Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was an early Roomba convert. I bought one of the 1st or 2nd gen products back in 2004 and was VERY happy with it. I then purchased a Scooba (sp?) and was far less impressed. In 2005 I was married, we moved into an apartment that had door saddles and we bought a bunch of rugs. Roomba wasn't able to keep up with the changes and he was retired. Fast forward to today. Roomba is back and it's more honey badger than tin man. Roomba no longer cares about door saddles - it plows over them like a running back. It can seek out its own docking station and settle in for a recharge. It still is great about getting into nooks and crannies to seek out and eliminate hair, dust and miscellaneous junk. Under the bed? Yep. around the bookshelves? Yep. You have to work at it to keep Roomba out of somewhere. Frankly I was humiliated at just how much unidentifiable yuckiness the Roomba picked up. We thought we had a clean home but evidently we were one step removed from plague-era villages. I am pleasantly surprised at how the sensor upgrades have improved the product. It used to be that Roomba had two travel speeds - ramming speed and complete stop. This led to scuff marks on walls and damaged veneers. This newer model(s) sense upcoming collisions and slows down, easing into them. Furniture and walls are left unblemished. I ran the Roomba throughout the entire 2-bedroom apartment. After 5 hours of operation, 3 area rugs, multiple sills, an inordinate amount of extension cords and ethernet wires (I'm a geek) and lots of furniture the Roomba emerged triumphant. It never once hung up on an obstacle. It went where it wanted, when it wanted and our floors are all the cleaner because of it. The unit will normally stop after one hour of operation. That's plenty of time to clean most rooms. If you are especially dust-phobic, indulge your needs and press the clean button once more. Our apartment was tangibly cleaner. Our allergies (it's prime allergy season here in New York) have lessened. The floor felt practically virginal. In homage to our current sensibilities let me specify that this means there is absolutely no whatsoever feeling of grit or impurity underfoot. The rooms smelled better. We even ended up with less clutter because we took a few minutes to put some accumulated junk away. We even managed to (OMG) donate or throw a few things away. So what are the tradeoffs? This version is not "smart". It won't pair up with your Google,, Apple or Alexa appliances. You can manually schedule cleaning but it's like stoneage (1990's) clock radio config to set it up. Then again it's a few hundred dollars less than the higher end home products by iRobot. The higher end products will answer to your every whim via the major platforms. Then again, I can't think of many occasions when I am sitting at my office and thinking to myself "hey, I should vacuum the floors at this very moment". Maybe you do - I'm not judging. If so, let down a couple of more c-notes and get yourself a super brainy version. For the rest of us though, this device has what it takes to give you a (mostly) labor-free path to clean floors, reduced allergies and geekdom status.