Why I'm skeptical that Memorial Day sales tell us anything about the robotics market
Consumer tech deals are everywhere this weekend, but the robots we actually need aren't on sale at Best Buy.
Image credit: Lottie animation by Centre Robotics (LottieFiles Free, used with credit). · source
Picture this: it's Memorial Day weekend, and my inbox is flooded with deals. iPads marked down by hundreds. Apple Watches at their lowest prices ever. Laptops, tablets, smart home gadgets, all competing for attention in what's become a retail feeding frenzy.
And I keep thinking: where are the robots?
I don't mean this as a gotcha. I'm genuinely curious. We're supposedly in the middle of a humanoid robotics boom. Every week I'm writing about billion-dollar valuations, factory deployments, promises of household helpers arriving "within years." But when the biggest consumer shopping events roll around, the robots are nowhere to be found.
Honestly, I'm not sure what this tells us. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
The disconnect
Looking through this weekend's sales coverage from ZDNet, you'll find the usual suspects: Samsung tablets, Hisense TVs, Ninja kitchen appliances. The deals are genuinely good, some of the best prices we've seen all year on mainstream consumer electronics.
But here's what's conspicuously absent: any robotics product that matters.
Sure, you might find a Roomba on sale somewhere. Maybe a robot lawn mower if you dig through the listings. But these are, let's be honest, fairly basic automation products that have been around for over two decades now. They're not what the industry is promising when they talk about the coming robot revolution.
I initially thought this was just a timing thing. The humanoid companies are still in pilot phases, still deploying to warehouses and factories, still years away from consumer products. Of course they're not showing up in Memorial Day ads.
But after reading through more coverage, I think the gap is more interesting than that.
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