A friend has a robot vac and just puts it in a room, closes the door, and leaves it for a couple of hours. Avoids the issue of worrying about which areas don't have kids' toys around, Lego, cords, etc. Higher touch than is ideal, but if you're already working from home and the kids are at school, it can work.

I guess. If I need to vac a room, that's probably 5 minutes work to pull out a broom vac and do it.

You can typically select certain rooms to clean rather than “clean all” on decent brands like roborock or Dreame. You can put it on a schedule too.

> custom-made for a robo-vacuum

If I was going to custom build a house around vacuuming, I'd get a central vacuum system, not a robotic one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_vacuum_cleaner

I was also dreaming of an opening in a wall where I can brush my dust into and it magically disappears... Since having cordless vacuum I no longer dream about that.

I mean even a plug which would let you plug in an elephant nose - I think that is more cumbersome than the cordless vacuum. I mean having to get that hose and hook it up every time I want to vacuum something? Meh. Easier to pick up the 21th century broom that makes dust disappear when you roll over it.

And manual brooming makes you give n passes over the same place to do the job... juck.

Depends on your tolerance for filth (not a value judgement). You don't know how messy your enviroment is untih you see a robovac fill cannisters of shit each week. Having baseline for cleaniness helps with allergies. Like everything you can optmize for some big QoL gains, i.e. i basically just whip crumbs from surfaces straight to the floor knowing it'll get picked up. The solution for 2 level homes is 2 robovacs, cheap second hand, going to get disgusting anyways, replace filters and bristles. A few 100 dollars to have 80% clean floors is pretty life changing. Does not replace need for manual vaccing nooks and corners every once in a while.

Having white socks stay white has been a breath of fresh air. Love my roller mop robot.

Definitely, but my experience with Roomba has been that it picks up far less than 80% of the dirt, I'd say more around 50%. I can just use a classic vacuum once a week and actually do a good job, plus not have to worry about a noisy robot pulling cabled stuff of my desk.

Perhaps these Chinese ones actually do a good job?

iRobot hasn't really done anything about that for quite a while so I'm not at all surprised by the headline. Not to mention insane prices for consumables (filters, bristles, etc) - I got Aliexpress replacements at 1/10 of the cost and there's literally no difference in the end result.

TBH after a while I optimized things around robovac, or tidiness levels. I have hardwood floors, woven carpets, just stuff where vacs pick thing sup very effectively.

I don't know if Chinese ones are any better in terms of performance, suction levels only matter when you're on carpet and then it heavily depends how worn out or well maintained your brush head is which is where cheap consumables start to matter. For me the easy surfaces get 80%+ clean, the harder surfaces get 50% but even with very highend vaccuums I can still scrapes tons of hair out with a fur brush. But part of it is also I have a ancient magic high performance furbrush (random plastic junk for 30 years ago) that somehow digs out more fur than any other brush.

    how worn out or well maintained your brush head i

This. Especially if you try different suplliers, the quality can vary wildly.

Probably fair. I have a pretty high tolerance for both a level of floor droppings and clutter until I pull out my broom vac every week or two. And I do have a housekeeper every 3-4 weeks to do a deeper cleaning--a lot of which wouldn't be handled by a robovac.