Rob Walker reports in Medium:
No one predicted the robot vacuum would become the hot seller of the pandemic. People have given their Roombas names and formed subtle attachments to the devices. Some users “genuinely worry about their Roombas, as if they were living pets.” It can be hard to take the Roomba seriously as a triumphant tech product, because it resembles nobody’s vision of the future. It is not sexily powerful; it is not appealingly beneficent; it is not darkly sinister. It’s neither utopian nor dystopian, connotes neither Rosie from The Jetsons nor HAL from 2001.Over the past few months of pandemic-fueled economic contraction, company after company has announced that its financial performance would be much worse than anticipated. There have been some obvious exceptions, like Zoom, and a few surprising ones, from Domino’s to King Arthur Flour. But here’s an overperformer hardly anybody seemed to anticipate: iRobot, maker of the Roomba — the pie-sized robotic vacuum device that tools around, guided by sensors, sucking up dust (and sometimes humorously interacting with pets) in homes around the world.
You know the Roomba—it’s been part of many domestic landscapes for years. People have given their Roombas names and formed subtle attachments to the devices. Some users “genuinely worry about their Roombas, as if they were living pets,” one study found. Artists and technologists learned to hack them, and the Roomba memes never stop. But no one predicted the robot vacuum would become the hot seller of the pandemic.
Still, even iRobot was evidently surprised to find itself scooting away from what it thought would be a big pandemic-recession blow to sales. “Our anticipated second-quarter 2020 financial performance will be substantially better than we originally expected,” CEO Colin Angle said in a recent statement. The company had previously suggested revenue would come in “modestly” lower than the first-quarter figure of $193 million. (Analysts reportedly projected a not-so-modest 30% drop.) But now the company, which formally reports earnings next month, anticipates quarterly revenue of $260 million or more — a healthy uptick. The statement specifically singled out “robust order growth for premium products,” such as the top-end s9 series Roomba, priced at an eyebrow-raising $1,000.
It can be hard to take the Roomba seriously as a triumphant tech product, because it resembles nobody’s vision of the future. It is not sexily powerful, it is not appealingly beneficent, it is not darkly sinister.
There’s a short-term story here, but a deeper one, too. The short-term version: “Maintaining a clean home has become a higher priority,” Angle said, “as COVID-19 has forced people to spend more time in their homes.” The company also makes a range of cheaper Roombas (some less than $300) and a series of similarly sized Braava mopping bots, all lately more attractive to families balancing work, childcare, and homeschooling in the same domestic space. That includes households that used to employ some form of cleaning service but dropped it during lockdown. So, just as people who couldn’t get to the gym rushed to snap up Pelotons, those who lost their cleaning services seemingly opted for a Roomba s9, which boasts better corner-cleaning ability and other features.
But the deeper story is that the Roomba emerging from the global mess of the coronavirus as a surprise winner ought to cement, once and for all, the largely unheralded success of this domestic tech object. Since 2002, iRobot has sold more than 30 million of its various consumer robots, reporting 2019 revenue of $1.2 billion.
It can be hard to take the Roomba seriously as a triumphant tech product, because it resembles nobody’s vision of the future. It is not sexily powerful; it is not appealingly beneficent; it is not darkly sinister. It’s neither utopian nor dystopian, connotes neither Rosie from The Jetsons nor HAL from 2001, fits neither a World’s Fair exhibit nor a Black Mirror episode. The Roomba is just kind of… silly.
But despite this — or, rather, because of this — there is a case to be made that the Roomba is the most underrated tech object of the 21st century.
To be sure, the Roomba received steady attention at its launch back in 2002 and had already sold its first million units by 2004. It was the debut domestic product from iRobot, which was founded by MIT computer science and artificial intelligence professor Rodney Brooks and two of his students, Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, in 1990. At first iRobot focused on a range of contract research projects for companies and the government, making everything from toys to military robots. A late 1990s contract with DARPA led to the development of PackBot, a series of military robots designed for reconnaissance, bomb disposal, and similar tasks. In 2016, iRobot spun off its military projects to a separate company.
The Roomba was never the center of attention. It just sort of whirred into our peripheral vision — and never left.
By then it was already best known for the Roomba line, the standout product from its series of domestic robots tracing back to the late 1990s. Basically, what became the Roomba was a scaled-down, simpler version of a more industrial-sized cleaning robot project that was proving problematic. “Even though there was obviously a great market in larger commercial cleaning robots,” Greiner later explained, “the right thing to do was get the technology working on a smaller scale first.”
Part of that strategy involved figuring out low-cost manufacturing that would make the product as accessible as possible. Brooks (who left in 2008 to start Rethink Robotics, focused on factory robots) later noted that appliance-maker Electrolux released a fancy home-cleaner robot to the European market in 2001. “But theirs cost 2,000 euros,” he said, “and ours sold for $200.”
This resonates with the fundamental modesty that has defined the Roomba’s place in the culture. It has always been treated more as an amusing novelty than a harbinger-of-the-future, cutting-edge device that would reshape the way we live and interact and create. “The new gadget is as likely to attract robot fans as neat freaks,” writer Virginia Heffernan observed not long after its debut. “But wasn’t the robot housekeeper also supposed to be companionable? That enduring sci-fi fantasy will have to wait for some other year.”
Even such disappointed musing was a rare example of taking the Roomba at least somewhat seriously. Think of the star turns enjoyed by the MakerBot, Google Glass, the Amazon Echo, commercial drones, and whichever hardware you associate with the past quarter-century of promises that virtual reality will soon change everything. Even telepresence robots and Sony’s Aibo robot dog seemed to inspire more hype, or at least gee-whiz speculation.
This very lack of flash was Roomba’s secret weapon all along.
The Roomba was never the center of attention. It just sort of whirred into our peripheral vision — and never left. Contrast that with Segway’s two-wheeled personal transport device, which debuted in 2001 amid deafening hype — its inventor said it would be “to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy” — and is now winding down production, according to Fast Company. The same year saw the debut of the iPod — later pronounced “an icon” by, uh, me — which still exists but is now essentially a footnote to the smartphone.
While these flashier developments come and go, we have simply accepted the Roomba. “What Comes After the Roomba?” the New York Times asked in 2018, underscoring the nonexcitement the device inspires and acknowledging that from its debut, it was “not much of a robot. It simply wandered around a room sucking up dust and debris.” It merely “did something useful at a nonastronomical price.”
This very lack of flash was Roomba’s secret weapon all along. “Our mentality was why wouldn’t anyone want a robot in their homes! Of course everybody wants robots in their homes,” Greiner (who in 2008 founded drone company CyPhy Works and later stepped down from her role as executive chairman at iRobot) told TechCrunch. “But what we discovered is that people buy it as an appliance. They buy it as a cleaning device. They buy it because it does the job more efficiently and more effectively than a human.”
How boring! And by now iRobot’s products have plenty of robo-vac competitors, and it took a hit earlier this year thanks to pandemic-related global supply chain disruptions and tariff fallout from the trade war with China that should have made it a tough time to push a $1,000 device. But probably that very boringness has contributed to the Roomba’s prompt recovery. It promises no real disruption, good or ill. Maybe what comes after the Roomba is another Roomba: Even in its more advanced and fancy iterations, it simply cleans the floor better than the last one did.
And maybe that’s enough. Maybe the Roomba is an icon of the mundane future we actually want.
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