If you shop for high-end vacuums these days, you’ll notice that everyone is obsessed with microdust: finding it, illuminating it, measuring it, and sucking it away with increasingly absurd force. So I must ask, who will speak for the “macro dust”? If you have a pet or a kid, you know exactly what I mean. As we are pushed harder towards stick vacuums with tiny storage containers, and away from a corded experience, who, I beg you, will suck away all the damn Cheerios and stuffed toy floof off the floor?
The answer, for now, is the Samsung Bespoke Jet AI (currently $999.99). By the numbers, which read out on the display as you vacuum, it does a respectable job on the stuff that needs a magnifying glass, but has impressed me more by doing a great job on the dust-bunny-sized stuff. Earlier this year I declared that Dyson’s Gen5 Detect was the best stick vacuum I’d tried, so I wondered what else a vacuum could really do to impress me. It turns out that head to head, the Jet has a few advantages, but mostly, the vacuums are just different in how they approach cleaning. These are two spectacular suction devices.
The Samsung Jet AI wants to be treated like furniture
One of the easiest ways to decide between a Dyson and the Jet is this—would you like to host your vacuum in your living room like a piece of art, or are you someone who wants to stick it somewhere away from company? While most sticks are, well, stuck (to the wall), the Jet dock is a freestanding black and metal contemporary sculpture. It’s not just for looks: The dock is also self emptying, so each time you return the vacuum, it empties it into a bag inside the dock. I didn’t love the idea of having the vacuum just out there, another thing taking up floor space in my living room, but because you’ll return it to the dock every few minutes to empty it, it’s quite convenient. The more it stuck around, the more it looked like it belonged. After a month of solid macro dusting, the bag has yet to become full. Using the self-emptying dock really impressed me—one of the things I can’t stand about stick vacuums is their tiny canisters and the awkwardness of emptying them. On first glance, the size of the canister on the Jet was dainty, particularly compared to Dyson models. In practice, it still holds less than the Dyson, but because of the self-emptying base, the Jet removes the pain point entirely. Over a month of hardcore vacuuming, I haven’t needed to replace the bag once, and it hasn’t gotten clogged, either.
An easier vacuuming experience
Your home has different surfaces: tile, carpet, hardwood, and/or rugs. While traditional vacuums went over everything with the same suction and rollers, high-end stick vacuums have a range of settings. With the Jet, the AI senses the surface type and adjusts automatically. The Dyson, which does a spectacular job finding the crumbs, has a button you have to flip on the handle to go between suction levels, and I imagine most people, like I, simply flip it to “max” and leave it there until they encounter a rug (the Dyson is so powerful, you cannot move it across a rug on max). I definitely preferred the hands-free experience of the Jet settings, but the Jet didn’t feel as powerful as the Dyson—until I manually went into the Jet and set it to “max” instead of “AI”. The tradeoff of doing so is that it’s even harder to toggle than Dyson, so you’ll generally want to leave it in AI mode. Where it seemed to matter was on the ground-in dirt on carpet and rugs, which the Dyson was able to remove. The Jet does a fine job with surface-level dirt, but didn’t really seem to “dig in” the same way.
Like other stick vacuums, the Jet has a nice swivel head and a number of attachments, which we’ll talk about in a bit. I liked that although the head was larger than Dyson’s default head, it was still compact enough to get into tight spaces around furniture legs. Overall, the Jet was a little easier to maneuver due to being lighter than the Dyson. It may not seem like a leap, but it turns out a pound really matters here.
Fewer clogs is a huge win for users
Another common complaint I’ve had with stick vacuums is how often they get clogged: If I’ve got to constantly take the stick apart and try to find the clog, it removes all joy from the cleaning experience. While I quite enjoy the Dyson Gen5, I experienced far fewer clogs with the Jet. In fact, it only clogged once over the month, while vacuuming up dirt from an overturned planter, and it was easy to clear. My house, due to an exuberant new Doberman addition, is usually littered with mud, mulch, the white floof from dog toys and the occasional abandoned kibble. This is the kind of debris that normally kills any vacuum, corded or not, and is also a real challenge for most vacuums to suck up. The Jet handled it all. Even when the stick clogged from the soil, it only affected the stick, not the self-emptying base, which cleared the stick with ease without getting clogged itself. I did some drywall work over the month I had both vacuums around, and the drywall dust immediately clogged the Dyson in such a manner it took a few tries to clear, but the Jet didn’t have any problems sucking the fine dust away and carrying on.
Sticks still lack accessories
Sticks still have one real issue: a lack of accessories. Most corded vacuums come with an extensive number of reach-arounds and extensions and fancy arms aimed at getting into spaces. The Jet ships with the standard head, a pet tool for hair, a crevice tool, and a multi tool—one of my favorite tools for its ability to suck dust off your keyboard, book covers and odd shaped items. The Jet does not come with, nor can you buy, a flexible hose to get into tight spaces, so point goes to Dyson, there, which has any attachment you can imagine. While I did not test it, you can, for $150, obtain a mop head for the Jet. The dock does not provide a place to stow these accessories (Dyson does). Dyson’s head has a unique corkscrew shape that makes it really hard for the rollers to get killed by hair, yarn or anything else that could wrap around them. It was a feature I missed on the Jet, since I did have to free the head of hair once or twice and had a very unfortunate YRI (Yarn Related Incident).
Excellent battery life, but no real smart functionality
Samsung claims a 100-minute battery life on the Jet, which would exhaust my enthusiasm for cleaning before the battery died. So on a random Tuesday, I left the vacuum on to clock it, and after 72 loud minutes, it finally took a nap. Still, it outlasted the “70 minute” Dyson battery on the Gen5 by 20 minutes.
Samsung has a well-established smart home ecosystem and hub called SmartThings, so I was quite hopeful for some additional functionality via the app (which is an optional experience and not needed to operate the vacuum). While you can add the vacuum and change a few settings, it doesn’t provide much more functionality than the Dyson app adds to their vacuum. It’s too bad, because at the very least, getting a monthly report of how much dirt was sucked would be a neat detail. Both the Dyson and Samsung read that data out on the handle display as you vacuum, but I doubt anyone pays attention to it.
Reusable filters means less cost for upkeep
The Jet has two different filters, and both are washable and reusable, so they should last quite a while. You’ll eventually replace them, though, and I found them pretty affordable at around $20 a piece (a pack of five is $39.99). Though I haven’t had to yet, the bin bags in the base should be replaced about every month, according to Samsung. Granted, my house is smaller, but over a month, I put the stick through the paces, so the fact that it’s still not full says a lot.
Overall, an impressive addition to the high end stick vacuum market
At these prices, you’re comparing a few elite devices, and if you spend $1000, you should get an exceptionally well-performing vacuum. On any day, the Samsung Bespoke Jet AI is a fantastic piece of machinery that I enjoy using, and so is the Dyson Gen5 Detect. Each has a few features that will make it more or less appealing, depending on your lifestyle. If you want to mount your vacuum, go Dyson. If the self-emptying feature appeals (and it should), Samsung is the way to go. If you’ve got long hair from you or a pet on the landscape, the Dyson corkscrew head might be a real benefit, but if your detritus tends to be more substantial, the Jet has the advantage.
