iRobot Is in Trouble, but Roomba Is Already Dead

Golden-era Roomba models (from the 2010s, basically) had a disarming, pet-like quality that made them easy to forgive when they inevitably ate a sock or shut themselves into the bathroom.

It never felt like they demanded your attention; sometimes they just needed help. And by making the bots simple to repair and their spare parts easy to find, iRobot seemed to want you to treat a Roomba like a companion, not just a replaceable gadget.

Flashy tech was never the Roomba line’s strong suit, but for a long time the bots were better for its absence. The simple Roomba 600 Series was a Wirecutter pick for a decade because it was durable, unfussy, and a decent cleaner. Its semi-random, wall-bonking algorithm was deceptively effective, because it rarely got stuck around furniture or carpet fringe and wasn’t shy about ramming itself into the nooks where dust bunnies tended to hide.

It looked dated and dumb even by the low standards we had back in 2013, when I started testing robots for Wirecutter, but we found it hard to argue with the results.

As solid as the semi-random Roombas were, it was always part of the plan to develop a smarter navigation system, as iRobot’s then-CEO Colin Angle told me in an interview when iRobot was still riding high.

The company’s first few attempts at this next-generation nav system turned out to be its best. Those bots retained the agile, persistent, hands-off approach that had worked well for earlier Roombas and added a camera, which allowed the bots to clean large spaces faster and without getting lost as often.

They were great at cleaning carpets, too, thanks to the rug-hugging, patent-protected, counter-rotating dual-rubber-roller AeroForce cleaning system. The first of these camera-equipped bots — the 900 Series — were Wirecutter upgrade picks for the entire back half of the 2010s.

I’d argue that iRobot’s peak was the 2018 launch of the Roomba i7+, a bot that was smart enough to clean specific rooms on command and automatically dump the contents of its dust bin into its own dock. For a few years, this model was the most complete, hands-free robot you could buy, and Wirecutter recommended it as a super-upgrade pick of sorts until 2023. (I still use one.)

In hindsight, though, iRobot’s bet on camera-based navigation was the wrong move. Its robots not only failed to keep up with the new norms set by a stiff wave of competition from China but also seemed to get worse as the company tried to brute-force better performance out of a flawed platform, rather than pivot to a more suitable technology or at least refine what it was already good at.

Right around the time that iRobot launched the Roomba i7+, some strident Wirecutter readers goaded me into testing the lidar-based Xiaomi Mi robot.

At the time, the Mi wasn’t sold in the US. We had to buy it through a gray-market seller, and everything — the instructions, the app, even the robot’s voice — was in Mandarin. I was also skeptical of the lidar-based nav system, which relied on beams of light to map out walls and obstacles. Neato and other companies had been trying to make lidar work for a decade at that point, with disappointing results.

But within 10 minutes of testing, it was obvious that the Mi was the fastest, most accurate robot I’d ever seen. The Xiaomi Mi was made by the company that would later become known as Roborock, which has since become a leader in robot vacuums.

Roborock soon followed the Mi with new models for the US. By the end of 2019, Wirecutter made the Roborock S4 a pick, and we’ve recommended at least one Roborock model in our guide to the best robot vacuums ever since.

Hundreds of copycats soon followed in Roborock’s footsteps, all using essentially the same navigation system. Even the cheapest bots from brands such as Tesvor and Wyze zipped around with the same precision as the flagship models from newly crowned top-tier companies such as Roborock, Dreame, and Ecovacs.

People who owned lidar bots, even cheap ones, tended to be much happier with their experiences than Roomba owners, mostly because of the speedy, accurate navigation. In 2021, we ran an AI analysis on thousands of buyer ratings for about a dozen popular robots and found a stark contrast: For every lidar robot, the navigation system was one of the main reasons people said they liked their robovac. For each Roomba model, feelings about navigation tended to be neutral or negative.

Any time iRobot tried to fix one of the problems with its camera-based navigation, it seemed to break something else. The last few models the company released on its legacy hardware platform got some of the worst reviews, often because the vacuums had trouble finding their way back to their increasingly bulky and feature-packed charging docks.

Ironically, in a 2019 interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast, iRobot’s Angle said that using both cameras and lidar could make sense in a navigation system, particularly in self-driving cars. But iRobot never tried it in a Roomba under his leadership.

It might not have been a purely philosophical decision. Way back in its bump-bot days, iRobot had committed to a modular hardware platform that made it easy for the company to experiment with major components — brushes, transmissions, motors, bins, filters, sensors, battery packs — without having to overhaul the chassis for every new robot.

For owners, it also made the bots easy to repair with just a screwdriver, a benefit that had a lot to do with why we kept recommending some Roombas even after it was clear that most people wanted bots like Roborock’s models. Even now, iRobot still stocks spare parts on its website for models that are more than a decade old.

