Entertainment
CES 2025: Roborocks grabby new robot vacuum is a huge flex
Roborock‘s new robot vacuum-mop hybrid will grab your attention — and your stray socks.
The Chinese maker of high-end cleaning tech debuted the Roborock Saros Z70 Sunday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas after about seven years in the making. The forthcoming hybrid robovac features a jointed, twisting “OmniGrip” appendage that can pick up and move certain small objects out of the way. Roborock calls it the “first-of-its-kind mass-produced foldable robotic arm.”
The launch marks a shift from conventional object avoidance technology to object removal technology, with the goal of making a robot vacuum that’s more autonomous than ever for care-free, do-everything-for-me cleaning.
In a demo, the Mashable team got to see the Saros Z70 depart its dock to fetch a balled-up sock and place it in a short basket before redocking itself. It’s pretty cool — but if you can afford it, ask yourself this: Why don’t you just hire a maid?
Roborock Saros Z70 design: The clawww
Credit: Haley Henschel / Mashable
Weighing in around 11 pounds, the Saros Z70 is a matte black disc-shaped device with a slim profile. It lacks a LiDAR tower — a protruding circular bump filled with sensors, common among modern robot vacuums — and instead navigates with the help of built-in “Starsight” sensors and cameras around its circumference. (This allows it to get under more spaces and clean beneath furniture.) These cameras turn off when it’s docked, per a Roborock rep, but users have the option to turn it on for surveillance purposes. The rep said its footage encrypted and stored on the Saros Z70 itself rather than through a connected service, so your data never exits the device.
The Saros Z70’s robotic arm is housed under a shiny door on its surface that automatically lifts and slides backwards to unleash the appendage. The arm has five axis that can twist, as well as a pinchy, two-pronged claw at the end of it. There’s a child lock and a safety stop button near the arm’s base in case of emergency.
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On the underside of the Saros Z70, you’ll find a new anti-tangle FreeFlow brush, a set of wheels that can elevate to overcome raised lips between rooms or the edges of carpets, and mopping pads. These pads are both retractable and removable — users can have the Saros Z70 ditch them in its dock if it’s only going to be cleaning hardwood floors, which is a new feature for the Roborock lineup.
How the Roborock Saros Z70 works
Credit: Haley Henschel / Mashable
Roborock says the entire Saros Z70 cleaning cycle happens in three parts. First, it does a sweep of a room while marking any nearby objects it’s able to lift, then returns to its dock. Next, it heads out again to move the objects it has identified out of the way. It then wraps up the cycle by returning to clean the spots where the objects previously sat.
Users have to enable its OmniGrip arm in the Roborock companion app — it won’t be activated right out of the box — but from there, they can pick which objects the Saros Z70 grabs and exactly where it puts them. (Our demo did not include a run-through of these settings.) At present, the Saros Z70 is capable of listing four different kinds of objects weighing up to 300 grams: socks, paper, small towels, and sandals. Support for other types of clothing and shoes as well as pet toys are in the works.
The Saros Z70 boasts a whopping 22,000 Pa of suction power, which the company’s rep called an industry record. For reference, Mashable’s current favorite robot vacuum — another Robobock model, the $1,599.99 Qrevo Master — clocks in at 10,000 Pa of power. This thing sucks… apparently. We didn’t get a chance to see it actually vacuum anything up.
The potential is there — but the price is silly
Credit: Haley Henschel / Mashable
In our demo, the Saros Z70 was programmed to move out of its dock in a straight line, grab a sock, and place the sock in a short basket before returning to its dock. It was able to successfully put the sock in the basket — so long as the sock had been placed in a very specific spot, otherwise its arm would miss. Notably, it also struggled to properly redock itself every single cycle, getting close to its parking spot but never right on the mark. It would say something in Mandarin that roughly translated to “action failed” every time it tried to return home, and I kind of felt bad for it.
According to the Roborock rep, this programing was chosen because of the constraints of our setting: Our demo took place in a small hotel suite, and others were apparently being conducted in convention center booths throughout the week. It couldn’t be wandering off.
Credit: Haley Henschel / Mashable
I think these circumstances sold the Saros Z70 short, because it really does seem like a neat device if it reaches its full potential from the standpoints of pick-up-ability and sheer power. That said, I’m not quite sure who’s going to be buying it: Roborock’s rep couldn’t tell us an exact price, but suggested that it would sell for around $2,000. (High-end robot vacuums that are on the market right now cap out around $1,600, such as the Qrevo Master.) If you’re someone who can afford such a luxury, I don’t see why you wouldn’t just hire someone to pick up your socks and vacuum for you. To own one seems like more of a flex than anything.
The Roborock Saros Z70 is currently in mass production and slated for an April release. We’ll have a full review of it once it hits the market.
Entertainment
Maddies Secret trailer reveals John Early as youve never seen him before
Comedian John Early makes his feature directorial debut with Maddie’s Secret, an offbeat homage to melodrama that he wrote and headlines as its eponymous heroine.
