Humane AI Pin

» see humane.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i work on edge ai now, computer vision running on small flying machines, so the humane pin is one of the few graves on this site that sits inside my actual profession. that did not make me want one. when humane unveiled the ai pin in late 2023 the pitch was that the smartphone era was ending and the next computer would be a screenless thing you wore and talked to, with an ai doing the work a phone full of apps used to do. i watched the demos the way you watch a colleague's overconfident prototype, interested in the idea and skeptical that the hardware and the models were anywhere close to ready.

humane was founded in 2018 by imran chaudhri and bethany bongiorno, a married pair of former apple designers who had worked on the iphone and the ipad. they raised about 230 million dollars from serious investors and spent five years building in stealth, with a famous ted talk in 2023 teasing the palm-projection trick before the product even had a name. the ai pin finally went on sale in april 2024 at 699 dollars plus a 24-dollar monthly subscription for the cellular connection and the ai service.

the reviews were not just bad, they were event-bad. marques brownlee built his review around it being the worst product he had ever reviewed, and the criticism was consistent: the hardware ran hot and died fast, and the assistant it was built around was slow and often wrong. by mid 2024 reports said more pins were being returned than bought. in february 2025 hp announced it was buying humane's software and patents for 116 million dollars, a fraction of what the company had raised, and the deal pointedly did not include the pin. on february 28 2025 the servers were switched off and every pin in the world became an inert square of aluminum.

i felt something other than schadenfreude watching it die, because the bet underneath it is not stupid. ambient ai you talk to instead of an app is a real direction, and some version of it will probably work eventually. humane just shipped the promise about three model generations and one battery breakthrough too early, at a price that assumed people would pay to be beta testers for a phone replacement that could not replace a phone. in my own work the lesson is boring and constant: the demo is easy and the device out in the real world is hard.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the rollout had a strange shape. for years humane was the most-hyped hardware startup in silicon valley precisely because nobody could see the product. the stealth and the apple pedigree, plus a ted talk with a green light glowing on someone's palm, built an expectation that this was the team that would finally do to the phone what the phone did to the blackberry. then the actual device arrived and the gap between the keynote and the experience was enormous. reviewers could not get through basic tasks, and the green palm interface that looked magical on stage was nearly invisible in sunlight and clumsy to navigate by pinching your fingers in the air.

~ the cracks ~

the deeper problem was that the ai pin was a bet on models that were not ready yet. it leaned on cloud ai for almost everything, which made it slow and dependent on a connection, and the assistant hallucinated answers often enough that you could not trust it for the simple lookups it was supposed to make effortless. it also ran hot against your chest, and the clip-on battery booster meant to fix that became its own annoyance. a product that asks you to give up your phone has to be better than your phone at something. the pin was not clearly better at anything.

~ what it became ~

humane the company became part of hp, where the founders and engineers were folded into a group called hp iq to put ai into hp's printers and pcs. the cosmos operating system and the patents lived on inside a much larger company with no interest in selling a wearable. the pins that customers had paid 699 dollars for, plus months of subscription, were bricked on a fixed date with refunds only for the most recent buyers. it joined the small museum of expensive 2020s hardware that asked to be the next big platform and instead became a cautionary tale told at the next round of pitch meetings.

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