No one wants to be that person to admit to reading a vacuum cleaner’s manual, and the latest Dyson makes it clear: not only don’t you have to, but you’ll get better use, as well.
Believe it or not, we live in a world where vacuums are changing. Everything is changing, that much you already know, but the handheld vacuum is one of them, as companies work to improve the suction, the power, and the capability.
For sure, today’s vacuums are totally different from the ones we knew a decade ago.
Dyson’s vacuum developments have shown the industry can change, and in last year’s V10, the company showed that it didn’t need to rely on the ball vacuum that rolled around on the ground with you. With the motor found on-board that vac, you could have all the power of a floor vac inside of one that worked in your hands. It was impressive, to say the least.
But not everyone is convinced. While the hardware more or less speaks for itself — and sounds like it should when you pull the trigger and turn the thing on — somewhere between the battery life, the suction, and the complexity of use, not everyone is convinced that the future of vacuum technology rests somewhere here.
And that’s fine: change takes time, especially when we’re used to what we’re used to.
So Dyson has gone back to the drawing board and reworked what it could, developing a new generation of its V10, upgrading the hardware and adding a few new features to help bring more people over, to convince the folks that have trouble believing in this sort of vacuum technology.
While it still sells a version of last year’s V10 vac, the new developments are part of the V11, an improved vacuum that not only has 20 percent more suction, but also some newer features designed to impress.
For starters, there’s a screen on the back, and it’s there to tell you not only how much battery life you have left as you jump between modes and floor types, but also what errors means and how to clear them.
No one wants to be that person forced to read a vacuum instruction manual — it’s kind of like a message that you’ve failed in life — and this helps deal with that, showing you how to deal with errors in an animated graphic.
The battery feature is going to be the one that more people will get use out of, and while there’s no touchscreen here (why would you need one?), the Dyson V11 includes a button to let you jump between the battery modes and see on that screen how much battery life you have available on each. Handy.
The screen is just one side of Dyson’s additions, with a new vacuum head called the “High Torque” cleaner head which includes microprocessors to detect the material of the floor, changing the power of the vacuum to account.
While it won’t detect what type of dust or particle is being sucked and alternate the power based on that — we asked, Dyson said it’s not possible yet — it will account for floor type, and shift the power and battery time to consider that.
And that means if your home has more than just carpet or hard-wood floors — if it has several floor types — the Dyson V11 will work out how to handle all of them, providing the right amount of power needed to capture what’s on your floor with ease.
That gives the Dyson V11 a degree of intelligence, and it’s one that can adjust the battery usage depending on how you use the V11 vacuum over time, improving an algorithm meant to accurately gauge remaining power.
“We’ve been developing vacuums for over 25 years. The evolution never stops. With the Dyson V11 cord-free vacuum, our focus was not only on improving performance, but on adding intelligence to genuinely assist people’s cleaning,” said James Dyson, Founder and CEO of Dyson.
The end result is a vacuum that ends up being just that wee bit more innovative than your standard stick vac, with its research spread out over 32,500 parts that were prototypes and a good 315 engineers involved. It’s a vacuum relies on several materials and hardware changes, from carbon fibre to plastic, and arrives with some advanced filtration able to capture 99.97 percent of particles to prevent pollen and bacteria from affecting people who are easily nudged by these particles.
The Dyson V11 starts at $1099 in Australia, and while it’s the new flagship Dyson stick vac, you can find the older models sold in select retailers, as well as at Dyson’s website.
