[atourgates]

I hope you do!

I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great.

And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.

Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to:

* Tidy up.

* Clean

* Do laundry

* Help with other stuff

Seems well worth $500/mo. I don't expect that V1 of this technology will be able to effectively do all that stuff, but I'm hopeful that v2 or v5 might be able to.

On a related note, "folding laundry" seems to be a really hard challenge for machine learning to solve. Solutions like "Foldimate" kind of work if you individually hand it every piece in the right way - but nothing seems to be cable of having a human dump a bin of washed clothes in and spitting out nicely folded laundry. And everything so far that's promised to do that seems to be vaporware.

[xnx]

> And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.

Maybe, but you should factor in that many chores can't be done at all, and those that can be done will take ~10x as long.

[tpmoney]

Slower is only a problem if you're waiting on the machine. I recently purchased one of those "all in one" heatpump washer and dryers. It is indeed on a per wash basis slower than my old separate washer and dryer. But over the course of a week and multiple loads, the total time spent is about the same or possibly even less.

Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.

A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.

[jfim]

I'm skeptical too, but the fact that it works slower isn't too much of a problem if it doesn't require human attention and finishes before one is back home. It's just like how the Roomba can take as much time as it needs to to vacuum the living room when I'm gone for the day, as long as it's done by the time I get back.