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 jewellery. 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 12 noon Pacific Time on February 28, 2025.
Humane ends badly
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 really do all that was promised, but the idea seemed mostly very good, very appealing.
There were issues over privacy and when the pin was listening to you, when it was recording. That doesn’t seem to have been fully thought through, despite the years of development that were conducted in great secrecy.
Yet the instant you saw it one being worn, such as at Paris Fashion Week, it looked almost good. It was bigger than expected, and given the poor battery life, but you saw it and you could see that this was the future.
The Humane AI Pin being worn at Paris Fashion Week
Specifically, you could see that it was the future of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” While it was many times deeper than the combadges on that show and its sequels, it was roughly the same width and height, and you wore it at the same position.
So here was a device you could just talk aloud to and it would phone someone. Or you could ask questions, and it would tell you the answer.
Plus it seemed to do so reasonably privately — not in the sense of security, but in the sense of just being audible to you. In today’s world where either no one knows how to hold a phone next to their ear, or they presume we all want to hear both sides of their vital conversations, that seemed appealing.
It seemed appealing, it looked good, but this is a case of appearances not being all they needed to be. The battery lasted only about five hours in real world tests, and the charging case had to be recalled because of overheating issues.
That five hours of battery life really required what Humane called a Battery Booster. This connected magnetically to the Pin and that magnet is how the device was held onto clothing.
You’d put the magnetic backing under your shirt or blouse, then the Humane AI Pin would snap onto the front. This is exactly how many or most wireless microphones work, and it would be fine, except a Pin weighs a lot more than a mic.
So where microphones tend to be wearable on any clothing, the Humane AI Pin’s weight would pull down on light material.
Humane, the company, ends badly
It weighed too much, it cost too much for what it did, and then in the end Humane AI Pin customers have been left having lost a lot of money. The announcement of it closing down is not going to win the makers any fans, either.
“Your engagement has meant the world to us, and we deeply appreciate the role you’ve played in our innovation journey,” says the company in a statement, before signing the message off “warmly.”
Yet if things have soured for the Humane AI Pin customers, they haven’t gone well for the company. While the press release about HP’s acquisition is carefully worded, it appears that the Humane company itself is over.
HP is buying “key AI capabilities from Humane, including their AI-powered platform Cosmos, highly skilled technical talent, and intellectual property with more than 300 patents and patent applications.”
While HP continues to release products, its glory days in computing are long gone. If there is even a plan to make a HP AI Pin, as it once made a HP iPod, it’s unlikely to happen.
Humane is said to have begun looking to be acquired pretty much immediately after its AI Pin came out and was so very poorly received. It was looking to be bought for between $750 million and $1 billion.
Instead, HP has got the lot for $116 million.
So Humane’s makers have got a lot less money than they had hoped for, but they are going to get a salary from HP.
Humane AI Pin customers get nothing.
