Okay so I need to talk about the Humane Pin, but not in the "here's what happened" way every other site already did this week. You've seen the headlines. You've maybe seen the Marques video. What I want to talk about is how close I came to owning one of these things, and how I spent Wednesday night nursing a beer and feeling genuinely relieved I didn't hit "confirm order" back in November.
Quick recap for anyone who's been offline: Humane started shipping its $699 AI Pin last week, the little screen-less badge you clip to your shirt that talks to you and projects a laser display onto your palm. No subscription, no problem, right? Except there is a subscription. $24 a month, forever, or the thing stops working as anything but a very expensive brooch. I knew that part going in. I did not fully appreciate it until I watched Marques call it "the worst product I've ever reviewed, for now" and actually meant it.
The complaints piling up this week aren't nitpicks. The laser ink display is basically unreadable outside unless you're standing in shade with your palm at exactly the right angle, like some kind of sundial ritual. The gesture controls — tap, hold, that weird outward-facing swipe thing — are slow enough that people are describing multi-second lags for basic tasks. And it overheats. Not "gets warm," overheats, to the point where the device throws a heat warning after what sounds like fairly light use. Cherlynn Low at Engadget and David Pierce at The Verge both wrote versions of the same sentence: this feels like a device that shipped a year before it was ready.
Here's my confession. I was this close to preordering one. I've been writing this blog since November 2011 and if you go digging you'll find at least three posts where I bought some gadget everyone warned me not to buy, because I'm apparently constitutionally incapable of learning. I had a Google Glass Explorer Edition. I wore it to a wedding once and got asked to take it off during the ceremony, which, fair. I still have a drawer with a dead Jawbone Up in it. So when Humane's promo video showed a guy ordering a pizza by talking to his shirt, some dumb optimistic part of my brain went "yeah, okay, sign me up."
What stopped me wasn't the reviews, since those hadn't happened yet in November. It was doing the actual math on the subscription. $699 for the hardware and then $288 a year forever, for a product whose entire pitch is that it replaces your phone, a device I already own and have already paid off. That's not a companion gadget price, that's a second phone bill for something that, per every review this week, can't reliably tell me the weather without lag. I canceled my own hypothetical order sometime in January and mostly forgot about it until this week's pile-on made me feel smug in a way I probably don't deserve.
I don't think Humane is a scam or that the team is dumb, for what it's worth. Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno came out of Apple and clearly believe in the screen-less, ambient-computing pitch, and honestly I do think that future is coming eventually. I just don't think it's this version of it, at this price, with this battery life, in this decade. There's a difference between being early and being unfinished, and from what I'm reading this week the Pin lands pretty clearly on the unfinished side.
Anyway. If you did order one, I want to hear about it, genuinely, send me an email. I'll be over here with my dumb regular phone, feeling weirdly proud of myself for once not falling for the pitch.