The Appliance vs. The Android: Sunday and 1X Bet on Opposing Futures

For decades, the dream of the household robot was deferred by physical limitations: batteries were too heavy, motors were too weak, and actuators were too rigid. But the true bottleneck was always the brain. Without the recent explosion in embodied AI, the concept of a machine navigating the unstructured chaos of a human home remained a fantasy.

As we approach 2026, the barriers of battery life and computing power are finally dissolving. But as the hardware becomes capable, a new question arises: what should a household robot actually look like?

Two companies have emerged as the primary contenders to answer that question: Sunday Robotics and 1X Technologies. While they share a goal—solving general-purpose domestic autonomy—they are taking two very different paths to get there.

Sunday Robotics, fresh out of stealth, champions a functionalist, data-first doctrine with its wheeled robot, "Memo". Conversely, 1X Technologies is doubling down on the anthropomorphic ideal with "Neo," a bipedal android designed to mimic human biology.

Here is how the two contenders stack up in the race for the living room.

The Form Factor: Wheels vs. Legs

The most immediate distinction between the two machines is how they move through the world.

Sunday Memo: The Efficiency of the Wheel

Sunday’s "Memo" is unapologetically a machine. Standing 1.7 meters (5'7") tall and weighing a substantial 170 lbs, it rests on a wheeled base. This design choice prioritizes runtime and stability. Because wheels are statically stable—meaning the robot doesn’t spend energy just trying not to fall over—Memo achieves a reported 4-hour runtime.

The trade-off is obvious: Memo cannot climb stairs. Sunday is betting that the majority of "chore-dense" environments (kitchens, living rooms) are on a single floor. However, the wheeled base offers "passive stability," meaning if you cut the power, the robot stays standing—a safety feature inherent to its geometry.

1X Neo: The Agility of the Biped

In contrast, 1X’s Neo is a true android. Standing 1.65 meters tall but weighing a remarkably light 66 lbs (30 kg), it is built to go where humans go. 1X argues that our world is built for bipeds; stairs, thresholds, and clutter are navigational hazards for wheels but navigable terrain for legs.

However, bipedalism comes with a "complexity penalty". The robot must constantly calculate its center of mass to prevent falling, which typically limits bipedal runtimes to roughly 2–4 hours.

The Hands: Grippers vs. Digits

If the legs dictate where the robot can go, the hands dictate what it can do. Here, the difference lies between specialism and generalism.

Sunday: The Dual-Gripper

Sunday has eschewed the human hand entirely. Memo features a custom dual-gripper—essentially a sophisticated pincer. The philosophy here is reliability. A pincer has fewer moving parts than a hand, making it more durable and easier to control. Sunday claims this allows for "mm level precision," enabling tasks like pulling a perfect espresso shot or handling delicate wine glasses.

1X: The 5-Fingered Hand

1X aims for universality. Neo is equipped with five-fingered hands featuring 22 degrees of freedom. The argument is that a general-purpose robot must interface with tools designed for humans—scissors, spray bottles, or door handles. However, controlling 22 motors per hand is exponentially harder than controlling a simple gripper.

The AI Strategy: The Glove vs. The Teleoperator

The most critical battlefront is not hardware, but data. Robots need to learn from human movement, and the two companies have solved the "data collection" problem in radically different ways.

Sunday: The Distributed Glove

Sunday Robotics believes you can decouple learning from the robot. They have distributed over 2,000 Skill Capture Gloves to users in regular homes. These "Memory Developers" perform chores naturally while the glove records tactile and motion data.

Sunday’s software, "Skill Transform," then maps this human dexterity onto the robot’s gripper. This allows them to collect thousands of hours of diverse training data without deploying a single robot. Their foundation model, ACT-1, is trained on "zero robot data," theoretically allowing it to generalize to new homes immediately.

1X: The Embodied Flywheel

1X rejects the idea that you can learn robotics without a robot. Their strategy relies on "Expert Mode"—a system where human pilots remotely control the robot via VR to teach it tasks.

As CEO Bernt Børnich has explained, this is a "social contract". Early adopters pay to use the robot, and when the AI fails, a human takes over. This intervention generates high-quality "on-policy" data, which is fed back into the model to improve autonomy. It is a strategy that bets on the robot learning from its own physical experiences in the real world.

Safety and Sound

Safety approaches also differ. 1X relies on "passive safety" through bio-mimicry. Neo uses a tendon-driven actuation system (muscles and cables) rather than rigid gears. This keeps the limb inertia low; if Neo accidentally hits you, it’s more like being bumped by a person than a piece of industrial machinery. It is also exceptionally quiet.

Sunday’s Memo is a heavier, rigid industrial machine. To ensure safety, it uses "compliant control" software (allowing users to push the robot’s limbs without resistance) and physical "cladding"—a mix of rigid and elastic polymers that give it a soft-touch exterior. To further mitigate risk, Sunday currently limits the robot's movement speed to 50% of a human's natural pace.

The Privacy Paradox

Bringing cameras into the home creates a privacy challenge for both companies.

• 1X: The "Expert Mode" introduces the risk of live surveillance. While 1X uses anonymization filters (blurring faces), the architecture fundamentally relies on a remote human viewing a feed of your home to help the robot.
• Sunday: While avoiding live teleoperation, Sunday’s approach involves massive data aggregation. The robot builds high-resolution semantic 3D maps of the home (knowing where valuables are kept) and the gloves capture biometric movement profiles.

Pricing and Ambition

Commercialization strategies reflect the risk appetite of each firm.

1X Technologies is following the Tesla playbook. They have opened pre-orders at $20,000 (or a monthly subscription), targeting wealthy tech enthusiasts willing to pay for the vision of future autonomy. They aim to ship in 2026.

Sunday Robotics is adopting the Google model. They acknowledge that a single unit currently costs ~$20,000 to build, but they are not selling them yet. Instead, they are launching a free, invite-only Beta in 2026. They aim to reduce costs by 50% through scale before a public launch, treating early users as partners in data generation rather than customers.

Conclusion

The market is witnessing a split between the appliance and the android. Sunday Robotics offers a tool: a stable, wheeled machine optimized for chores, unburdened by the need to look human. 1X Technologies offers a companion: a soft, bipedal being designed to inhabit our world fully, despite the immense technical hurdles.

In 2026, we will find out if consumers want a better dishwasher on wheels, or if they are ready to invite a synthetic humanoid into the family.