We’ve finally reached a milestone where a real company is selling domestic robots for our homes. 1X began accepting pre-orders and offering sale options for the NEO robot in October 2025, with deliveries planned to start 2026.
When I consider what 1X is offering, it becomes clear to me that the domestic robotics industry finds itself at the dawn of a new “Apollo Age“: a period characterised by an ambitious promise to deliver something awe inspiring despite the lack of computational power, suitable hardware, and capable software.
When the Apollo Mission ran between 1967 and 1972, NASA relied on the minds of highly capable individuals and state-of-the-art computers when “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Looking back, we recognise the incredible accomplishment achieved with very limited computational power by today’s standards: The Apollo spacecraft’s guidance computer was comparable to an early 1980s home computer CPU, with limited memory. And the ground computers, though large and advanced for the 1960s, possessed less raw power than a basic modern microcontroller!
In coming decades, as we reflect on the next three to five years, we will hopefully look back on the “Apollo Age of Robotics” with equal astonishment. A period characterised by the remarkable feat to deliver on the promise of useful domestic robots, despite the limited computational resources and ill-suited AI architectures of today.
Alternatively, we might be left in disbelief, contemplating the “Dark Age of Robotics” when the promise of useful domestic robots fizzled out into mass layoffs and bankruptcy—causing the entire domestic robotics industry to go dormant while awaiting the emergence of more suitable Artificial General Intelligence, running on custom-made and highly capable neural netware.
Either way, for us living right now that believe the former, the WSJ said it succinctly in one of their videos available on the YouTube: “The next few years isn’t about owning a super useful robot, but about raising one.”