By Jason Snell

April 15, 2024 8:00 AM PT

Can anyone but a tech giant build the next big thing?

I’m not bullish on the Humane Ai Pin, the clip-on device whose first reviews arrived with knives out this week. The thing feels like a commodity product from 2026 that escaped back a couple of years—a basic hardware conduit for cloud AI models that will soon be available ubiquitously. I wouldn’t be surprised if my Apple Watch had most of its functionality later this year.

What excites me about the Ai Pin is what it represents for the future of computing, namely, eliminating a whole lot of drudgery from our lives. Computers have already reduced dramatic amounts of drudgery—they’re really good at it; it’s basically their best thing—but in eliminating all that analog drudgery, they’ve managed to create a small but still significant amount of digital drudgery. AI constructs have the potential to reduce that, performing tasks for us in seconds based on a single command that we’d otherwise spend a minute on by swiping and tapping.

But the more I think about the Ai Pin, the more sad it makes me… and not for the reason you might think. (If we were to play a word-association game and you prompted me with AI, my response would be “overhyped, but still world-changing.”) No, I’m sad about the Ai Pin because it—and a similar AI hardware product, the Rabbit R1—shows just how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies, most notably the Android-iPhone duopoly.

I’m looking forward to Apple’s new AI efforts, which it’s likely unveiling this summer at its developer conference and rolling out to everyone in the fall. I really do expect that at some point soon my cellular Apple Watch will have capabilities in line with those of the Humane Ai Pin. So will my iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and maybe even Apple TV? It’s gonna be everywhere.

The problem is that I’m dismissing the Ai Pin and looking forward to the Apple Watch specifically because of the control Apple has over its platforms. Yes, the company’s entire business model is based on tightly integrating its hardware and software, and it allows devices like the Apple Watch to exist. But that focus on tight integration comes at a cost (to everyone but Apple, anyway): Nobody else can have the access Apple has.

Humane’s Ai Pin has its own cellular account and uses its own cloud services. My Apple Watch shares a cellular account with my iPhone and syncs data with my iPhone apps, with watch apps that are based on Apple’s platform, and with the same cloud services that my other iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps use. It’s a huge advantage for the Apple Watch.

It seems like we’re at the point where even the most groundbreaking hardware device simply can’t succeed in a world where it’s unable to deeply integrate with either the iPhone or Android. (And really, in the U.S. especially, it would need to integrate with both.) This is why the Ai Pin and the Rabbit and similar products are not going to succeed. Instead, Apple and Google will integrate everything that the Ai Pin does into iOS and Android, and those will be the best-in-class implementations, and that’ll be it for Humane and anyone else who wants to create an AI-powered hardware dingus.

This is not a lament for Humane or its business model. It’s a lament for all of us. So many innovative products will never get funded or never launch a product because if they can’t connect deeply with the smartphone, they’re at an impossible disadvantage. And if one such product somehow did make a mark, what are the chances that it would survive rather than just being acquired by Apple, or Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft, or Facebook? What are the chances that those companies would just build a me-too product that was vastly more functional because they were able to tightly tie it into the ecosystems they control?

I’m not making a legal argument here. (Which is good, because I am not a lawyer.) I’m just observing that the smartphone has become so central to life that if your product can’t offer deep connections to the smartphone, you’re stuck. And yes, Humane could do a better job integrating with phones than it has done—its entire conception as a replacement that frees users from the most successful tech product ever seems misguided—but I’d expect that any integration they built would be largely unsatisfying. They don’t own the phones, so they can’t play that game.

That’s what troubles me about where we are right now. I love my iPhone—I really do. And I appreciate the hardware Apple makes that is tightly integrated with its other products, which is why I own a vast amount of Apple hardware. But it sure does feel like it’s increasingly unlikely that any sort of revolutionary hardware is going to come from anyone not named Apple or one of the big Android hardware partners, if not Google itself.

If the world’s tech giants have gotten so big and so powerful that nobody else can even afford the table stakes, we all lose. And the existence of that dumb Humane Ai Pin is just a reminder of that.

By Dan Moren

April 11, 2024 8:56 AM PT

Want Apple to change? Regulation works.

Lately you can’t throw a digital camera without hitting a story on the various regulatory and legal challenges Apple’s been facing. While some have decried these actions as interference in the internal operations of a company, there’s one salient detail that I think those opinions often overlook.

Regulation works.

Here are just a handful of examples from the past few months of Apple changing its policies due to regulations—or, in some cases, the mere threat of regulation:

• In January, Apple announced that it would now allow developers of game streaming apps to submit a single app containing the entire game catalog. That had previously been a sticking point for Microsoft bringing Xbox Game Pass to the platform in 2020—and, as we later found out, was one of the areas of concern in the antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice just a couple months later.

• Late last week, Apple changed another of its longstanding App Store rules by allowing “retro game console emulator apps”. Interestingly, one of the only other announced third-party marketplaces coming to the EU is AltStore, the marquee title in which will be Delta, a Nintendo emulator developed by AltStore proprietor Riley Testut.

• Just today, Apple announced that it would it relax rules around used parts for repairing iPhones. Apple’s Self Service Repair program, which was put into place to comply with Right to Repair legislation passed in some states, launched in 2021. But critics pointed out that Apple’s initial foray still required a restrictive “parts pairing” process that made third-party repairs more limited and more expensive, and Oregon recently made a law that bans the approach. Today’s change effectively undoes that process, though it does still include provisions to prevent stolen parts from being used.

None of this even takes into account the massive changes made to iOS as the result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which may already be resulting in consumer changes.

Apple is unquestionably a behemoth in the technology industry, one of a handful that dominate our lives. And while there are places that those companies butt up against each other and compete, it’s also apparent that corporations of this size are not subject to the same degrees of competition that much smaller players might be. Their core businesses are relatively stable, even if they skirmish around the edges: Apple and Amazon can, for example, squabble over the (relatively small) market of smart home speakers, but Apple’s no more likely to come up with a killer retail site that unseats Amazon than Amazon is to make a world-class smartphone.¹

More to the point, these handful of tech companies are so large that the chances of being upset, or even threatened, by small upstarts is vanishingly small. (And in the rare cases where it might happen, it’s a simple matter for the large companies to simply acquire the smaller ones.)

That means the only entities powerful enough to impose any sort of pushback against the companies are government bodies.² Apple details this in its annual 10-K filing, which lays out risk factors to the company’s business. One entire heading in that section is “Legal and Regulatory Compliance Risks”, which includes the follow sub-heading:

The Company is subject to complex and changing laws and regulations worldwide, which exposes the Company to potential liabilities, increased costs and other adverse effects on the Company’s business.

The simple fact is that, without some sort of threat, Apple was never going to change any of its business practices, because there was absolutely no reason to do so. Apple would happily have never offered a self-service repair program or allowed emulators or changed its policies about game streaming—we know because there were literally years of people asking for these changes without the company lifting a finger—until governments got involved.

It’s not just Apple, either. Broadband companies weren’t about to start giving customers clearer and more accessible information about their plans without regulatory intervention from the FCC.

The absence of meaningful challenges breeds complacency. And complacency leads to the temptation to collect increasing revenue without corresponding innovation because, well, it sure is a lot easier, isn’t?

Much as some might pooh-pooh government intervention in the market, these regulatory and legal threats are ultimately efficacious because Apple ended up changing its behavior. In some cases, it may take months or years for the impacts on the consumer to be felt—and, in some cases, as detractors point out, it may not happen at all if users decide they don’t want these capabilities or alternatives. And you know what? That’s totally fine—because then it’s users choosing to stick with the status quo, as opposed to having no other option than the one that they’re given.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]