According to this video the big black squeegee bit just pushes debris away on hard floors, big yikes. And they're not wrong that the anti tangle combs already worked very effectively. So it's not a huge selling point over the previous cleaner head.
This ‘review’ is a perfect example of why I'm waiting to produce mine. Where to start… (and why am I the only one seemingly noticing these things)
The lack of straightness to the front edge isn't an issue at all and doesn't significantly affect performance—something they, naturally, failed to evidence. Talk about cosmetic reasoning. There appeared to be an absence of IQ to recognise the advantages it brings and I now prefer it. I went back to the Gen5 recently and it felt weird and poor in comparison with a flat front edge.
When it comes to power modes, they didn’t notice or apparently understand the difference beyond name alone, which is awful. And while hair detangling was effective with combs, it came with serious drawbacks and limitations the review seemed to be completely ignorant of. Quite the disservice.
The tests they do will come back to bite them when I release my review because it shows they simply don't understand anything and aren't testing anything real-world. The machine uses much less power, for important reasons they don't seem to understand enough, and so won't visually perform well in exaggerated, unrepresentative 'visually illustrative' tests, aka building site testing with contrived piles of dirt, which require high energies. People who don't understand anything tend to champion this unrepresentative non-testing. This combined with an unrecognised genuine problem with the machine means they come to wrong conclusions—flawed testing and ignorance are a bad mix I’m seeing all too often. The irony is, they even point out that when testing in their own homes in actual real-world situations, it had no trouble picking up "impressive amounts of dust, dirt, and hair". I mean, they don't even notice their own contradiction and ignorance.
The back flexible pad has been on every machine for several generations, so should be completely obvious even to a halfwit that it isn't the cause of alleged problems on hard floors. The issues they mention are a direct result of building site testing and simply aren’t there in real-world usage. They wrongly concluded poor pickup on carpet is because of the unswept central path, but no appropriate testing was done to confirm this, naturally. I've already confirmed this is not the issue and quantified the influence of the unswept central path in REAL-WORLD usage. If I can do it, why can’t they?
Sources like this are misleading because of their own clear ignorance. This is the problem with genuinely ignorant bedroom testers that cosmetically come across as ‘professional’. True review professionalism stems from understanding and knowledge, not cosmetics. The adage ‘lipstick on a pig’ comes to mind. This is exactly why I'm waiting to give my review, as I want to expose the problems with other reviewers as well by showing what they're all doing completely wrong. I hope it will help people learn to spot and be very critical of the nonsense.
The irony is that this review didn't recognise the real problems with this machine or understand exactly why the V16 performs worse than its predecessor out of the box (or how to fix). They came to the right conclusion but for entirely the wrong reason, which is massively misleading, exactly as predicted. Ignorance of any basic science or knowledge of the real world undermines the worth of the output out there on the lay internet. It's very frustrating seeing such weakness because we're all worse off because of it. I suspect all eventual reviews from US sources will be as flawed as this one. The V16 has genuinely unforgivable issues that deserve heavy criticism, but no one is talking about them! All but one can actually be ‘fixed’, giving you an otherwise really nice tool that I do prefer over the Gen5, showing how nice the new technologies are within an otherwise flawed product. But we shouldn’t have to be ‘fixing’ anything. Dyson do deserve some heavy criticism for elements of this product, and I’m going to go to town on them, but none of these reviews are doing even that job properly, undermining things for the rest of us and letting Dyson off the hook. Pathetic, everywhere you look.