The $20,000 home robot folds your laundry, sort of. In the Wall Street Journal's day with 1X's NEO, a person in another room in a VR headset drove its hands, and it finished no hard task on its own.
By itself NEO opens the door, fetches a thing, turns off the lights. Everything past that short list is "Expert Mode," a company employee climbing into the robot's body by remote. CEO Bernt Bornich is blunt: "If we don't have your data, we can't make the product better." The privacy controls (no-go zones, face blurring, scheduled access) are real, and they are the tell: you do not build elaborate consent flows for an appliance.
Do not buy the first one. You would be paying the early-adopter premium to do unpaid QA on a stranger's eyes in your hallway.
