The Roomba j7+ is the direct successor to the i7+ — same form factor, same Clean Base, same AllergenLock bags — but with three meaningful upgrades and one tradeoff. If you've already narrowed your shortlist to these two, the answer almost always comes down to whether you have pets, kids, or an unpredictable floor.
What's the same. Both robots use the same three-stage AeroForce cleaning system with dual rubber multi-surface extractors, share the same 1,800 Pa suction rating, both have a roughly 75-minute runtime on a single charge, both auto-recharge and resume mid-job, both use the same 0.4-liter onboard bin, both ship with an identical Clean Base Automatic Dirt Disposal tower and the same proprietary AllergenLock bag. App control, voice assistants (Alexa and Google), Imprint Smart Mapping, room-specific cleaning, no-go zones, multi-floor maps (up to 10), and Carpet Boost mode are all identical. On hardwood, low-pile carpet, and basic edge cleaning the two robots produce essentially the same single-pass result.
What the j7+ adds. First, PrecisionVision Navigation — a forward-facing camera trained on a much larger object dataset that lets the j7+ identify and physically steer arou
Yes — the Roomba i7+ supports multiple floor maps, which is the feature iRobot calls Imprint Smart Mapping. The i7+ can store up to 10 unique floor plans in its memory, so a typical two- or three-story house with a basement is easily covered.
Here is how it actually works. The i7+ does not use LIDAR. It uses vSLAM (visual simultaneous localization and mapping) with the iAdapt 3.0 navigation system, which means a single optical camera on top of the robot looks for high-contrast features like baseboards, doorframes, table legs, and corners as it cleans, and stitches those landmarks into a 2D map. To create a usable map, you need to run two or three "Mapping Runs" on each floor — the robot drives the perimeter and zigzags through every room without vacuuming, building the floor plan as quickly as possible. Mapping mode lives under the Home app's Smart Maps section. On a roughly 1,500-square-foot floor, a mapping run takes around 60 to 90 minutes.
For multiple floors, you carry the robot to each floor and run mapping there. Once a floor is mapped, the i7+ automatically detects which floor it is on when you set it down — it compares what it sees through the camera against its stored m
In a typical household the Roomba i7+ Clean Base dirt-disposal bag fills up about every 30 to 60 days. iRobot rates the AllergenLock bag at "up to 60 days" of debris, but real-world replacement intervals depend almost entirely on three variables: how many pets you have, how much carpet versus hard flooring you run the robot over, and how many cleaning jobs per week you schedule.
A few realistic ranges from owner reports. A two-person, no-pet, mostly-hardwood apartment that runs the i7+ three times per week: roughly 75 to 90 days per bag. A family of four with one short-haired dog and a 50/50 carpet-to-hard-floor split running daily: roughly 30 to 45 days per bag. A heavy-shedding household with multiple long-haired pets and wall-to-wall carpet running twice daily: as little as 14 to 21 days per bag. The Clean Base does not weigh debris — it just runs the evacuation cycle on every dock and waits for you to notice the bag indicator light on top of the tower. The Home app also pushes a "Replace your dirt-disposal bag" notification when its internal counter trips.
Replacing the bag is genuinely simple. Lift the lid on the Clean Base, pull the cardboard tab on the full bag — the bag's
The Roomba i7+ is one of the better mid-tier picks for pet hair, but with caveats worth understanding before you buy it specifically for that job.
The i7+ uses iRobot's three-stage AeroForce cleaning system: a multi-surface debris extractor pair (two counter-rotating rubber rollers, not bristle brushes), a side brush for edges, and a high-efficiency filter rated to capture 99% of pollen, mold, dust mites, and dog and cat dander down to 10 microns. The rubber roller design is the part that actually matters for pet hair. Bristle brushes on older Roombas (the 600 and 690 series) tangle hard with long fur and require constant scissor work. The two rubber extractors on the i7+ flex against each other, slap debris loose instead of sweeping it, and shed wrapped hair down into the bin much more readily. Owners with shedding labs, golden retrievers, and long-haired cats consistently report only needing to detangle the brushes every few weeks rather than every run.
Suction is rated at roughly 1,800 Pa, which is double the 600-series Roombas but well below the j7+ (also 1,800 Pa but with a smarter mapping platform) and the s9+ (2,200 Pa with a wider, deeper cleaning head). For embedded pet
The iRobot Roomba i7+ works with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant out of the box. Voice control runs through the iRobot Home app, so once you have the robot set up on your 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network and signed into iRobot Home, you link the same account to the Alexa app or Google Home app and the i7+ shows up as a controllable device.
