Meet NEO, the $20,000 robot that plays Xbox, opens Funyuns, and unzips your hoodie

1X Technologies, a Palo Alto robotics company, has shown off NEO — a humanoid home robot with articulated hands capable of performing a surprisingly wide range of tasks. The demo video is making the rounds, and it's equal parts impressive and deeply unsettling.

NEO can swirl a wine glass, change a lightbulb, pick up individual screws, separate grapes, use an Xbox controller, open a bag of Funyuns, and — most memorably — slowly unzip someone's hoodie. It can also plug itself in to recharge, which somehow feels like the creepiest part. The robot costs $20,000 outright or $500 a month on subscription, putting it squarely in the "fabulously wealthy" bracket for now. For elderly users or people with disabilities, a capable home assistant robot could genuinely be life-changing — if you can afford one.

There's a significant catch buried in the demo, though. Right now, NEO isn't operating autonomously — a human pilot controls it remotely using VR gear. So that slow, deliberate Funyun extraction and that lingering hoodie unzip? There's a real person behind those dead black eyes, watching through VR goggles from somewhere in Palo Alto. The robot also gets attacked with a hammer twice in the video, for reasons that are never explained, which does not help the overall vibe. NEO's featureless face — pitch black eyes, no other features — and its white sweater-and-gloves aesthetic complete what can only be described as a serial killer starter pack.

The autonomous capability question is the real story here. Until NEO can handle these tasks without a human pilot, the value proposition gets complicated fast — you're essentially paying $20,000 for a robot suit that a remote operator wears on your behalf. Whether 1X Technologies can close that gap and ship something genuinely autonomous remains to be seen, but for now, human obsolescence is probably safe for another year or two.