Andrew_OSU

DavidIce said:

The problem with both the Nomad and Sandmarc is that they don’t taper / curve like the Apple band. Why would any take the time to design something that looks like it doesn’t belong on the watch. IMHO, they both totally miss the mark. The 4.5 rating should be a 3 at best.

twolf2919 said:

I was a very happy customer of the Roborock S5 Max.  It did an excellent job cleaning and, more importantly, after initial setup never had an issue.

Two years later, I was wooed by the Roborock S7 MaxV's suction power - supposedly twice my S5's.  I didn't want any part of the auto-emptying, auto-mop-cleaning dock since the former simply meant you'd have to start buying bags for the robot (cleaning out the onboard dust bin is simple and requires no bag) and the latter meant more mechanicals that could go wrong and, potentially, a stinky mop.  Anyway, to each their own when it comes to the dock.

Robot reviews are great in that you get to see the features of a robot.  But reviewers rarely spend enough time with the robot to give long-term feedback on these devices.  The reviews for the S7 were great - just like this review for the S8.  But they didn't help discover any of the shortcomings that reveal themselves over time.

For me, the S7 MaxV has been a lot more hassle than its predecessor.  I really don' know why - it has a lot more sensors than the S5 did - but the robot gets lost or stuck on a regular basis.  It usually happens after a few weeks - not right off the bat.  I am pretty sure it's some sort of software bug: I've noticed that over time, the map starts deteriorating: it starts showing little non-existent artifacts (like dark grey dots and lines that the robot avoids but which don't exist as anything real in the house) - and walls that were previously pretty perpendicular to one another start skewing one direction or the other.  As a result, the robot begins making nonsensical decisions about where to go - or try to go as the case may be.  I've contact Roborock about this on numerous occasion, but their stock answer is that I should delete the map and let the robot recreate it.  And this is what I'm forced to do periodically - and it's annoying as heck.  Mostly because the earlier version of the Roborock had none of these issues, but also because my house is one of those "open concept" houses where some rooms - e.g. kitchen, dining room, family room - aren't distinct rooms as far as the robot is concerned.  So you have to manually divide up the space in the app - a laborious activity in the app consisting of dividing and combining things successively.  Then there are the floor-ceiling windows or sliders that, without manually creating "invisible walls" the robot constantly runs into (and gets stuck at when there's also a sliding door track).  So it takes a good half hour of time every time I have to recreate the map because the Robot f*&ked up the map again :-(

I love the fact that the S7's mop works better than the S5's and that the quiet mode is indeed pretty quiet and lets us run the robot every day.  I'm not sure that our all-hard floor house needed the extra suction power of the S7 - and combined with the map headaches I've been having, I would not have upgraded from the S5 had I known this up-front.  I'm glad the reviewer thinks the S8 is a good upgrade from the S7 - he must have never had the mapping errors I saw - or he's recommending the S8 because they fixed them there?

Another question for the reviewer: in the video you seem to indicate that with the S8 you can only remove the cloth mop?  In the S7 the whole plastic piece the mop attaches comes out - which is very helpful because it means you don't have to turn over the robot every time you want to put a new mop cloth on.  When I mop with the S7, I put a new mop cloth on for every room I have it mop.  If that's no longer possible with the S8, that's a definite negative - unless you get the S8 Ultra, which supposedly cleans the mop cloth for you.

StrangeDays said:

What makes this singular shade a colorway instead of a color?

Been seeing this used frequently lately on tech blogs, and trying to ascertain if there is a functional nuance to the term that isn’t apparent to me, or if it’s just a trend of using a novel, longer word for what was just “color”. 

insync88 said:

Why wouldn’t the Matter bulbs support Adaptive Lighting ?

jimcord said:

Thank you for an honest review, and being willing to point out what could be perceived as shortcomings. I agree with your assessment that it feels like a first generation product. Now let’s just wait for all the apple apologist to gang on about how wonderful this product is and not that they got suckered for paying $800 for a bigger watch but they really have no use buying over a series 8. Now we can just wait for apples, marketing team, to conjure up a story about how the non free diving app and fall detection managed to save someone’s grandma from having a heart attack at 200 feet underwater after she fell, and hit her head on a rock