Roomba had first mover advantage by a mile and ~70% share of the robot vacuum market at its peak. The problem isn't Amazon but the fact that the company stopped innovating and let competitors with cheaper products and better tech eat its lunch.
LIDAR bots are really cheap. It can’t be the cost of components. And no matter what you could certainly afford to put them on the most expensive bots and leave the really cheap ones with the pointless camera system.
I left the brand over it. There were some things I liked better but their VSLAM implementation is fundamentally flawed.
I wanted something that worked in 100% darkness, and LIDAR delivers that. So I don’t have to go around turning on lights, and I don’t have to worry it will get lost because I didn’t turn on lights.
Most things are a wash. The app is a little better than I remember the iRobot app being.
The auto empty dock works fine, the Roomba could tell you when the dock was full which I do miss. But that’s not an issue.
The mopping system doesn’t work for me due to how deep my carpet is. When the robot lifts the mop to travel it still hits my carpet. The Roomba system looks better where it lifts the mop all the way above the robot.
But I don’t care about the mop. That was just built-in so I tried it.
I’m happy I made the switch. I wish I didn’t have to. I was perfectly happy with my Roomba other than the navigation issue. But it was killer.
The DreameBot L20 Ultra can disconnect its mops and leave them in the dock. Roborock's Q Revo seems like it was based on the DreameBot L10s Ultra, so I've seen some guesses that it may eventually come to Roborock as well.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
The newer ones high end ones have front facing cameras. I don’t know if that’s a replacement or in addition to. And that’s the camera that might capture your stuff.
I think Roborock and others have copied the front facing camera. Seems like you could still spy with a LIDAR bit if you had that.