With Alexa you can say things like "Alexa, ask Roomba to start cleaning," "Alexa, ask Roomba to clean the kitchen," "Alexa, ask Roomba to send the robot home," or "Alexa, ask Roomba where it is." With Google Assistant the phrasing is more natural — "Hey Google, start vacuuming," "Hey Google, clean the living room," or "Hey Google, send the Roomba home." The room-specific commands rely on Imprint Smart Mapping, so you have to let the i7+ run a few training maps first (typically two or three full runs of an unobstructed floor) before named rooms work. Until the map is locked in, the voice commands fall back to "clean the whole place."
The i7+ also supports IFTTT, which is useful if you want it to start a job tied to something other than a voice command — for example, when your smart lock detects the front door deadbolt was just thrown from the outsid
The M3 iMac (released October 2023) is the direct successor to the M1 iMac (released April 2021). The chassis is identical, the colors are essentially the same, and the screen has not changed. The differences are almost entirely under the hood — and they are real, even if they are not the kind of "wow, what a redesign" leap some buyers were hoping for.
What is identical:
What actually changed with M3:
Yes, but with real limits — and the answer depends on which configuration you bought.
Entry-level (8-core GPU) iMac M3:
Officially supports one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz, in addition to the built-in 4.5K Retina display. Apple's M3 chip in the iMac caps total displays at two: the internal panel plus one external.
Higher-tier (10-core GPU) iMac M3:
Same answer. The external display ceiling on the iMac variant of M3 is one external monitor, regardless of which GPU core count you picked. The two extra USB-C ports on the higher-tier model are USB 3 only, not Thunderbolt, so they cannot drive an additional display directly.
This is a real constraint. The MacBook Pro and Mac mini variants of the M3 (M3 Pro / M3 Max) support more external displays, but the base M3 — which is what every iMac 2023 ships with — is limited to one external panel by design. Apple has been very explicit about this in the iMac tech specs.
What works "officially":
Short answer: no. The SSD on the 2023 M3 iMac is not user-upgradeable. Whatever capacity you order at checkout is the capacity you have for the life of the machine, full stop.
Why it cannot be upgraded:
On Apple Silicon Macs, the SSD is implemented as raw NAND flash chips soldered directly to the logic board. There is no M.2 slot, no SATA bay, and no proprietary blade module like older Intel MacBooks had. The storage controller lives inside the M3 system-on-chip itself, and the NAND modules on the logic board are paired to that controller via Apple's hardware-secured boot chain. Even Apple's own service technicians do not "upgrade" SSDs in the field — when storage fails, the entire logic board is swapped.
The capacities Apple offers at order time:
A note about the 256GB base config:
The 256GB SSD on the M3 iMac uses a single NAND chip, which means slower sequential read/write speeds compared to the 512GB and larger configurations that use two or more NAND chips operating in parallel. Real-world testing has consistently shown the 256GB drive com
The iMac 2023 with M3 starts at 8GB of unified memory in the base configuration, and that is the spec the vast majority of buyers walk out the door with. It can be configured up to 16GB or 24GB at the time of purchase, but those upgrades are order-time only — once your iMac is built, the memory is soldered to the M3 chip package and cannot be changed.
The configurations Apple offers:
Why "unified memory" matters here:
This is not the traditional DDR4 or DDR5 DIMM you would find in an Intel-era iMac. Apple Silicon chips like the M3 use a single pool of memory that the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and media engines all share at very high bandwidth. There are no VRAM-versus-system-RAM tradeoffs to think about — graphics workloads pull from the same pool as your apps, the OS, and background processes.
The practical effect is that 8GB on an M-series Mac feels meaningfully different than 8GB on a comparable Intel machine, because nothing is being copied back and forth between separate memory regions. That said, "different" does not mean "infinite" — heavy multitasking,
The iMac 2023 with M3 splits its port layout across two configurations, and which one you get depends on whether you choose the entry-level model or step up to the higher-tier configuration.
Entry-level (8-core GPU) model:
That is it. No Ethernet, no extra USB-C ports, and no USB-A anywhere on the machine. The two Thunderbolt ports each support up to 40 Gb/s data transfer, DisplayPort, USB 4 (40 Gb/s), and Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gb/s).
Higher-tier (10-core GPU) model:
The Ethernet-in-the-power-brick design is worth flagging because it means the only cable running into the back of the iMac itself is the power/Ethernet combo cable. Cleaner desk, but if you want to swap the iMac to a different room with no Ethernet drop, the wired-network capability comes along for the ride only because it lives in th
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