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.
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