Amazon has cut the Segway Navimow i215 robot lawn mower to $1,399 as of November 11, down from its usual $1,599. That is $200 off, or 13%, as part of the early Black Friday discounting.
The i215 skips the step that made older robot mowers a chore to install. It needs no antennas and no boundary wires, the buried or pegged cable that marks where a mower may go. One-tap auto mapping works out the size and shape of the yard and where the obstacles sit.
Navigation runs on solid-state LiDAR, a laser-based sensor with no spinning parts, plus onboard vision sensors. Both work day and night. The mower can detect more than 200 obstacle types, and its app lets you divide the yard into up to 20 mowing zones on an interactive map. Cutting is handled by a 100W mower with a six-blade disc.
Boundary wires have long been the fiddly part of owning a robot mower, so dropping them is the feature doing the most work at this price. Mapping by sensor and camera also moves the setup effort from a weekend of laying cable to a few taps in an app.
Two specs that decide whether a mower suits a given yard were not published with the deal: the maximum lawn size and the battery life. Check Segway's spec sheet for both before buying.
The timing is also a little odd. In mid-November, lawns in colder parts of the US have mostly stopped growing, so this is as much a spring purchase as a current one.