decades, if ever, let alone able to vacuum under the sofa and cope with the unmentionable pet residue they encounter there.
As virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, and Microsoft's mobile OS strategies show, it's easier to sell dreams than to dispel disappointment. Don't believe it of VR and Autopilot? Skip back ten years to what was promised, then back to today to see how much a part of your life those things actually are. When a technology promises to take on reality in your place, it better not miss. It generally does.
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Perhaps Roomba would have fared better in its fight for life had it described itself as an agentic appliance. Accurate enough and thus, we suspect, entirely unwelcome. The parable of the robot that wanted to clean up but merely sucked is far too close for comfort. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/irobot_chapter_11/
[2] https://vacuumwars.com/robot-vacuum-market-trends-are-traditional-vacuums-falling-behind/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aUkky60n85-_SE9NnyusZQAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aUkky60n85-_SE9NnyusZQAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aUkky60n85-_SE9NnyusZQAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/cma_update_opinion/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/agentic_os_opinion/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/24/opinion_column_vibe_coding/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/17/ai_music/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/amazons_irobot_deal_off/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aUkky60n85-_SE9NnyusZQAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aUkky60n85-_SE9NnyusZQAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
long live Henry!
Roomba's fundamental problem was even more basic: it can't climb stairs and it can't open doors. So if you live in a bungalow with all the internal doors removed, it was wonderful. I actually owned one when I lived in a bungalow that was mostly open-plan 15 years ago. It was great. Then the family grew and we moved to a house with stairs. Suddenly, you couldn't just set it on a timer. You had to carry it to the room you wanted it to clean. Or buy *two* expensive hoover replacements. Or both.
Then there's the cost. I paid about £350 for a roomba 15 years ago. That was a long way over the odds for a hoover, but you sort of expect that as an early adopter. But £350 is still a fair bit for a hoover and the mass market isn't going to support it. The base model on their website is still £350, the top model is £1k. Okay, you get more than I got for my £350 - mine didn't mop and it didn't empty itself. You've still got to empty it, of course, just from the dock instead of the hoover.
Today, I pay a cleaner £25 a go, three times a month. She Hoover's, mops, dusts, tidies toys, collects stray dishes, removes cobwebs, cleans mirrors and basins and the bath and toilet. And she's a nice person who we can have a real conversation with. And she costs less in a year than an iRobot production that can sweep and mop half the house as long as we leave the doors open.
I agree with your comments but as someone who lives in Silicon Valley (iRobot is in MA, but cost of living is also high there) I can maybe shed light on the perspective of the creators. You will not find a cleaner for 25 quid here. You're talking $150-200 for a cleaner to come once a month and do the work you listed. At that price point, something like a Roomba makes a lot more sense. Unfortunately, unlike Daleks, it hasn't evolved stair capacity or the ability to exterminate.
for that money I'd rather buy a portable vacuum (for quick jobs) and a corded one for "whole floor"/carapet cleaning.
And a broom, most of the time it's much faster than fiddling with vacuums.
Not sure how much time it takes to deal with those robots (empty the robot/dock, clean it/ untangle it/ clean where it can't reach etc.), my feeling is that it "feels" less but it's actually comparable to doing the cleaning yourself.
"as someone who lives in Silicon Valley"
Your world is that of AI startups and people who somehow manage to capture billions from "venture capitalists" without providing anything tangibly useful in return.
You already live outside of reality.
A relatively cheap light rechargable upright vacuum cleaner is far more practical than any robot vacuum cleaner and gets the job done in a fraction of the time.
The Roomba seems to me to be the typical over-done US product built around a misunderstanding about what people need which makes it more complicated and expensive than it needs to be and possibly only legal to sell in the US itself. There was another one in this fine organ a couple of days ago about an e-bike which reaches 33mph which is an absurd speed.
In the same timeframe for about £100 less, I bought a Miele vacuum cleaner that is still going.
As Jack Dee might have said
"the cat hairs of reality meet the shiny hype of smart tech"...."it's the end of the programme."
One of my mates had a Roomba...
...after the dog had diarrhea once, he no longer had a Roomba.
seen this happen to plenty of market leaders and early innovators over the years. The basic issue is roomba's were late to the market with various features (auto emptying, mopping, etc) and overtaken by Dreame, roborock, ecovacs, etc which offer new feature with every release cycle.
Next in line
...First Law of Finance: you must make money.
And soon enough that will become very much true for the so-called AI economy. Can't wait for that to happen and I'll have plenty of -icon- when it does.