The first time I ran the V15 across what I would have sworn was a clean hardwood floor, the laser lit up a film of fine grit I hadn't been able to see in regular light. I vacuumed the same patch twice more out of disbelief. That laser is a parlor trick on paper and a genuinely useful tool in practice; it has changed the way I clean hard floors, which is a sentence I did not expect to write about a vacuum.
The other feature I actually use every week is the hair screw tool. I live with two long-haired humans and a dog. Every other vacuum I have owned needed scissors and a swearing session every couple of months to clear the brushroll. This one has not tangled once. Whatever Dyson did with the conical brush angle works the way the marketing copy claims, which is rare enough that it deserves the call-out.
Suction is the headline number and the easy thing to measure. 240 AW was class-leading at launch and it is still enough that I have never wished for more on any surface in this house. On a medium-pile rug in max mode it pulls up enough dust on the first pass that I now empty the bin before starting just to enjoy how much shows up. The LCD on the back tells you how much runtime you have left at the current power level, which is the kind of small obvious thing that other manufacturers continue to leave out for no good reason.
The bin is the worst thing about it. At 0.76 liters it fills up faster than feels reasonable, and I empty it three or four times when I do the whole house. The eject mechanism is satisfying (slide the red lever and the gunk drops straight into the trash without the cloud of dust that most vacuums kick up) but you do it more often than you should have to at this money.
The related complaint is that there is no auto-empty dock at the $650 price. Samsung includes one in the box on the Bespoke Jet. Dyson sells it separately on the Submarine variants, which is the kind of pricing decision that makes you feel like a sucker after the fact.
The other annoyances are real but smaller. Max mode on carpet with the front gate fully closed is genuinely hard to push, to the point where I default to auto mode and let the suction adapt. It will not stand up on its own, so it lives on a wall mount. And boost mode will absolutely eat a throw rug if you're not paying attention, which I learned in the bathroom one Saturday morning.
Three years in, the battery still holds about 50 minutes in auto mode, which is more than I need for one floor. The newer Dysons are incrementally better in ways that have not, so far, justified replacing this one.
Verdict: Buy this if you've been putting off replacing an older cordless and you want the one that will still feel current in three years. If you specifically want hands-off emptying, look at the Bespoke Jet AI instead.