The Best Robot to Buy to Vacuum Your Dirty Home

The $350 iRobot Roomba 560 is my pick for a robot vacuum cleaner.

First thing’s first: a robot vacuum cleaner is not a replacement for a traditional vacuum. These bots are designed to supplement, not replace, manual cleaning. As I found when I compared several models for Wired last year, a robot will rid you of ignorable, but irritating dirt and dust that gathers on your floors, extending the time between major household cleanings, but eventually, you’ll still need to vacuum by hand to pick up the grime that the robot couldn’t wrestle free. But they will give you more time between major cleanings—you can go a month or two between manual cleanings rather than sweeping or scrubbing once every two weeks. Or if you’re concerned about allergens, every day. For anyone that has pets that shed, or allergies to dust or pollen, the little bit of cleaning a robot vacuum can do on a daily basis can go a long way.

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A new High Res Notebook: There’s a next generation 15-inch Macbook Pro that has a super high-resolution display that has more pixels than most 27-inch monitors. That is useful for working from the field and getting enough desktop space to fit lots of windows side by side, but I don’t know how readable that is going to be. It’s a 15-inch notebook that is about as thin as a Macbook air, weighs as much as a lot of 13-inch notebooks (4.6 pounds) and has no optical drive. It’s surprisingly not as expensive as I thought it would be at the $2200 starting price. But then I remembered it’s not 2002 and lots of solid laptops cost around a grand and change. Here’s the thing: Since it has got a lot of hardware built from the ground up, you should wait a few months to get one if you are really interested while they shake the bugs out. That’s it.