Neato Robotics - XV-11

10-12 years ago, I had a pair of Neato XV21s. They were fine. They were much better cleaners than my Deebot X1 Plus is. My Dreame D9 Max however, picks up better than the XV21s did, but I'm not totally wowed by how much better, so I don't think it's a lot. . I would hope that if you're talking about ones that are above the $200 mark, there would have been significant improvements since then. I can't find the specs on my old ones, but the D9 Max is rated for 4000 Pa, the X1 Plus 5000 Pa .. The X1 Plus's suction is *terrible* though in comparison to the D9. So I guess specs aren't everything. I had a Neato D8 that only lasted about 6 months (and the company offered to replace it, even after they had folded, but I couldn't find my receipt) that was rated for 2500Pa, and it was much better than the X1 Plus, too. With models out there exceeding 20k Pa on the top end, I'd hope there are improvements in the last decade!

No, they don't. We have 5 Neatos and they are great. Even our original XV-11 is still running daily, around 15 years later. Granted, it needs a bit of love (and oil) now from time to time, but it's easy to fix.

Neato XV series for being awesome and being the first robot vacuum to feature a lidar sensor roomba 500 series, for a while they were the most popular robot vacuums ever made and still the most reliable, other than battery replacements they can last more than 15 years without issues Roomba 980, the thing is still a beast at cleaning and the navigation is good enough. No keep out zones or anything but it does its job well

I had an OG Neato that I still miss 10 years later. I also wanted a basic “do one thing well” robot vac so I recently got a Roborock Q5 Duo-roller. It has an app, but it’s vacuum-only, self emptying, and runs wherever you want whenever you want (scheduled or manual). I bought it specifically to clean up husky hair. It works great so far, but I’ll have a better evaluation after a year. As of right now I’m just happy to not have to manually vacuum under my bed any more.

neato actually used lidar and had good product.  the only issue with neato is reliability and high price

I run 11 Neatos 90 minutes 5 days per week in our house while we swim in another part of the house. Been doing it for 10 years. Not always the same Neato's though they are very repairable and I've made many repairs on them through the years.

Neato was the first with lidar. It was D shaped so it got edges and the aggressive brush was full width. Unfortunately it was over engineered like they were building a rocket ship with all kinds of sensors to make sure everything was working perfectly and sometimes sensors went bad throwing an error stopping it from running when it was perfectly fine. Company was purchased by a German company that destroyed it and they went out of business 2.5 years ago but kept the cloud servers running until recently. They can still be used manually by pressing the start button. But lots of features are gone. We use 11 so they are all done while we are swimming. We are retired and don't want to listen to them running for 8 hours per day if we just ran 1 per house level.