So the Humane AI Pin reviews finally landed this week and I have been refreshing YouTube like it's a horror movie premiere. You remember the Super Bowl ad, right, the one with the little screen-less badge you clip to your shirt and it beams a laser display onto your palm? I've been half-obsessed with this thing since the CES buzz last year, mostly because I wanted so badly for someone to actually nail the "phone but less annoying" idea. Turns out we're not there yet. Not close.
MKBHD's review is titled "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now," which is the kind of headline that tells you everything before you even hit play. The Verge's review wasn't much kinder. And I watched both back to back on my lunch break Thursday, which was not a good use of a lunch break, honestly, because I came away kind of bummed out instead of hungry.
What it actually is, for anyone who missed the hype
The Pin is a $699 wearable, no screen, that you talk to like a tiny AI assistant strapped to your chest. It projects a green laser "ink" display onto your hand for the rare moment you need to see something instead of hear it. On top of the $699 hardware cost there's a mandatory $24 a month subscription just to get a phone number and cellular data through it, which by itself made me raise an eyebrow when I first heard the pricing back at launch. That's before you've done anything with the device. You're paying a phone bill for a thing that isn't a phone.
The problems reviewers ran into are pretty consistent across the board. The laser display is basically unreadable outside in daylight, which feels like a fairly big miss for a gadget you're supposed to wear outside your house. The battery situation involves a magnetic booster pack that reportedly doesn't get you through a full day, and multiple reviewers mentioned the thing warning them it was overheating during normal use, not even anything intensive. Just, like, existing in your pocket on a warm day apparently.
My actual opinion here
I don't think this is a scam or a grift, to be clear. The people behind it, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, both came out of Apple, and you can tell there was real design thinking put into the gesture controls and the whole "look at your hand, not a screen" concept. I just think it shipped about eighteen months too early, wrapped in marketing that promised something a lot more finished than what actually arrived in the box. There's a version of this device, maybe two hardware revisions from now, that's genuinely interesting. This isn't that version.
What gets me is the subscription model attached to a first-gen device with this many rough edges. If I'm buying a $699 experiment, fine, I get it, somebody has to be the early adopter and eat the cost of figuring out what doesn't work yet. But asking for $24 every single month on top of that, indefinitely, for a product that can't reliably read text back to me in sunlight? That's a harder pill. I keep thinking about my uncle who buys every weird gadget that shows up on his Facebook feed and how he'd genuinely be a target customer for the ad, and how disappointed he'd be a week in.
There's also just something a little sad about watching a company with this much talent and funding (they'd raised well over $100 million before this thing even shipped) put out a product that reviewers are describing as unfinished. I don't say that to pile on. I say it because I think the AI wearable idea itself is sound, and a stumble this public makes it harder for the next company to get funded to try again properly.
Anyway. I'm not buying one, if that wasn't obvious. But I'm keeping an eye on whatever software updates come next, because I do think there's something here worth fixing rather than abandoning. The gesture stuff, the hand-as-a-display idea, that's genuinely clever industrial design even if the execution isn't there yet. Somebody just needs another year in the oven before charging people a subscription for the privilege of testing it.
Also, unrelated, but if you clipped one of these to a t-shirt in April in most of the country you'd be sweating through it by 2pm anyway, laser display or not. Bad timing on the launch window if you ask me.