The short version
These two get compared constantly, and they shouldn’t be. The NEO is a closed consumer appliance that has not shipped to a paying customer yet. The G1 is a developer platform you can order today — if you’re willing to wait out a backorder.
If you want a robot that does chores in your house, only one of these is even trying, and it will have a human being driving it part of the time. If you want to write code against a humanoid, the NEO offers you no way to do that at any price.
Prices below were re-checked against manufacturer pages on 2026-07-21 and were unchanged.
The teleoperation question, which decides most of this
This is the fact that should govern a NEO deposit, and 1X does not hide it — but it’s easy to miss under the marketing. NEO ships with “Expert Mode”: on 1X’s own consumer page, “for any chore that NEO doesn’t yet know, owners can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it through unknown tasks.”
In practice that means a person in an office looking through your robot’s cameras, inside your home. Engadget reported at launch that “much of the work will be done by teleoperators in the beginning,” and listed what NEO does on its own: opening doors, fetching items, and turning lights on or off. The complicated chores — the ones you’d buy a humanoid for — are the teleoperated ones.
1X’s controls for this, as reported consistently across outlets: operators are 1X employees in the US, they cannot take control without the owner’s approval, owners can set no-go zones, and people can be blurred in the operator’s view. Footage goes back to 1X for training. CEO Bernt Børnich put it plainly to Gizmodo:
“If you buy this product, it is because you’re OK with that social contract. If we don’t have your data, we can’t make the product better.”
That is an honest sales pitch, and it’s the right basis for the decision. You are buying an early-access research program that lives in your house.
As for how well it works, the published hands-on results are mixed. Testing a pre-production unit in expert mode, Notebookcheck found NEO handled a vacuum cleaner and loaded a dishwasher well, took 1 minute 7 seconds to fetch a water bottle from the fridge, and could not crack a walnut. Gizmodo, citing the Wall Street Journal’s test, reported the robot nearly toppled over closing a dishwasher and took two minutes to fold one shirt.
And in July 2026, a 1X executive told Forbes — while announcing impressive new 25-degree-of-freedom hands — that “Neo will ship with more hardware capability than the AI currently knows how to use.” That’s the company, this month, telling you the software is behind.
What “preorder” actually means here
The $200 deposit is fully refundable, so the downside is small. But be clear-eyed about timing.
1X says US deliveries “start 2026” and has said so for months without narrowing it. Its April 2026 factory announcement still described customer shipments as planned, with the Hayward plant running at 10,000 units a year and currently supplying “research, development, and internal home-testing programs.”
The number that matters: 1X sold out its entire first year of production in five days after the October 2025 launch. A deposit placed today is not competing for a 2026 slot. Separately, 1X has agreed to deploy up to 10,000 NEOs into investor EQT’s portfolio companies between 2026 and 2030 — the same product line, from the same factory.
We could not find a verified report of a NEO delivered to a paying customer. Treat 2026 as a target.
The G1’s real price is not $13,500
The spec table shows $13,500 direct, and that’s accurate — but two things sit on top of it.
Landed cost. Unitree charges $300–$1,200 shipping, and you handle US customs duties, taxes, and import clearance yourself. RoboStore’s US price of $17,990 (regular $21,600) buys you out of that paperwork and gives you domestic support — though its product page showed Sold Out at our check, and shop.unitree.com lists the G1 as backordered. Neither channel is quick right now.
The SDK gate. The standard G1 does not support secondary development. If you intend to program this robot, you need an EDU unit, and EDU starts at $43,900 — a 3.25× step from the base price, and not something you can bolt on later. Anyone comparing “$13,500 humanoid” to “$20,000 humanoid” is comparing the wrong numbers if code is the point.
For the NEO, meanwhile, there is no developer story at all. 1X publishes no SDK, no API docs, and no developer program; the page titled “An API to the Physical World” is a metaphor about hands, with a waitlist button. It is a closed appliance by design.
Subscription or purchase, if you go NEO
At $499/month, the subscription runs cheaper than the $20,000 purchase for 40 months — $19,960 — and crosses over early in year four. But the ownership tier is also the one that carries the 3-year warranty, premium support, and priority delivery; the subscription gets standard delivery and ships later.
So the crossover math favors subscribing only if you expect to want out within about three years — which, for a first-generation robot that improves by software update, is a defensible bet. 1X does not publish cancellation terms, and we found no reliable source for a minimum commitment, so ask before you assume you can walk away monthly.
Our verdict
Buy the G1 if the robot is the project: you want to develop, research, demo, or teach with it, and you accept a backorder and a short warranty. Budget the EDU tier from day one if you’ll write code — that decision, not the base price, is your real budget.
Put down the NEO deposit if you want a seat in the first wave of home humanoids and you’re genuinely comfortable with a remote 1X operator working inside your home. It’s refundable, the queue is long, and nothing obliges you to convert. Just don’t buy it expecting an autonomous housekeeper this year — 1X isn’t promising one.
Buy neither if you want a robot that reliably does your chores by itself. That product does not exist yet, from anyone, at any price.