iRobot charges $1,199 for a Roomba that seals a skirt against the carpet

SealForce ships in both machines ^[9][6]. The sealing skirt the launch is built around is identical in the $899 and $1,199 models, so what actually separates them is $300, a third more money for the 875 ^[21], and it buys two things the cheaper robot does not have at all: ThermaMist, which sprays heated mist ahead of the mop to pretreat stains, and a retractable mop cover that extends during vacuuming to keep carpet dry ^[4][6]. The rest of the premium is about 17 percent more suction and 11 percent more airflow ^[22].

Chief engineer Adam Pope puts the new vane-type blower at 20 liters of air per second, and iRobot says SealForce delivers three times deeper carpet cleaning ^[16][11]. Look at the baseline. The comparison is the same robot with the skirt up, not another robot and not a test standard, and "deeper" arrives without a unit ^[11]. That supports a claim about the mechanism doing something, while telling a shopper comparing brands nothing they can act on.

The 875 goes to IFA in Berlin this week, iRobot's first big trade show in years ^[1], and the spec sheet it carries there still leads with Pascals. 35,000 Pa is the highest suction figure the company has ever published, from a firm that spent years refusing to publish detailed suction specs at all ^[3]. Both axes are running at once: airflow management is the story, and the raw number went up anyway. Sealing is the newer claim rather than a replacement for the old one. The Verge's read is that the 875 brings iRobot closer to catching up with its competition than its last relaunch did ^[15].

Strip out the carpet features and what remains for a hard-floor household is a better mop than the Roomba 775, with more downward pressure ^[10] and a dock that washes the roller in hot water and dries it with hot air ^[5]. Navigation is lidar plus camera vision in a slimmer body that can climb a 3.5 cm threshold ^[12]. Those are real improvements, and they are the ones a household without carpet is actually paying for.

What settles this before any Pascal rating does is the share of floor that is carpet, because the skirt only drops when the robot detects carpet ^[9], and the baseline behind the vendor's own multiple. Carpet under half the house, plus an improvement measured against the vendor's own feature switched off, means the premium is buying a mechanism you will rarely watch work and cannot compare against anything else on the shelf.

For anyone shipping a hardware line, the SKU structure is the transferable part. Put the story feature in the midrange and the flagship has to be defended on the things nobody put in the headline ^[20]. Here that means a heated mist spray and a plastic cover have to hold up $300, and the launch copy is not the place that argument gets won.