As an aspiring food influencer, Maddie Ralph (Early) is passionate about her cuisine. And at first glance, she’s got a picture-perfect life: a loving husband (Eric Rahill), a devoted best friend (Kate Berlant), and a job at a culinary content studio called Gourmaybe. But as the title suggests, there’s a side to Maddie she can’t stomach sharing with her loved ones. And this secret could kill her.
Out of the movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, I cheered Maddie’s Secret, writing in my review for Mashable, “The film is silly and strange, but even amid campy bits, sincere. So, you’ll laugh at its parody elements, but may well be genuinely moved by Early’s commitment to this strange and splendid film.”
I also said “John Early is a better ingénue than Sydney Sweeney,” comparing Maddie’s Secret to another earnest (but less entertaining) TIFF offering, Christy. And I stand by it.
Maddie’s Secret opens in theaters in New York on June 19, and in Los Angeles on June 26.
Entertainment
Pride is almost here! Check out the best dating apps for LGBTQ women.
We know Pride is all year round, but there is something special about the month of June. We’re not there quite yet, but if you want a main squeeze for all the parades and parties, you gotta start looking now. How about on a dating app?
As a lesbian, you probably know all about them. Lesbian Americans (along with bisexual and gay Americans) are far more likely to have ever used dating apps than straight Americans: 51 percent to 28 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.
There are a few reasons why LGBTQ people might turn to online dating more quickly than straight folks. For one, you might live in an area without a thriving LGBTQ community, and in-person dating may be hard. If you don’t know other lesbians to begin with, how can you meet more IRL to date? (Sometimes, lesbian spaces can also be co-opted by The Straights.) Unfortunately, in-person dating may also be less safe, depending on where you live.
Hookup apps for everyone
AdultFriendFinder
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readers’ pick for casual connections
Tinder
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top pick for finding hookups
Hinge
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popular choice for regular meetups
Thankfully, we live in a time where we can find people like us with a few swipes. Lesbians are welcome on major dating apps, and there are also niche ones specifically for lesbians and other queer women and people. But which one to choose?
How to find the best dating apps for lesbians
Niche lesbian dating apps aren’t your only option for finding love.
Credit: Stacey Zhu / Mashable
In Mashable’s recommendations below, you’ll find both general dating apps and apps specifically for queer people. As the former appeals to the general population, you’ll find more users in these spaces. The caveat, however, is that when you swipe on other women, you might find those coupled with men who are looking for another woman to have a threesome with (aka unicorn hunters). No judgment here, but that’s probably not what you’re looking for. Then again, people of all types are on dating apps like Tinder and Hinge. You never know who you may come across.
Then there are apps specifically for the community, like HER and Lex. If you yearn for a smaller dating scene, head for these apps. While there’s no “Grindr for lesbians” — we go into why in the FAQ section — these apps are more so like stepping into your neighborhood lesbian bar than an app like Bumble.
You can also try multiple dating apps, as each one below has a free version. You can filter by the gender you identify with and are looking for, and sometimes, as with OkCupid, there are many options to choose from.
Diving into the dating pool isn’t easy, but the water’s fine. Check out our guide below for the full rundown of our recommendations and dating app reviews.
Entertainment
OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT 5.5 Instant as the new default model for everyone
Last week, OpenAI managed to stop ChatGPT from talking about goblins all the time. This week, there’s a whole new model for users to play with.
The company announced in a blog post on Tuesday that ChatGPT 5.5 Instant has begun rolling out to all users as the new default model for the popular AI chatbot. The new model is a follow-up to GPT 5.5, which was released in April.
GPT-5.5 Instant replaces 5.3 Instant, which will remain available for the next three months for paid users but will otherwise be sunsetted.
Unlike Claude Opus 4.7 from Anthropic and GPT-5.5, which are only available to paid customers, GPT-5.5 Instant is “available to everyone.” OpenAI says it should produce fewer hallucinations and better overall results for everyday ChatGPT usage.
“This update makes everyday interactions more useful and more enjoyable: stronger and tighter answers across subject areas, a more natural conversational tone, and better use of the context you’ve already shared when personalization can help,” OpenAI’s blog post said.
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According to OpenAI, GPT-5.5 Instant produced 52.5 percent fewer hallucinated claims in internal testing than GPT-5.3 in “high stakes” topics like law, finance, and medicine. In addition, the new model “reduced inaccurate claims by 37.3% on especially challenging conversations users had flagged for factual errors.”
The company also says the new model is better at deciding when to use web search for a prompt and analyzing image uploads than before. The new model is also allegedly more concise in its answers, while also maintaining something of a personality in how it talks to the user. GPT-5.5 Instant should also be better at understanding and referencing context from a connected Gmail account and other integrations to provide quality answers.
And, again, most importantly, it should avoid mentioning goblins unless absolutely necessary.
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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Maddies Secret trailer reveals John Early as youve never seen him before
Pride is almost here! Check out the best dating apps for LGBTQ women.
