When magazines in the 1950s put out articles forecasting what our lives would be like in the 21st century, there were many optimistic errors. Unable to expect the coming of the internet age, they expected meals to be replaced by pills and that we’d commute by flying mobiles and monorails and live in glass bubbles. But the one element that has come true, if only partially, is the luxury of household robots.

We don’t have automatons to cook our meals and fold our clothes, but many households now have little robotic vacuums, scooting across our floors, cleaning as they go. 

They’re fun, and nice to have, but the segment is still relatively new, and has been divided between the underwhelming but inexpensive products for the mass market, and the luxurious yet gimmicky options at the top end. The most expensive options do clean better than the cheapest Roomba, but the mopping isn’t very good and their dock bins, which they can empty into, just means they take more room when they’re charging. 

 This is what makes Dyson’s latest, the 360 Vis Nav, so appealing to me. Selling out immediately upon launching in the US — Dyson expects to have them back in stock within two weeks— their $1,200 robot vacuum doesn’t have the gimmicks. Instead, it is a focussed effort on making the most powerful, best filtering robot vacuum on the market. Dyson claims it has twice the suction of any other robot vacuum, and you can tell — both by its loudness when set on its most powerful ‘Boost’ mode, and also by just how gleaming your floor looks after a clean.

Along with being more powerful, and boasting Dyson’s HEPA filters, the 360 Vis stands out among competitors by differing from the usual puck shape. Instead, it has a flat front, courtesy of a full-length, triple-action roller brush bar, as you find in their best-selling stick vacuums. This allows it to clean corners better and cover your floor more consistently; and if it misses anything alongside skirting boards, a small duct pops out to catch the remnants. 

Though it looks quite bright in photos, the purplish-blue is chic and unobtrusive in person, and though it is larger than many competitors, the charging dock is slim. It’s also worth mentioning that, though the internal bin looks small, it is easily emptied – with two button presses that ensure you never have to touch the contents – and given the strength of the vacuum, the contents are tightly packed, so it doesn’t need to be frequently emptied. The vacuum is also quite low, with a light mounted with its 360-degrees vision camera, meaning it can clean under couches and chairs without difficulty. 

Finally, though it can start through an on-board touch screen on the top, further features are found in its intuitive, attractive MyDyson app. Here, you can set it to clean only specific rooms of your house — avoiding a children’s play area for example, or just focusing on a particularly dirty spot— or schedule it to do so, connecting to all your smart home systems. My review unit is automatically scheduled to clean my kitchen and dining room overnight at 2:30 am, on the Quiet mode, and then during the day on Sundays, to clean my entire apartment on automatic mode. That automatic mode is extremely clever, using on board sensors to tell which areas have more dust, so it can increase pressure accordingly, and then remember to prioritize those areas when it next cleans. A ‘heat map’ of these dust levels is available in the app, and with its set of on-board cameras, it can quickly adjust to any changes to the room, and has never hit anything in my month of testing. Also, Dyson has never had a leak of customer data, so though it contains a map of your home and operates with a camera, you can be confident that the data will stay on-device, as Dyson promises. 

It is worth noting that, despite the price, it isn’t perfect. Though the ‘quiet’ clean mode is fine when you’re sleeping and have some closed doors separating you, it’s still too distracting to have on when you’re watching TV in the same room; and it has no guaranteed moisture protection, which would have been a nice addition for peace of mind. There are some other small issues — the camera-only mapping could use improvement and I’ve received a surprising number of error notifications for phantom issues — but these can be tweaked through firmware updates.

Overall, in my experience, for what I look for in a robot vacuum, it’s the best on the market. It’s not cheap, but it’s easy to use, extremely powerful, cleans really well, and is not bogged down by unnecessary features. I haven’t used my stick vacuum since it arrived, and my apartment is cleaner than it’s ever been; and that feels like the future to me.