It'll be a US or Japanese or South Korean robot since it's not allowed to come from China.
I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market.
I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.
It'll be a US or Japanese or South Korean robot since it's not allowed to come from China.
I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market.
I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.
Roomba made some of the first robotic vacuum cleaners and they were based in the US.
Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.
What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.
> What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!
(yeah, I'm being sarcastic)
IMO the solution is antitrust enforcement that considers hardware, software, and services all different products/markets, and prohibits anticompetitive tying between them. Having a piece of hardware should not force you to use specific software to operate it. And choosing specific software to control your robot vacuum should not force you to use specific network services (for mapping or whatever else the software developer leaves out). Rather there should be competitive markets for software onto existing hardware, and for network services to provide features to that software. If a company develops software for a piece of hardware they manufacture, then every bit of documentation used to write that software should be made publicly available so that competing software can also create an implementation.
Then, casual auditing of the hardware/software would suffice to make sure they weren't bundling other types of product. And the main concern would boil down to data collection by Chinese services - for which the US Software industry could step in with alternatives. And then rather than merely banning "Chinese services", a US GDPR would go a long way towards setting general rules to alleviate the specific concerns regarding data collection / abuse. It would then be up to Chinese companies whether to comply or not.
We've been missing these general approaches because our domestic surveillance industry wants to continue abusing the market, and has stymied any such regulation that would encourage competition with them. But these are the types of general approaches we actually need, rather than simplistic import bans and other ham-fisted protectionism.
Sorry, in the US it's, AFAIK, now not allowed to come from anywhere but the US: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/fcc-bans-future-roomba...
The admin seems to have a tendency to fearmonger over China and then ban or tariff globally. Allies don't exist apparently.
> Allies don't exist apparently.
Aren't our only "allies" Russia and North Korea now?
And Israel, so there shouldn't be any tech shortage.