is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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Robot vacuums are amazing machines, but they can also be a pain in the arse.
In my home, testing a new robot vacuum often means digging it out from under my living room couch or unhooking it from the legs of my lounger. Then there’s being woken at 3AM by a cheery “resuming cleaning,” getting down on my hands and knees to retrieve a pencil from their brushes or scrub the gunk out of the “self-cleaning” dock. And — my favorite – holding my nose while dumping the contents of a giant dirty water tank into the toilet.
Then I met Matic. It’s a complete rethink of the household robot. From design and navigation to cleaning performance and mobility, it’s been built from the ground up to address the problems of today’s robot vacuums. And it succeeds. While it’s not perfect, Matic is the robot vacuum I would buy if my house weren’t overrun with them.
At a glance, you can see this is a different kind of bot. It’s more WALL-E than Roomba, with a stout white body, flat, wide head, large LCD screen, and small pause/resume button. There’s no hint of the Roomba “disc-bot” design, which has barely changed in a decade.
9 Verge Score Matic $ 1095 $ 1095 The Good Excellent mapping and navigation
Kept my floors spotless
Rarely gets stuck
Human-like cleaning patterns
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