Two months in and I’m ready to call it. The race is over. For the money, there is no better robotic vacuum on the market than iRobot’s Roomba i7+. “For the money,” though, is a huge caveat; this is a device that sells for north of a thousand bucks. If the past two years has proven anything, it’s that the market is shifting toward smaller, quieter, and cheaper robots. For iRobot, this is a nose-thumbing moment to the cheaper, albeit capable, Chinese competitors. It’s a direct contradiction that takes the bigger, faster, stronger approach to a world that craves commoditized…

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