I'm a consumer of cleaning robots, and I certainly care.
I'm on my second Roomba now, and I love the thing to death.. However.. The fact that it bumps around randomly for a very long time while missing obvious spots can truly suck. Your Roomba can go several whole cleaning missions without ever touching a given spot, or mostly ignore half your floorplan for whatever reason (i.e. the shape of the room). Neato appears to be planning to sell this thing for $399, which is around the same price range as a Roomba. If there turns out to be a price premium when this thing hits the market, it will be well worth it if it turns out this thing works better due to the allegedly-expensive software and hardware.
And that's the whole point -- what it comes down to is not nerd-love or whatever, but that it really works. Every single person that I've ever met and discussed my Roomba with asked the same first question: "does it actually work? does it map out your room? no? so how does it make sure that it hits every spot?".
I can reply with iRobot's hopeful marketing or I can tell the truth: it works pretty well, but not as well as you'd expect. A device that would actually ensure every spot is visited once, whatever the method, is going to be a winner, all other things equal.
I think consumers, geeky or not, have the capacity to both care that a device works and spot obvious methodological drawbacks.
I'm on my second Roomba now, and I love the thing to death.. However.. The fact that it bumps around randomly for a very long time while missing obvious spots can truly suck. Your Roomba can go several whole cleaning missions without ever touching a given spot, or mostly ignore half your floorplan for whatever reason (i.e. the shape of the room). Neato appears to be planning to sell this thing for $399, which is around the same price range as a Roomba. If there turns out to be a price premium when this thing hits the market, it will be well worth it if it turns out this thing works better due to the allegedly-expensive software and hardware.
And that's the whole point -- what it comes down to is not nerd-love or whatever, but that it really works. Every single person that I've ever met and discussed my Roomba with asked the same first question: "does it actually work? does it map out your room? no? so how does it make sure that it hits every spot?".
I can reply with iRobot's hopeful marketing or I can tell the truth: it works pretty well, but not as well as you'd expect. A device that would actually ensure every spot is visited once, whatever the method, is going to be a winner, all other things equal.
I think consumers, geeky or not, have the capacity to both care that a device works and spot obvious methodological drawbacks.