About a year ago, I reviewed a weird little aspirational Star Trek-like mini communicator badge I wore on my clothing. The Humane AI Pin promised to be the future of devices beyond the phone: something that made living in the world more immediate, to remove us from screens, to make our lives easier through AI.
The $699 Humane AI Pin is now a paperweight, sold for IP to HP. The hardware will stop working after Humane’s services are cut off at the end of the month. All data will be deleted from Humane’s servers, too.
The AI pin was an utter failure. It didn’t work well, either. It overheated. It had an extremely awkward, futuristic yet gimmicky interface, relying on hand gestures made while simultaneously looking at the pin’s “display” as a projected image on your open hand. And its AI wasn’t good.
But the real reason, in my opinion, that the Humane AI Pin failed was its ignorance of how ubiquitous phones are. It’s a lesson other AI devices, and VR/AR wearables, should pay attention to.
Meta’s Ray-Bans (left) have an AI-powered camera and microphone/speaker just like the Humane AI Pin. But Meta’s glasses connect to phones, are cheaper and don’t make AI the main event.
Meta’s Ray-Bans, another piece of wearable AI tech, have done pretty well. According to Meta, 2 million pairs have been sold so far. But as someone who’s worn them, I could tell you the big reasons for this. First, Meta’s glasses are decent-looking glasses made by a big brand. Second, they work with phones, and act as phone accessories (headphones, wearable cameras). And third, they make the AI a clever bonus feature, not the main event.
AI is, at best, a sometimes helpful thing; at worst, a distracting, broken intruder, and often it’s more like a curious gimmick. Meta’s treating AI like an experimental playground, and the Ray-Bans make its use optional.
The Humane AI Pin, meanwhile, made AI its only true feature beyond being a mediocre camera and Tidal music player. It looked weird on anyone wearing it and served no other purpose. And, most importantly, it had absolutely no connection or relationship to the phone in my pocket. According to Humane’s founders, this was the future beyond the phone.
I’ve heard this argument before, notably in VR and AR headsets. The Meta Quest, the Apple Vision Pro: these are the future of computing, we’ve been told. There’s one problem there: I’m never getting rid of my phone. And neither is anyone else.
Phones do too much. They’re too integral to safety, security, account management, music, to being a camera or a personal assistant. To get rid of a phone means replacing it with something that does at least as good a job, or convincing us we can live without the phone’s functions. Neither is true for me. And so AI gadgets or standalone VR headsets will never be more than “extra devices.”
Humane’s AI Pin was not only crazy expensive ($699!), but it required its own cellular service and $25-a-month plan to function. Humane stubbornly refused any phone app, or any way for the pin to pair with Bluetooth and act as a connected camera and microphone/speaker for phones, or run off cellular from your existing phone. That decision, looking back, was even dumber than it seemed in 2024.
If Humane’s pin were simply a phone-paired wearable, would it had been better off? I think so.
The Humane AI Pin is dead now, its fanciful ideas eaten up by HP — a graveyard for many old, failed tech things. But its lessons remain. When I see how Apple has positioned the Vision Pro stubbornly away from iPhones, I only think about a future headset small enough to work with your phone in tandem. When I see Meta’s Quest headsets in relation to Meta’s smart glasses, I see a lineup of great VR game consoles, but they’re still destined to remain too separated from the rest of our computing lives. Meanwhile, Meta’s glasses, while not doing very much yet, at least function like accessories to our already-lived lives, rather than trying to force us down another product path.
Tread carefully, new tech. Phones are too good to be replaced anytime soon. Google’s Android XR promises of working with Android phones and Google’s Play app store suggest that maybe, this time, Google is recognizing that for its return to new VR and AR gadgets, you can’t run away from phones. You have to find a way to embrace them.
I see phones evolving into more connected versions of themselves with more immersive and optional personal accessories, powering glasses and wearables in new ways. But I can’t see anything swooping in to fully replace the phone anytime soon. Anything that tries to make that claim right now is probably destined to die, like the unlamented Humane Pin.
Add comment