Humane's AI Pin is No More and Owners are Left With Nothing
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Take a last look. The Humane AI Pin is no more.
The Humane AI Pin company is being shut down and its much-vaunted, badly-received device is being switched off. It could have been so much better.
It was controversially expensive, it had many faults, but now the much talked about and seemingly rarely bought Humane AI Pin is no more. Humane has announced that certain of its technologies and staff are being acquired by HP, and the Humane AI Pin is being switched off.
This is how it so very often goes with technology - you don't know what you've got until it's gone. People weren't very impressed with say, the adorable 12-inch MacBook but they lamented its passing when it was discontinued, for instance.
Maybe it's a nostalgia thing as it happens a lot - even the Touch Bar seems to be more popular now it's gone. But fortunately, what's rarer is that people who actually bought the device are not left seething.
If you had a Touch Bar on your MacBook Pro, nobody took it away from you. But if you bought a Humane AI Pin, you're screwed.
You spent $700 to buy it and then you paid $24 per month for a subscription. If you bought it from the moment it went on pre-order sale on November 16, 2023, you may have spent a further $360 or so on that subscription.
That's gone. No one is getting their subscription back, but worse, only certain people will get a refund on their $700 purchase of what is about to become jewelry. Unless you bought a Humane AI Pin in the last 90 days, you're stuck.
So make the most of its not awful but not brilliant phone call capabilities, its hard-to-see projection, or its reportedly slow AI features. You've got until noon Pacific Time on February 28, 2025.
There is an argument that a separate AI device that you use instead of, or alongside, your iPhone, just could never take off. The ubiquity and sheer compelling usefulness of the iPhone was surely a problem for the Humane AI Pin, just as it presumably was for the Rabbit R1.
That Rabbit R1 is still on sale, it's just been forgotten. Whereas now that the Humane AI Pin is over, it's hard not to wish it had worked out. It cost too much for what it did, it didn't do all that was promised, but the idea seemed mostly very good, very appealing.
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