The Robot Butler Comes With a Guy

The roast

So there's a company called 1X, and it's selling NEO, a home robot. Not a vacuum. A person-shaped robot. Five-foot-six, 66 pounds, and it wears a knit sweater. A robot in a sweater. It's the first machine that looks like it's about to ask if you've thought about grad school.

And honestly, the good stuff is good. It lifts 154 pounds. It carries 55. It's quieter than a refrigerator. When the battery's low, it plugs itself in, which is more than I can say for my phone, or me. It tells jokes. It doubles as a Bluetooth speaker. The suit and the shoes are machine washable, and it ships with a lint roller. A lint roller! They know. They know about your dog.

Now the price. Twenty thousand dollars to own one, or $499 a month. Every dad does this math the same way: twenty grand is a used truck. And a truck like El Truck can at least haul the stuff the robot is supposed to put away.

Here's where it gets weird. 1X has a feature called Expert Mode. If NEO doesn't know a chore, you schedule a 1X Expert, and a real human, somewhere else, takes over your robot and does it through its cameras. So you're not buying a butler. You're buying a butler costume, and a guy who's on call. That's not artificial intelligence. That's a very long extension cord.

To be fair, they've thought about it. You have to approve the connection. They say they can blur people so the operator doesn't see them, and you can set no-go zones he can't walk into. Great. Now I'm drawing a map of my own house for a robot's substitute teacher. "Not the garage. Not the closet. Definitely not the junk drawer, that's between me and God."

The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern spent a day with NEO, and everything she saw it do was a 1X employee in a VR headset. She asked who was talking. He said his name was Turing. Sure it is. And when she asked it to get a water from the fridge ten feet away, it took a little over a minute. Loading three things in the dishwasher took five minutes. Five! Three things! That's not a chore, that's a hostage negotiation with a fork.

Which brings in our guest star, the Robot Vacuum. Every house has one, and it has been doing the job for years with no arms, no sweater, and no guy. It gets stuck under the couch, it eats a sock, and it never asks for $499 a month. NEO is the vacuum's ambitious cousin who went to college, came home, and says he's "still learning."

And it's still learning in more ways than one. It's the end of October 2026, and the order page still says "US Deliveries start 2026." That's not a ship date, that's a dad saying "we'll see."

Would I take one? If it shows up on its own, folds the laundry on its own, and nobody named Turing is in my kitchen? Absolutely. Until then, it's not a robot. It's a very expensive way to have a stranger load your dishwasher.