This is a bit like saying "Buy a commodore 64 to store recipes? I'd rather have a recipe book," in 1985.
The home robot most likely will do much more than those things. It'll clean, but also be a guard dog, accept packages, garden, clean your car, reads stories to the baby, play catch with the dog, etc. Or at least in theory if the technology catches up.
How often do you hire people? And work with things like this? There's a real mental load and privacy and scheduling load here that robots solve. It can be very hard to find someone, then the time/investment of being home when they are available, etc. I'd rather have a substandard cleaning that's easy and convenient than getting these deep cleans and working with people, cleaning services, scheduling, the social and mental load of a stranger in your house, the issues about your own privacy, etc.
I think the success of the roomba shows that people will settle for less, and pay a lot for it. My robot vacuum is the worst vacuum and mop I've ever seen but it does it automatically and that means a lot to me. I just press a button and things are clean-ish. That has a lot of value. More complex robots will benefit from that kind of dynamic I imagine.
The lesson of that is that you should wait at least 20 years before getting a device that purports to do the thing well, and maybe 40. And even then, people will still publish recipe books and cooking technique books.
Right now, people who have flat floors, not too much pile on rugs and carpets, no pets or pets that don't shed much, no stairs, and don't have much in the way of mess are quite happy with their robot vacuum cleaners. Mostly. But vacuuming is pretty much the least annoying and tedious part of cleaning your house, and modern bagless upright convertible cleaners are cheap and lightweight.
People with medium sized flat boring lawns seem happy with their robot lawnmowers.
But its faster to get a service with the big mowers to do it, and the job gets done better by the humans, especially if you need to consider edges or have bushes to trim or leaves to move.
The home robot most likely will do much more than those things. It'll clean, but also be a guard dog, accept packages, garden, clean your car, reads stories to the baby, play catch with the dog, etc. Or at least in theory if the technology catches up.
How often do you hire people? And work with things like this? There's a real mental load and privacy and scheduling load here that robots solve. It can be very hard to find someone, then the time/investment of being home when they are available, etc. I'd rather have a substandard cleaning that's easy and convenient than getting these deep cleans and working with people, cleaning services, scheduling, the social and mental load of a stranger in your house, the issues about your own privacy, etc.
I think the success of the roomba shows that people will settle for less, and pay a lot for it. My robot vacuum is the worst vacuum and mop I've ever seen but it does it automatically and that means a lot to me. I just press a button and things are clean-ish. That has a lot of value. More complex robots will benefit from that kind of dynamic I imagine.