The $1,000 Roomba Cleans Well and Still Needs Babysitting
A robot vacuum that costs $999.99 should not have to be pulled out from under a child’s bed. This one did.
Gizmodo’s Wes Davis spent weeks with the Roomba Max 775 in a 750-square-foot apartment. It vacuumed well, mopped better than most machines he has tested, and still got stuck under furniture and dragged two cables across the floor. He scored it 3 out of 5. That result is the most useful thing on the market right now, because it tells you exactly where the money stops working.
What a thousand dollars actually buys
By iRobot’s own spec sheet, the Max 775 is a black disc 14.7 inches across and 4.1 inches tall, weighing 12.8 pounds, with a 6000 mAh battery. The dock it lives in is a piece of furniture: 17 inches tall, almost 19 pounds, holding clean and dirty water tanks, a dust bag and a heater.
The mop is a roller – a spinning cloth cylinder instead of a flat pad – and it slides sideways to reach baseboards. A cover rolls over it when the robot believes it is on carpet. iRobot told Gizmodo an ultrasonic sensor (sound-based distance sensing) under the front of the robot makes that call. Navigation runs on LiDAR, a spinning laser that measures distances to build a floor plan, plus a camera that looks for cords and shoes. The dock washes the mop with 167°F water and empties the bin; iRobot claims up to three months hands-free, and a spare bag in the dock could stretch consumables to roughly half a year.
The test numbers: 11 minutes to map the apartment, 39 minutes for the first vacuum pass, and two and a half hours for a full vacuum-then-mop run that ended with 36% battery left. A Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro did the same apartment in about two hours with 40% left.
The failures are identical at every price
This is the part shoppers underestimate. The Max 775 drove over a cable on a rug after avoiding it twice. It mopped a patch of a thin bedroom rug next to a clear plastic chair mat – iRobot’s reply was that “some very low-pile carpets can be more difficult for the dedicated sensor to detect,” and that the clear mat may have read as hard floor. It whines while working, and the dock is loud enough to interrupt a conversation, so schedule it for when you are out.
The app is the sore spot. On long cleans, the map stopped loading and app control dropped out until the robot docked again. iRobot says it is rolling out connectivity and syncing updates across models. At $999.99 with a 60-day home trial, use that window hard.
The tiers, and where the extra money disappears
iRobot launched five self-emptying models in the US on July 7, 2026, after its bankruptcy and sale to Chinese manufacturer Picea Robotics: the $600 Plus 415, the $700 Plus 515, the $700 vacuum-only Max 715, the $800 Plus 575 and the $1,000 Max 775. All use LiDAR mapping and a camera. Going from $600 to $700 buys hot-water mop washing. Going to $1,000 buys the roller mop, the mop cover and dual side brushes.
Here is the honest read: above roughly $400 you are mostly buying mopping quality and dock convenience, not fewer rescues. Davis says the only robot he has felt an unqualified yes about is the Matic, and its price has climbed to just under $1,500. Nothing at any price handles a cluttered floor.
Buy for the one job you hate
Pick by failure mode. Sticky kitchen floors and pets? The roller-mop tier earns its money. Carpet everywhere? Buy the vacuum-only model and keep the $300. A cluttered home with cables and kids’ toys? Spend less, because you will be tidying before every run regardless, and a cheap disc tidies just as well as an expensive one.
What to buy
- Roomba Max 775 Combo Robot + AutoWash Dock ($999.99) – Best pick if hard-floor mopping is the chore you hate, thanks to the sliding roller mop and 167°F dock wash – but the app was buggy on long runs during testing.
- Roomba Plus 415 Combo ($600) – The cheapest of the new self-emptying, self-washing models; it uses spinning mop pads instead of a roller and skips the hot-water mop wash.
- Roomba Max 715 Vac + AutoEvac Dock ($700) – Vacuum only, with the same dual anti-tangle rubber rollers – the sensible buy if your home is mostly carpet and you never wanted a mop.
- Matic robot vacuum (around $1,500) – The one machine Gizmodo's reviewer calls an unqualified yes for reliability, though it is expensive and too tall to fit under most beds.
- Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro – Cleaned the same 750-square-foot apartment faster than the Roomba with more battery left, so worth cross-shopping before you commit to $1,000.
