1X Neo
For apartment dwelling or quiet, multi-generational households, the 1X Neo is the most approachable and user-friendly option. 1X may have given up industrial lifting strength, all-weather outdoor mobility, and ready out-of-the-box autonomy, but they’ve earned back a near-quiet operation, a compact footprint suitable for smaller homes, and a focus on home privacy with physical, hardware-based, non-hackable kill switches. If you're looking for a robot that can safely stack a pile of clean towels or load your dishwasher, and won't startle your toddlers or nervous cat (or turn your home into the set of a Michael Bay action movie), the Neo is a brilliant option at the moment. But if you're looking for a robotic arm to load up a snowplow or lift a couch, or one that can do its own programming without being taught in a controlled environment by remote human workers, it's going to fall short of that in its present design.
- PRICE
- $20,000
- PAYLOAD
- 12 kg
- BATTERY
- 5.5 hrs
Neo gets an exceptional score for fine-motor dexterity thanks to its 22-DoF (degrees of freedom) hands, the highest in the category, allowing the arm to easily pick up small items like keys or coins, as well as the delicate stem of a wine glass. While it has the highest rating in fine-dexterity, it scores low on Capability (its overall score) because it can’t carry anything over 18 lbs. and it can’t travel over rough terrain or go anywhere outside of flat indoor flooring.
Through the use of tendon drives with low inertia, rather than mass-heavy planetary gearboxes, 1X has created a platform with minimal mechanical fatigue. The lifetime of the tendon is nominal, at 2,000,000 cycles per replacement. Over months of consumer use data tracking, Neo rarely experiences hardware failure via actuator burnout or structural jam of joints, which are common in high-stress, high-pressure industrial platforms.
It’s also a massive outlier when it comes to the way that cloud telemetry was used. All of 1X NEO’s main navigation systems, obstacle avoidance, and basic language models run entirely local on an NVIDIA Jetson Thor based chip that is called the 1X NEO Cortex. Most importantly, 1X has integrated a substantial physical, hard-wired toggle switch in the side panel. Flipping the switch severs the connection of the four beamforming microphones and dual stereo cameras directly at their source: physical, power trace lines. There's no remote cloud upgrade, no software hijack, no firmware malfunction that will ever undo that action. The reason the rating doesn't hit a clean 10 is for access to more advanced, highly individualized household tasks, one must rely on 1X's Expert Mode remote-human teleoperation layer; in other words, a distant human driver will momentarily view your private living space through a secure stream to train it for a fresh, new set of abilities.
Neo has set a new high bar for consumer ease. It's a solo unboxing, has perfect smartphone app connectivity, it's got a conversational interface allowing you to manage your time, delegate work and change habits just by speaking naturally in colloquialisms. And it charges and updates itself while it docks.
Analysis of verified owners’ sentiment from owner-centric subreddits, Discord developer servers, and owner logs on YouTube showed a very high rate of satisfaction with customers in the demographic. Most owners complimented how non-scary the bot is in looks and sound, and many say that it fades to background noise after a few days. The most common criticism is an early expectation of off-the-shelf autonomy, with a few buyers expressing annoyance at having to schedule a teleop session to tune the bot to the idiosyncrasies of their floorplan.
The absolute best choice for small space urban dwellers. It requires a small operation radius, causes no heavy vibration traveling down through floor boards of apartments, it will not bother the neighbors upstairs/downstairs or in the adjacent unit. At only 66lbs it has no chance of overloading an old sub floor, or even cause much damage at all, should it fall over on to the nearest dry-walled article of furniture.
REDDIT “The silence is the real killer feature here. I saw a video of a Unitree H1 walking in an office and it sounded like an angry industrial blender. Neo just makes this faint, melodic whirring sound when it’s reaching into my dishwasher. My kids call it the 'giant plush toy' because of the knit suit. It took three teleop sessions with a 1X remote pilot to fully nail down my specific kitchen cabinet height, but now it autonomously clears my coffee cups and breakfast plates every single morning without fail.”
YOUTUBE “If you want a robot that can move heavy gym weights or mow your lawn, do not buy the Neo. I tried to make it carry a heavy 25-pound box of dynamic car parts from my hallway to my study, and it just stopped, looked at the box, and sent an app alert saying the weight profile violated its joint protection thresholds. But for sorting my daily laundry, wiping down clean kitchen countertops, and keeping me company with surprisingly witty conversation via its built-in LLM, it’s completely transformed how I run my apartment.”
