iRobot Roomba Max 775 Review: A Respectable Roomba Redux

The iRobot Roomba was, if you ignore one expensive and trilobite-shaped forebear, the first robot vacuum. And for a long time after its 2002 introduction, it was also the best one. But its star eventually faded sometime in the early 2020s, and after a failed attempt in 2024, after two years of trying, to sell itself to Amazon, iRobot filed for bankruptcy. In January of this year, it was finally acquired by Picea Robotics, a Chinese robot vacuum manufacturer with partners such as Anker, Xiaomi, and Shark. The company wasted little time getting new robot vacuums to market after that.

Earlier this year, iRobot launched the $1,000 Roomba Max 775 Combo Robot + AutoWash Dock, which was then the priciest of its post-buyout U.S. releases. I’ve been testing the Max 775 since I returned from IFA 2026, where iRobot showed off a compelling new bot-within-a-bot concept called the Roomba Duo (not to be confused with the iPhone Duo, a totally different thing). The Max 775 is nowhere near as goofy or compelling as that concept, and it feels like every other Chinese robot vacuum out there, but it does get the job done.

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Roomba goes BRRRRRR…

The Roomba Max 775 looks nice out of the box. It’s almost identical to the Roomba Max 705 that iRobot released last year, down to the roller brushes. It has the same dual dark-green and light-green rubber-roller brush design as older models like the Roomba J7, which was a favorite of mine when it was new.

It features some modern touches, too, such as a sliding roller mop that extends to reach the edges of baseboards, carpet, and furniture while mopping, and dual rotating side brushes that flick debris into its path as it vacuums. The Max 775 self-docks to empty its dustbin—using a vacuum motor that’s just on the edge of too loud—and that also cleans its mop roller after a job, using 167-degree Fahrenheit water. It even has a cover that slides over the mop to keep it from dragging water across rugs, assuming it detects them in the first place. More on that later.

You’ll find a few uncommon niceties on the Max 775. It ships with extra accessories, such as two more side brushes, a bonus HEPA filter, and an additional dustbag stored in a special slot in the dock. iRobot says the Roomba is good for about 90 days of self-emptying before you need to replace its dustbag, so with two included, it could be up to half a year before you need to buy a replacement. The Roomba Home app will notify you if the dock runs out of water or needs its dirty water tank refilled, and the LED lights in front of those compartments also turn red when you need to address either issue. It’s not a necessary feature, exactly, but it’s nice to have.

You could set the Max 775 up in about 10 minutes if you rushed it, but plan for a good half hour if you’re the type who reads everything carefully as you go. The process involves placing its dock, plugging it in, filling its dirty and clean water tanks and inserting them into the top, and pouring its mopping concentrate into a small compartment in the dock. Then you’ll remove the thin plastic and packing foam from the bot itself, attach the spinning side brushes, shove the Max 775 into the dock, press the robot’s power button, and tap the “+” button in the Roomba Home app. The app scans for the robot; when it appears on the screen, you tap it, and the app takes it from there. Once that’s finished, you can start mapping.

It took the robot about 11 minutes to map my 750-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment, and the device did a surprisingly good job of automatically dividing and naming my rooms. (I did have to split my kid’s room off from my dining room myself, though.) It spent around 39 minutes vacuuming my apartment the first time, though it weirdly only touched a small portion of each room—thankfully, this was the only time that happened—before getting stuck under my kid’s bed.

This is a noisy robot. The voice and alert sounds from its speaker are loud and tinny (as with most robovacs, you can turn its volume down to zero if you’d like), and it emits a high-pitched whine while it works, which I found annoying. The dock isn’t quite ear-piercing when it empties the robot’s dustbin, but it makes enough of a racket to interrupt a conversation for sure. In short, you’ll want to schedule the Max 775 to work while you’re away, especially if you’re sensitive to noise.

Watch out for gremlins under the furniture

The Max 775 did a great job navigating, even around the ornate table bases of my dining room, and it would stop to do a quick revolution around table and chair legs where it could fit. I liked how gentle it was, too—I never saw it ram into furniture the way my old Roomba J7 did. It had no problem completing whole-home cleans on its own—except when I included my child’s bedroom, which I’ve come to think of as a doomed cave where every robot vacuum goes to face its own private Darth Vader. The only device I’ve tested that consistently enters and leaves that room without help is the Matic, which is too tall to go under most beds anyway.

Otherwise, object avoidance was about as good as these things get—which means the Max 775 will frustrate you in a cluttered home. It’ll go around small objects like cables on your floor, but it isn’t perfect. I had to rescue two cables from under its chassis—one black USB-C cable it had snatched from under my desk and another white cable I had intentionally laid out in the middle of a carpet. The Max 775 noticed and drove around the latter a couple of times but still eventually managed to turn into it and pull it across the rug. In fairness, neither cable ended up in its maw or wrapped around a side brush. That’s not to say those things won’t happen; they just didn’t for me.

When it’s not snagging cables (or, once, one of my kid’s flowery headbands that seem to lurk in every corner of my place), the Max 775 reliably sucks up dirt and other normal debris. I rarely found things with my feet, and my rugs looked clean. I also never noticed it dropping dirt as it worked, and its dustbin never clogged during my testing.

