Humane wrapped its bet against the iPhone in the cloak of AI and lost

The Ai Pin is officially dead. Parts of Humane have been sold to HP, and the Ai Pin will cease to function in a week. Cause of death? An outdated and undercooked bet against the iPhone made by former Apple engineers that Humane tried to disguise as artificial intelligence hardware.

Bloomberg reports that HP has agreed to acquire assets from Humane for $116 million. Humane’s sole product, Ai Pin, won’t become an HP product. Instead, HP will put the parts of Humane that it is acquiring into its AI portfolio.

Despite the product’s name, there wasn’t a whole lot of AI in the Ai Pin.

The hardware was basically an Apple Watch-sized version of the iPhone. Only it had no display aside from a low fidelity projector that relied on an unintuitive hand gesture system to control.

It could summarize your text messages, but not your text messages. Just the ones that people sent to your special Ai Pin phone number.

The actual AI aspects mostly relied on early versions of ChatGPT. Apple isn’t doing enough with Siri to make its voice assistant competitive with ChatGPT, but at least the iPhone is where the best features of ChatGPT exist — and they’re evolving daily.

Before it was called Ai Pin, the product was being developed during a global conversation around smartphone addiction and too much screen time in our everyday lives. Apple even released a feature to ease concern called Screen Time that allegedly tracks device usage.

Then the pandemic made remote work the norm, and screens became the only way we stayed connected.

Humane still positioned its product as the solution for helping you reconnect with the real world and use your phone less. The hardware was managed through a website because Humane knew that requiring a smartphone app was antithetical to the device’s purpose.

Personally, I never got to try the Ai Pin. The concept is cool, but it’s a smartphone accessory that extends the experience — like AirPods or the Apple Watch — not a standalone device worth hundreds of dollars for the hardware and another monthly fee for the product to do anything.

9to5Mac’s Take

Humane co-founders and former high level Apple executives Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno join HP as part of the deal, helping the PC maker integrate AI into its products.

Much less glamorous than what the duo were previously selling, but marketing the miniature smartphone without a display or much battery as an artificial intelligence product seems to have been a bet that ultimately paid off.

$116 million seems generous for a company that sold customers $500 and up hardware with a $24/month subscription that ceases to function 10 months and two weeks after release.

Rest in HP, Humane.

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