More than a decade ago, I bought a cheap Roomba off an overstock deals website that no longer exists. It served me (and then us, when I married) well, but after five or six years its battery wasn't holding a great charge anymore, and we ditched it and returned to vacuuming with an upright vacuum.

The Roomba was handy, but it had flaws- being so small, it had a tiny dust compartment, and removing it, dumping it, and reinstalling it was a constant chore. Also it's brushes were constantly getting clogged with hairs and the tool used to clear them off wasn't very good at the task and was uncomfortable to hold as well. Plus as the battery endurance got lower, it would often run out of charge while part-way through its task, and then I'd have to search out where it was in the house and carry it back to its base to recharge.

Anyway, for Christmas I ordered my wife a newly-released Roomba after reading many positive reviews. After putting the box under the tree, I read a wise quote online: "If you want a new toaster, don't give your wife a toaster. Just buy the toaster." So I unwrapped the Roomba and set it up in early December, and got my wife something else.

Anyway, the new Roomba is a substantial improvement on every pain point. I got one of the "+" models, which means its recharging base also has a built-in vacuum of its own, sort of. Basically when the Roomba docks to recharge, the base will suck the dust out of the Roomba and catches it in a standard vacuum bag that is much easier to replace then getting down on your knees to flip over the Roomba. The robot itself is also smarter; it makes a map of the house as it goes, so when its battery runs low, it can always make it back to the charging base, no matter where in the house it is.

I'm sufficiently impressed that I might buy a second one next year and install its base upstairs; but even that is less of a pain that the previous Roomba was. The new one, with it's ability to map the area it is working in, will return to its start point if it can't see a charger as it worked. So basically I can drop it off at the head of the stairs, let it do its thing, and then when its done I can just to back to the head of the stairs and there it'll be, waiting patiently.

It's also has rubber "brushes" instead of the, um, brushy brushes the old one has. They seem to be getting much less hair wrapped around them, and are easy to clean when it does happen. And while once it sucked a cord into itself, it tried to disgorge it by reversing its brushes, and then when that didn't work it pinged my phone with an alert that it was having trouble.

So kudos to the people at iRobot, who removed most of the pain points from the original Roombas.

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