NEO

In October 2025, 1X Technologies did something no humanoid company had done before: it put a general-purpose robot on a public order page and let anyone buy one for their house. NEO costs $20,000 outright or $499 a month, weighs 66 pounds, and wears a soft knitted body so it is safe to bump into. The first year of production — more than 10,000 units — was spoken for in five days, and the company is building a California factory to chase 100,000 by the end of 2027.

"100% of its actions are tele-operated." — the Wall Street Journal, on its hands-on NEO demo

Every prior humanoid you have heard of — Tesla's Optimus, Figure, Boston Dynamics' Atlas — was a research project or a warehouse pilot, never for sale to a household. So the discontinuity here is not what the robot can do; it is that you can order one. On capability it actually lags. At launch NEO is largely teleoperated: when it tackles a task it hasn't learned, a remote human in a VR headset takes the controls and does the work through the robot's body. In a hands-on demo for the Wall Street Journal, every one of its actions was driven by a person.

That is not a glitch on the way to autonomy — it is the business plan. The robot only gets smarter by watching humans pilot it in real homes, which means early buyers are paying $20,000 to let a background-checked stranger see into their living room and move their hands for them. 1X ships room-blurring and no-go zones precisely because that is what the arrangement requires. The genuinely new thing a household can buy in 2026, then, is not an autonomous helper but a seat in a data-collection program wearing a humanoid shell.