Described by famous tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee as “the worst product ever reviewed,” the Humane AI Pin got off to a pretty rough start. For some reason, things only got worse for this AI gadget.
The Verge reported on Wednesday that Pins have recently been returned more than they’ve been sold: In June, just 8,000 were returned. do not have The report said the number of returned properties had fallen by a further 1,000 as of Wednesday, leaving only around 7,000 with buyers.
Humane expected to sell about 100,000 Pins in the first year, but the New York Times reported in June that it only sold about 10,000. That’s an incredibly large gap, but it’s not all that surprising given the negative feedback the Pin received in its first few months. We haven’t had our hands on the device, but reviews claim the Pin is buggy, slow, and has a battery life of just a few hours.
As if the $700 price tag was too steep to begin with, buyers also had to pay $24 for a T-Mobile unlimited data plan that also included cloud storage. Ambitious, it also used a projection interface, but that was also a flop: Apparently the projection wasn’t clear enough outdoors.
Another crazy fact is that Humane reportedly overestimated its product and its capabilities, raising a whopping $200 million from investors. The company only sold $9 million worth of pins, $1 million of which has already been refunded. In May, Humane was looking for a buyer for the company at a price of up to $1 billion.
What was meant to be a groundbreaking gadget designed to act as a “second brain,” in Humane’s words, came to a dramatic and swift demise. Humane isn’t the only one to see this happen; in fact, Rabbit’s R1 was an even bigger flop, initially with more issues than you could count at your fingertips. This is probably just the result of overdoing it on AI. As Brownlee said, it’s better to leave AI as a feature for now; selling it as a product just hasn’t worked so well so far.
