| If I'm putting myself in the shoes of the founders or executive team- just wondering how many parameters being dialed differently could have shaped the launch for the better (or worse). I'm imagining all the stakeholders arguments: "the laser projector adds X more development months, X less hours of battery life, and X more costs to manufacture due to higher power needs therefore bigger battery, more heat management.. should we launch v1 without it? We can just push-notify your phone if we detect they need a display and they're reaching for their phone, they swipe notification and we take them to exactly what we were trying to show them. Or we can show it on their watch and it would serve as a forcing function for us to build out the voice UX to try and do more with voice." "I get that we're introducing a new ux modality but shouldn't we give user's a pathway that blends between already heavily embedded habits (smartphone, watch) to ours? User's should be able to carry on existing txt conversations from their phones, call from their existing phone numbers, hear notifications from their phone, etc. In fact- these could be great hooks for us to get them used to using our natural language UX more frequently." "I get that the device needs to look like beautiful jewelry but metal is heavier- can't we find a way to make a fully plastic enclosure look high-end?" "Our software stack isn't ready! We can put compute and llms closer to the edge to reduce latency, train 'micro-llms' for very specific tasks that will run faster and cheaper, etc. etc." For all of these hypothetical contentions I can equally imagine very valid reasons for choosing the paths Humane has chosen. Letting these objections always drive the product development could have resulted in a much worse outcome. There's a plethora of anecdotes about Steve Job's refusing to compromise on the many facets of the original iPhones design but if I had to guess there are less stories repeated about how many compromises he was ok with. It's been notoriously difficult to introduce new consumer product categories- if it was easy or more obvious the Apple watch would already be at-parity with 80-90% of the features (which one would assume is what will happen in short order, watch & airpods as proxies to an embedded+edge llms on iPhone). I can understand viewpoints from both those who are trashing the Humane ai pin and those excited about it but one thing I'm happy to see is a team of this caliber making bold moves (and a investment ecosystem to support it). With v1 out (remember, a lot of hardware startup never make it this far) and the community responding it will be interesting to see how deftly they can navigate rapidly iterating and improve the ux. |
What will see, eventually, is similar devices from other companies that are not trying to build their own ecosystem but are happy to be a peripheral of an existing ecosystem. The will also probably compromise on design more to make it smaller, lighter, and cheaper. And even then it will be niche.