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The Roomba Max 775 Combo packs serious suction, clever mopping and a dock that handles most of the dirty work. At £799 it faces fierce competition, but a £200 discount makes it far more tempting.
For years, Roomba was almost a generic term for a robot vacuum. Then something slightly awkward happened. While iRobot was busy being the famous one, a wave of rivals turned up with enormous suction figures, spinning mops, self-cleaning docks, laser navigation, cameras, and the humble Roomba started to look rather old fashioned.
The Roomba Max 775 Combo feels like iRobot is really starting the fight back, though.
This is a fairly serious robot vacuum and mop with 30,000Pa of suction, twin rubber rollers, a spinning roller mop, LiDAR navigation, AI obstacle recognition, and a huge AutoWash dock that empties the bin, washes the mop with 75°C water and dries it afterwards.
It can even dispense its own cleaning solution, and you can go for up to three months without dealing with the dust bag.
The normal price is £799, although at the time of writing there's a £200 discount code on the iRobot website. And that discount makes quite a difference, because the robot vacuum market around £800 is absolutely brutal these days.
What I liked about the Roomba Max 775 Combo
The headline attraction is the mopping system. Rather than dragging a damp pad around behind it, the Max 775 uses what iRobot calls its PowerSpin roller mop. It rotates at 200rpm, applies pressure to the floor and can move out towards edges to get closer to skirting boards.
More importantly, the roller is continually being cleaned rather than simply getting progressively filthier as the robot drives around your house.
Once it gets back to the dock, things become even cleverer. The mop is washed using water heated to 75°C and then dried at 50°C, which should reduce the lingering damp smells that can plague robot mops.
There's also a heated spot-cleaning function for dried-on spills, which is exactly the sort of thing I want a robot mop to tackle rather than merely polishing the dust.
I also like the approach to carpets, and I've been using it on my first floor, which is predominantly carpet.
When it detects one, the mop doesn't merely lift slightly off the floor. A protective cover comes across the roller to isolate it, reducing the chances of the robot dragging a wet mop over your best rug.
Vacuuming power is serious too. At 30,000Pa, this is serious suction, even beyond the power of some cordless upright vacuums. That makes a difference on carpets, and I'm still finding the 775 Combo pulls up clumps out of the pile of my carpets that other vacuums just don't get to deal with.
You also get the company's familiar twin rubber main brushes, which have always made a lot of sense in houses with hair and pets because there's less for long strands to wind themselves around.
Navigation has finally caught up with modern expectations too. The Max 775 combines ClearView Pro LiDAR with a camera-based PrecisionVision AI system, allowing it to map rooms while identifying things such as shoes, cables and, rather importantly, pet accidents.
It can save up to five maps, so it's suitable for multi-storey homes, and the app lets you send it into particular rooms or areas rather than cleaning absolutely everything each time.
And then there's that dock. It's very big, but it does an enormous amount. It empties the robot's dustbin, refills its water, washes and dries the mop, dispenses cleaning concentrate and runs cleaning cycles to keep itself reasonably fresh.
That's the point where these expensive robots begin to justify themselves for me. Automating the vacuuming is nice, but if I'm then spending 15 minutes cleaning the robot every day, we've rather defeated the object.
What I didn't like about the Roomba Max 775 Combo
For all the impressive hardware, there are a few reminders that throwing technology at a robot doesn't automatically make everything perfect.
First, there's the app. Roomba's software has traditionally been one of its stronger points, but I've noticed some occasional mapping quirks, including the app momentarily losing track of where the robot is during longer cleaning runs. I'd expect iRobot to keep polishing this with firmware updates, and it's not something that will plague you, just something I've noticed.
And although I like the AutoWash dock, it's not exactly silent. Emptying the dustbin and washing the roller can produce a fair racket, so I'd think twice before scheduling its full maintenance routine at three in the morning. Drying the brushes, which takes an age with robot vacuums, is a very quiet affair, though.
Overall verdict - should you buy the Roomba Max 775 Combo?
The Roomba Max 775 Combo feels like a much-needed reminder that iRobot can still build an ambitious robot vacuum.
It has finally got the specification sheet to compete properly with the likes of Roborock, Dreame and Ecovacs: 30,000Pa suction, proper LiDAR navigation, AI obstacle avoidance, an actively cleaned roller mop and a dock that does almost everything apart from put itself away in a cupboard.
The mopping system is probably the most interesting part. Continuously cleaning a roller makes far more sense to me than dragging the same increasingly grubby pad around several rooms, and the heated washing and drying system removes a lot of the unpleasant maintenance afterwards.
It's not flawless. There are a few software and navigation quirks and, at the full £799 asking price, those weaknesses matter because there are some spectacular alternatives at this end of the market.
At £599, though, the argument changes considerably. You're getting an unusually complete vacuum-and-mop system from the company that effectively created the category, and most of the technology you'd expect from considerably more expensive flagship robots is present.
Roomba might have spent a few years watching its rivals race ahead, but the Max 775 Combo suggests it's finally caught sight of them again.