There’s always been something pet-like about the Roomba. Maybe it’s thanks to DJ Roomba, or maybe it’s just the myriad YouTube videos of cats riding it around. But the little cleaning machines are more than just electronic housekeepers to their owners. This was only reinforced a couple weeks ago when iRobot gave me a look at its newest bot, the Roomba 980, named Magellan.

Well, that particular Roomba was named Magellan (because he’s a discoverer, roaming the world that is your dirty home). The other one was named Beyoncé, because I imagine she is a better dancer. “People love their Roombas,” said iRobot PR Manager James Baussmann. “They take on a personality.”

It’s only going to get easier to anthropomorphize the Roomba, too, given that the latest iteration of the little-robot-vacuum-that-could is smarter than ever. The Roomba 980 has updated navigation and localization features, meaning it can map your house more accurately, learning there’s a table here and a chair there, or that it already vacuumed this spot, but not that one. This Roomba knows your house better, and can clean more than one room, thanks to its new iAdapt 2.0 sensors: This allows the robot to build a map while it’s cleaning. The sensors inside the Roomba work the same way as those inside an optical mouse; they track distance and direction traveled so that the device can maintain its route while also recording it for mapping purposes (this is an iRobot proprietary technology called vSLAM, which stands for visual simultaneous localization and mapping). Thanks to all this, you can now program the Roomba 980 to vacuum an entire floor of your home, and its new sensors and mapping capabilities mean that it knows once it’s finished a room and can orient itself to move to the next, without any help from you. If the 980 runs out of gas halfway through its cleaning tour (you must have a very large and/or very dirty house), it knows how to get itself back to its home base, where it can dock and recharge.

Unlike the other Roombas, the Roomba 980 is not hacker-friendly. DIY Arduino enthusiasts have long been fans of iRobot’s easily modified bots, but this is no Create or Create 2, the programmable iRobot products. And there’s a very, very good reason for the hacker-proofing: The Roomba is finally getting its own app.

The new iRobot HOME app for iOS and Android acts like a hub for all your platform products. With the app, you can start or end cleaning jobs, tell your Roomba to go back to its base, or schedule vacuum times (like, say, when you aren’t home, or just before you get back from vacation). If you have multiple Roomba 980s, you can view the profile for each one and determine its particular cleaning route and schedule. The app also includes things like instruction videos, and all your device’s data—when I had a chance to play around with the new Roombas and click around in HOME, it felt very much like a Quantified Self app for your robot. Here’s how long your Roomba has been roaming around, here’s how full its bag is, here’s the route it took earlier. It was robust, to say the least.

The trade-off is that this isn’t as much of a toy as the previous Roomba, beloved by the at-home hacker community. The fact that it’s using your home Wi-Fi means iRobot doesn’t endorse you hacking the 980—but what does that even mean anymore? Well, for starters, the 980 isn’t as easy to disassemble as its predecessors. But what about the hackers who aren’t just trying to make beer transportation devices? What about security holes in baby monitors and smart cars—should users be similarly concerned about the new app-controlled Roomba? Not really, says Ken Bazydola, who’s the director of Roomba Product Management. He says if you were to hack a Roomba 980 and see what it “sees,” you’d be staring at a series of light and dark patterns instead of someone’s living room. “We’re sort of just waiting for someone to lie and say they hacked it and put some video up on YouTube that’s clearly just filmed from a GoPro sitting on top of a Roomba,” Bazydola says. While there is a “simple camera” that sits on top of the Roomba 980, it’s angled in such a way that it can’t see features of a room. “This camera doesn’t see things like we do,” says Baussmann. “The robot perceives its environment as a patter of light and dark points in its field of view.” This is a pattern unique to each home, each room, and it’s only meant to keep a robot on its path.

“We love that our customers enjoy hacking our products and encourage it. However, since it is Internet-connected, the Roomba 980 is a very different robot,” Baussmann tells me. “Our primary goal in this case has been our customers’ privacy and security. In the future we will consider secure methods of permitting and encouraging hacking as we do for our other robots.”

So the new Roomba is smarter and more connected, but the real question: How well does it clean? iRobot says the 980 has twice the cleaning power as the last generation, partially because its new sensors let it detect what sort of surface its vacuuming, allowing it to adjust it power. It also can pull up more dirt from heavy fabrics like thick carpets, and it can detect when a spot is particularly dirty and apply its force as necessary. iRobot say it has labs dedicated to analyzing types of dirt and debris Roombas pick up, so it’s always focused on upgrading its dirt detection technology so it can pick more and more of this up, using the appropriate amount of power to do so. “You should see what we pull out of those things,” Bazydola says of the labs. “We’ve got a list of employees with the most number of pets, and test all new products in their homes to see if they pass the test.” Roomba asks employees and friends to bring in whatever’s inside their vacuums. “We’ve got cat hair, dog hair, human hair, various dirt types, Christmas tree needles, you name it. Sometimes when I walk by the labs I see the piles of dirt and chuckle,” says Baussmann. 

All the brains and brawn come at a higher cost, of course. The Roomba 980 is $899, available starting tomorrow—a big leap from the current models, which range from $400-$700. But it’s hard not to overstate the importance of the app update; it’s honestly crazy-making to think that before this, Roomba owners owned a robot they couldn’t control from their phones. And if the app can make it so the only human part of vacuuming is having to pick up your Roomba and deliver it upstairs (I’m looking at you, rich people/humans who live somewhere far more affordable than the Bay Area), then that might just be a worthwhile investment. For those of us who live in one-bedroom apartments with hardly enough floor space to walk on, well… it might be a few more years until such an upgrade is necessary. But in the meantime we can dream, and watch as you vacuum your homes with a nothing more than a swipe.