Humane’s Ai Pin Aimed to Replace the iPhone. What Happened?

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Earlier this year, Humane was a promising AI wearable startup hoping to develop a device to replace the smartphone. Over $200 million They worked with big names like Microsoft, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to create a device that can make calls, send texts, answer questions, and translate from one language to another. Pin has a laser projector that projects a screen onto the palm of your hand. Users can interact with the screen by tilting their palm or pinching their index finger and thumb together.

the Husband and wife co-foundersImran Chaudhry and Bethany Bongiorno, former Apple design director and software engineering director, respectively, have solid track records. Chaudhry first gave the Ai Pin a sneak peek at the company’s May 2023 launch. TED Talks It was viewed approximately 2 million times.

Currently, more customers are returning Humane’s flagship product, the $699 Ai Pin, than buying it.

Related: This futuristic wearable smartphone alternative projects a screen onto the palm of your hand

^{Screenshot from Humane Aipin. Credit: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

The Verge Humane’s $9 million in cumulative sales of the AiPin has been eclipsed by $1 million worth of returns since the product was launched in April, according to internal data the company obtained Wednesday. Between May and August, within two months of the product’s launch, the number of AiPins returned exceeded the number purchased, the data showed.

What happened with Ai Pin?

A promising start and TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023Early reviews suggest that Ai Pin didn’t quite deliver on what it promised.

Marques Brownlee, a YouTube tech commentator with nearly 20 million subscribers, said of the pin:The worst product I’ve ever reviewedBrownlee said he took a long time to answer questions and often got them wrong, and that he sometimes felt overheated, misheard things multiple times and felt like he had a “warm pack on his chest” at times throughout the day.

The Verge’s Victoria Song I tried out the translation feature I found that I couldn’t translate simple phrases between Japanese and Korean.

Cherlynn Low of Engadget wrote: I tried to take multiple photosThe device would then overheat and shut down, making the palm screen unreadable on cloudy or rainy days, Lo said.

^{Humane eye pin. Photo by Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images.}

As The Verge reports, if a customer returns the pin, Humane cannot resell it as a refurbished item due to T-Mobile’s restriction on associating one device with one person.

About 10,000 pins have been sold so far this year, falling short of Humane’s goal of 100,000 for the year. The New York Times.