So CES wrapped up over the weekend and the thing everyone in my group chat is talking about isn't a TV or a laptop, it's this little orange square called the Rabbit R1. $199, no subscription, sold out its first batch of 10,000 units within a day of being shown off in Vegas on the 9th. Teenage Engineering did the industrial design (you can tell — it's got that same playful, slightly toylike look as their synths) and the pitch is that instead of a phone full of apps, you talk to this thing and it just... does stuff for you. Orders food, books rides, that kind of thing, using what they're calling a "Large Action Model" instead of a plain old LLM.
I want to be excited about this. I really do. I like weird hardware, I like companies that try something other than a black rectangle. But I've been doing this blog since 2011 and I have watched enough of these come and go that my first reaction was not excitement, it was a specific kind of tired.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not really about Rabbit specifically: I have a drawer. Everyone who writes about gadgets for a living (or, in my case, as an extremely persistent hobby) has this drawer. Mine has a first-gen Pebble watch in it, a Jawbone UP band with a strap that disintegrated, and a Google Glass Explorer Edition I paid way too much money for in 2013 that now just sits there judging me. Every single one of those was going to be the thing that replaced or reinvented some part of my phone. None of them did. The phone won every time, mostly because the phone is the thing already in my pocket and these gadgets ask you to carry a second thing and remember to charge it.
That's not a knock on the R1's execution, which by the demo videos looks genuinely slick — the little scroll wheel, the camera that can supposedly look at what's in front of you and identify it, the fact that it doesn't want you to install fifteen individual travel and delivery apps. If I'm being fair, $199 with no subscription is a completely different risk profile than the stuff I bought a decade ago. Most of my drawer graveyard involved either a monthly fee or a $300+ price tag for something unproven. This is priced almost like an impulse buy, which frankly might be the smartest thing about it.
I also think it's funny that this dropped the same week everyone's SEC account apparently got hacked over a Bitcoin ETF that then, a day later, actually got approved for real. What a week to be extremely online. I don't have anything smart to say about the ETF thing, plenty of people with actual finance backgrounds are covering that better than I could, I just think it's a little bit absurd that "fake regulatory tweet causes a market swing" and "tiny orange AI gadget sells out in a day" happened within about 48 hours of each other and somehow both feel like the same flavor of 2024 chaos.
Anyway. I'm not ordering one, at least not yet. Not because I don't believe in the idea, I actually think "an assistant that does things instead of an app grid you have to navigate yourself" is a real direction phones are eventually going to bend toward. I just want to see it out of the demo stage and in actual people's hands for a month before I hand over money again. Call it drawer wisdom. If you did preorder one, genuinely, email me and tell me how the first week goes, I'll probably write about it.
One small thing I did like from the CES coverage that had nothing to do with any of this: apparently there were multiple transparent OLED TV concepts on the show floor again this year, which happens every January and which no one ever actually ships at a normal price, and I find the yearly ritual of it kind of charming at this point. It's the tech industry's version of a groundhog seeing its shadow.