Called “the worst product ever” by famed tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, Humane’s AI Pin got off to a rocky start. Somehow, things only get worse for artificial intelligence devices.
Returns at The Pin have recently exceeded sales, The Verge reported Wednesday. Only about 8,000 units were available in June no As of Wednesday, that number had dropped by another 1,000 units, meaning there were only about 7,000 units left in the hands of buyers, the report said.
Humane expected to sell about 100,000 Pins in its first year, but only sold about 10,000, The New York Times reported in June. It’s an incredibly noticeable difference, but judging from all the negative feedback this Pin got in its first few months, it’s nothing too surprising. We haven’t gotten our hands on the device yet, but reviews say the Pin is buggy, slow, and has only a few hours of battery life.
As if the $700 price isn’t too high to begin with, it also requires buyers to pay $24 for a T-Mobile unlimited data plan that includes cloud storage. Ambitiously, it uses a projection interface, but that’s also a bit of a failure. Apparently, outdoor projection isn’t clear enough.
Another outrageous fact is that Humane grossly overestimated their product and its capabilities, reportedly raising a whopping $200 million from investors. The company has sold just $9 million worth of Pins, of which $1 million worth has been returned. Back in May, Humane was seeking a buyer for the company for as much as $1 billion.
What was supposed to be a game-changing gadget, designed to act as “your second brain,” in Humane’s words, quickly met a dramatic demise. Humane isn’t the only company where this has happened. In fact, Rabbit’s R1 was an even bigger failure, with more initial problems than we could possibly have at our fingertips. I guess this is just a result of overuse of artificial intelligence. As Brownlee says, AI is best left as a feature for now. So far, selling it as a product hasn’t really worked.
