I spent four days this week refreshing the same YouTube video like it was going to change its verdict if I stared hard enough. Marques Brownlee's Humane AI Pin review has been sitting at the top of my feed since it went up on the 11th, and it's titled, bluntly, "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now." That's not hyperbole from a guy who usually hedges everything into oblivion. He actually said it, on camera, and meant it.
For anyone who missed it: the AI Pin is a little square badge you clip to your shirt with a magnet, $699 up front plus $24 a month for the cellular plan, and it's supposed to replace your phone with voice commands and a laser projector that beams a menu onto your palm. No screen, mostly. You talk to it, it talks back, and sometimes it projects green text onto your hand if you hold your arm at exactly the right angle in exactly the right light.
I almost preordered one back in November. I didn't, and this week I've been feeling smug about that in a way that's probably not attractive.
Here's my issue with these devices, and I've said some version of this on here going back to, I want to say, 2013, when everyone was convinced Google Glass was going to be normal within two years. Every few years someone raises a pile of money, hires people who used to work at Apple, and promises the thing that finally replaces your phone. It's never the phone. Nobody actually wants the thing that replaces the phone. What people want is a phone that does slightly less nagging.
The reviews this week are brutal in a specific way I find more convincing than the usual "meh, not for me" shrug. People are describing the device overheating mid-task and shutting itself off. Battery life apparently gets you through maybe half a day if you're using it for anything beyond checking the time. The laser display is basically unreadable outdoors, which, for a thing you're supposed to wear outside your house, feels like a fairly load-bearing flaw. One reviewer said she kept pulling her actual phone back out because the Pin just couldn't keep up with basic requests fast enough to be worth the awkwardness of talking to your own chest in public.
I have a drawer in my desk, bottom left, that I genuinely call the gadget graveyard when I'm talking to my wife about it, which she finds less funny every time I say it. There's a Jawbone UP band in there that's been dead since 2015. An actual Amazon Fire Phone, which I bought used off eBay years after it flopped, purely as a joke, and which somehow still turns on. A pair of prototype smart glasses from a Kickstarter that never shipped a real consumer version. I'm not telling you this to brag about being an early adopter. It's closer to a confession. My judgment on this specific category of product is bad maybe forty percent of the time, and I know it, and I still almost bought the Pin anyway.
What stopped me wasn't the reviews, since none of this existed yet when I was considering it. It was the subscription. Twenty four dollars a month, forever, for a device that's supposed to reduce how much I look at a screen. If the thing actually worked as advertised I'd maybe be typing this on a laser projection onto my palm right now instead of a keyboard, and honestly that sounds worse in almost every way I can think of, not better. My palm is not a good monitor. It was never going to be a good monitor.
Separately, and I don't want to make this whole post about it since plenty of outlets are already on it, Tesla reportedly told employees this week it's cutting more than ten percent of its global workforce, in a memo from Musk that leaked almost the moment it went out, the way everything there does now. I don't have some unique read on Tesla's org chart. I just noticed it landed the same week as the Pin reviews and found the contrast a little strange: one company trying to convince you a $699 badge is the future of computing, another laying off tens of thousands of people who build the thing that's already, definitionally, the present.
My drawer stays closed for now. Ask me again in four years when the next one of these ships and I have, apparently, learned nothing at all.