Meet NEO: The First Real Home Robot Is Finally Here
For years, humanoid robots have lived in labs, research centers, and sci-fi movies. Now, with NEO, 1X is bringing the future directly into the home — and it might be the moment we look back on as the start of a new era.
NEO isn’t a gadget. It’s a household helper.Designed to move, see, understand, and learn, NEO is built to support everyday tasks: organizing spaces, handling chores, fetching items, and navigating the home with human-like motion. It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest we’ve ever been to a truly useful home robot.
Why NEO matters
It’s one of the first humanoid robots actually intended for real homes, not just labs.
It uses advanced vision-language AI (“Redwood”) to learn tasks and adapt to your environment.
It’s designed to be safe, soft, quiet, and able to operate around people.
Early units ship in 2026 — marking a major shift in consumer robotics.
What it can do
NEO can help with:
Tidying up and managing household tasks
Carrying objects and organizing items
Voice-controlled assistance
Learning new chores through guided training
Integrating smoothly with daily routines
Why this is just the beginning
Right now, NEO is a glimpse of where home robotics is headed. Just like smartphones in the early 2000s, humanoid home robots will likely feel rare at first… until suddenly they’re everywhere. NEO shows us what’s coming: homes where robots do the repetitive, physical tasks so we can focus on what truly matters.
The future of everyday life is changing — and NEO is one of the machines leading the way.
Carlos thanks for sharing this interested post. NEO really feels like one of those before-and-after moments in consumer tech. What strikes me most is how humanoid robots are finally crossing the bridge from research to real homes, something we’ve been hearing about for decades but never actually seeing at scale.
The combination of embodied robotics + vision-language models is what makes this different. If NEO can genuinely learn tasks, adapt to its environment, and operate safely around people, we’re stepping into a new category — not “smart devices,” but smart companions.
Early 2026 might seem far away, but in robotics terms it’s basically tomorrow. And as you said, this feels very much like the early smartphone era: niche today, everywhere sooner than we expect.