It worked well as a mop-bot, too. The Max 775’s roller mop left a nice, streak-free shine on my hard floors, extending to the edges of my baseboards. It handled my usual ketchup puddle test as well as the best of its roller-mop-equipped competitors—the Matic and the Ecovacs Deebot X12 Omnicyclone—cleaning it all up instead of smearing much of it across the floor.

I did catch the Max 775 mopping a small part of the thin rug in my bedroom at one point, near the plastic pad my office chair sits on. I asked iRobot how the Max 775 detects whether it’s on carpet or hard floor, and the company responded that an ultrasonic sensor underneath the robot handles this. I shared an image of the rug-mopping incident and asked what might cause it, and the representative said the following: “Some very low-pile carpets can be more difficult for the dedicated sensor to detect. However, after reviewing the photo you shared, we believe the clear mat under your chair may also be contributing to what you experienced. Because the sensors are located toward the front of the robot, it’s possible the robot lowered the roller mop while moving onto the clear surface, interpreting it as hard flooring.”

That passes the sniff test for me, as I didn’t catch the Max 775 mopping other parts of the same rug, nor did I catch it on any other rugs in my home. The fix was easy: I just took to the Roomba Home app to draw a no-mopping zone on the map approximately where the rug is.

Battery life is solid. I sent the fully charged Roomba Max 775 to vacuum, then mop, my entire 750-square-foot apartment, and it ended with 36% remaining after two-and-a-half hours. That’s comparable to the battery life of the Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro, which completed the job faster, in about two hours, and ended with 40% of its battery remaining.

Basic app control

iRobot’s Roomba Home app is a refreshingly simple distillation of the crowded app ecosystems of many other Chinese robot vacuums I’ve tested. You get some of the usual options: you can adjust suction power and mopping intensity, define no-go areas for vacuuming and mopping, and choose how often you want the device to automatically empty.

I encountered bugs that really need ironing out, though. The robot seemed to lose its connection to the app during longer cleaning runs—for example, it would stop showing the Max 775’s location on the map or which room it was cleaning. If I closed the app and reopened it, the map wouldn’t load at all, leaving me with a spinning circle and the words “Map loading.” I also found I could no longer control it from the app in this state, leaving me with only the buttons on the chassis itself, which let me pause the robot, turn it off, or send it home. Once the Max 775 was docked and had announced it was finished, the map would load again. This didn’t seem to happen on shorter runs, like when I sent it to clean one or two rooms, but almost always did on long ones.

I also noticed that although the Roomba Home app would alert me via a push notification on my iPhone 15 Pro when the Max 775 encountered an issue, tapping the notification reopened the app but didn’t actually show me what the problem was. I could usually figure it out by finding the robot, of course, but it would be nice to see what’s going on when I’m away from home, too.

iRobot is aware of the issues and tells me it is “currently rolling out updates across models to further improve connectivity and syncing reliability.” The company says the updates “will be available across models soon.”

Roombas are still good

iRobot was pivoting toward chasing its Chinese competition, rather than meaningfully innovating in the robovac space, even before its sale to Picea. As one of the first Roombas after the sale, the Roomba Max 775 is hard to distinguish from the constant crowd of robots coming out of that country, aside from a few minor differentiators I mentioned near the top of this review. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad device; it just means that choosing a Roomba over anything from Roborock, Dreame, Ecovacs, or Eufy practically requires a magnifying glass.

That said, the question of who should actually buy the Max 775, over other options available, is fuzzy for me. It’s a fine option if you’re a Roomba diehard—although I’m not sure who that describes, after the company’s sale to Picea. I liked its vacuum performance, and it can mop bigger messes than most. And I prefer its predictable zig-zaggy cleaning patterns; not trying to be too smart about that means it never gets stuck in weird loops, unlike the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller, which I watched spin in a circle for six minutes while trying to figure out how to get back into the dock it was right in front of. But overall, the Max 775 doesn’t do anything uniquely well or solve any robot vacuum pain points, and I don’t see how iRobot stands out without that.

The Max 775 performs about as well as most robot vacuums can. It’s good at vacuuming, and mops better than most. It also screwed up in the same ways that so many other robot vacuums do—it drove over cables, mopped a bit of one of my rugs, and got stuck on the hidden clutter under furniture. Its app is buggy, too, in ways that would really bother me if I paid $1,000 for it. I think I’d care less about that if I didn’t feel like I’d have to babysit it.

Even ignoring this Roomba’s buggy app and hunger for cables, I still find myself grappling with the same question as every time I test a disc-shaped robot vacuum with a bump sensor, the industry-standard form factor iRobot pioneered more than 20 years ago. Are robot vacuums worth spending more than three or four hundred dollars on? The only one for which I’ve ever felt the answer is an unqualified “yes” is the Matic, and even that’s getting harder to say now that the data center components-demand crunch has driven its price to a hair under $1,500. The ideal trade-off for all these robots is that, yes, they take longer to clean than you would, but they’re still doing it for you without you having to watch them or intervene. And if they can’t do that—and the Max 775, like most, can’t—then what’s the point for anyone who doesn’t like watching a little guy trundle around their home?

See iRobot Roomba Max 775 at Amazon