However, that hardware platform became a liability as time went on. Flavia Pastore, a product engineer who has been at iRobot since 2009, told me recently that it was difficult to make major changes to the navigation system and other components, even when it was becoming obvious that improvements were necessary. And it kept the company’s production costs high.

Newer brands began to blow past iRobot in nearly every meaningful way: more features, better reviews, lower prices. Roborock, Dreame, Ecovacs, and others pushed the boundaries at the top of the market, producing popular mop-vacuum combos complete with self-cleaning docks, as well as advanced nav systems that used both lidar and cameras.

iRobot also lost its foothold at the bottom of the market. In 2021, Angle told me that the Roomba 600 Series — the old entry-level bump-around bot — still accounted for 60% of iRobot’s revenue, even after it had moved toward camera-based navigation. But that was also the point at which cheap and decent lidar-based bots started to flood the zone, and buying a bump bot stopped making much sense.

By 2023, Roomba had discontinued several of the midmarket models that we still liked, and Wirecutter stopped recommending Roomba robots altogether.

The all-new Roomba lineup for 2025 has little in common with the classic bots, largely because iRobot is relying heavily on another company to design and build them.

According to a recent SEC filing, that partner is 3iRobotix (also known as Picea) in Shenzhen, China. 3iRobotix has claimed that it has partnered with other notable robot vac brands. iRobot’s spending on research and development fell by nearly 60% year-over-year from the first quarter of 2024 to 2025, and it moved some of its R&D out of its Bedford, Massachusetts, office and into China.

Pastore described the development process for the new models as “accelerated,” and it shows. The models that we’ve tested are generally faster and more accurate navigators than the classic Roombas. In a statement, iRobot representatives told me, “Culturally, iRobot created the category, and we revamped our entire line up earlier this year and continue to launch flagship products that push innovation. We continue to design, innovate, and build, and we have exciting things coming up in 2026.”

But in our testing, we still encountered some app glitches, incomplete cleaning coverage, and mopping problems.

Even if iRobot survives long enough to fix those quirks through software updates, the new Roombas still don’t act or perform much differently than their competitors do. Pastore pointed out that other brands have been copying iRobot for years, which is a fair point: It’s a bit rich to criticize iRobot for taking cues from competitors who borrowed elements from Roomba in the first place. But I would argue that the new Roombas feel more like competing bots than the competing bots ever felt like a classic Roomba.

The change that I’m most disappointed about is that the new-generation Roombas aren’t built to be repaired, at least not as easily as the legacy models were. Pastore told me that this was a conscious decision to keep costs down. After selling millions of robots and tracking how many spare parts it sold, iRobot realized that only “a very small percentage” of customers ever took full advantage of the repairability anyway, because certain parts (such as the wheel modules) rarely broke down.

But if you actually liked what iRobot was selling in the classic Roomba lineup — warts and all — that era is over. It has stopped producing the legacy models, and even before leadership’s most recent warning about the business shutting down, it didn’t sound like the company had any plans to bring those models back.

For the most part, new robot vacuums truly are better. Even the mediocre models, including those that we’ve tested from the current Roomba lineup, are smart and quick. Some are loaded with features that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. As generic as we’ve found the new Roombas to be, the buyer ratings at Amazon are often better than the ratings for the last few classic-era Roombas they’ve replaced.

I reached out to iRobot for comment on the customer response to these new models, about six months after they launched. “iRobot has always been and continues to be customer-centric,” a company representative wrote, adding, “This means providing customers with what they and their homes need to clean and get hours back in their day. We aim to provide customers with true benefits of cleaning.”

While the new Roombas are better robots in the ways that matter to most people, they’re also charmless and virtually indistinguishable from dozens of other robot cleaners. Something unique is gone now: There’s no more dead-simple Clean button on top of the bot, no more mighty AeroForce cleaning system, no more easy repairs. The sentimental may be left wondering: Couldn’t iRobot have found a way to split the difference between the Roomba of old and new?

If you have an old Roomba that you still love, stock up on spare parts now. (I have enough bags and filters and brushes to get my i7+ through a couple more years.) Genuine spares for most models are still available through iRobot for now, though based on what current company reps have said publicly about streamlining supply chains, that may not be the case for long even if iRobot remains in business.

We asked iRobot if it had plans to replenish its stocks of spare parts for old robots. The company didn’t answer directly, but a rep said that the customer-care team would “always try to help with a new part or offer a different solution.”

Previous company reps told us years ago that third-party filters were generally fine to use, but knockoffs of major moving parts could be riskier because ill-fitting components could lead to bigger problems.

Eventually, it’ll be time to move on. As over-the-top as some flagship bots have become, you don’t have to participate in any of that: Some of our favorites have roughly the same set of features as the Roomba i7+ did back in 2018, plus a basic mop that you can take or leave, all for a fraction of what that setup used to cost.

This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.