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After its reputation went up in flames, Humane warns users its charging case may too
(www.engadget.com)
Gotta say, this is “headline of the year” contender material
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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I remember being downvoted heavily on Reddit when I called this stupid mostly down to how limited it is and the silly subscription.
Kinda hoping now all those downvoters purchased one because they deserve it.
I think it would be really cool if it worked like they wanted us to believe it would. Like, it could be one of those “change the way we live our day to day lives” events to the like of of smartphones becoming mainstream.
This device was never going to live up to that or get anywhere close to it, but I can’t blame people for really wanting to believe.
Huh? What do you think they promised that wasn’t delivered that would’ve made this anything that a phone app couldn’t do better? Fundamentally, talking to things sucks, but phones support that anyway. The gimmicky interface is worse than just a touch screen. You have to wear the fucking thing which makes it useless if I’m in bed or whatever. The AI was shit but could just as easily be integrated into an app. It was a shit product from design to execution.
A device that can do all of the things a phone can do without needing to find and install apps, that can learn from your usage patterns in effective and practical ways, and is unobtrusive to wear all the time sounds pretty fucking cool to me.
That is the promised future that AI devices are selling; I thought I was pretty clear that this device was never going to deliver on it.
The thing is, even if the device was doing what they said it would do... It could be an app. In fact it makes more sense. No double network subscription, no need for expensive hardware on top of the one you already carry, expanded acess to the user's data, better hardware in some case (camera for example), more efficient, more integration with other tools (from basic stuff like a calendar to gps etc), and so on.
If AI was a juice the humane pin would be it's juicero.
You lost me at Reddit.
I don’t get it. It was so easy to call this, Rabbit, home 3D TVs, the Fire Phone, etc.
What do we see that these execs don’t? Why can I call flops 5 seconds after hearing them but they go on to spend millions to develop products which go nowhere?
If you can find an angel investor, it doesn't matter. You're an exec getting paid to fail upward to your next project.
The subscription makes sense for having LTE access. That’s not really a problem nor hard to justify. Even the concept sounds pretty solid overall. But everything from price to execution was just wildly bad.
It's fucking $24 a month
My basic 4g plan is €3 a month
And my 5G unlimited plan is $70/mo, but can go as low as $20/mo for 4G prepaid on my network. Seems reasonable to me.
For clarity, the reasonable part is that the pin network subscription is ~$20 here. Not that $20 for 4G is reasonable but that’s a different issue than what we are discussing specifically.
I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget's review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.
Maybe I'm too old-school and impatient, but I've never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It's a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I've used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.
The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I've never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.
~~Check out Coffeezila's video on them, the whole things shady AF, in addition of being shitty.~~
The coffeezilla vid was about the rabbit, not the humane
Oh shit, you are right. I can't keep up with all these snake oil sellers.
Fortunately, almost nobody bought it, so the risk to the public is very low.
Yeah. And it's so bad that I feel like the functionality barely goes down.
They should release the following:
'Out of an abundance of caution, we advise against any user charging this device and attempting to rely on it for communications or regular assistance. Fortunately, we've found a workaround and suggest customers looking to continue enjoying the benefits of the Humane pin consider wearing it down in an unpowered state. This will provide infinite battery life and a 100% reduction in unwanted heating while enabling users to continue to receive nearly all the same functionality to which they are accustomed.'
What reputation? The company never had one in the first place.
Mostly Imran Chaudhri's reputation, really. The guy created the user interface and interaction designs for the iPhone and worked on a bunch of other Apple stuff. Most of the press material i've seen before the release of the AI pin mostly concentrated on him.
Twisted fire-starter!
Thanks, now it'll be stuck in my head all day
Humane Labs?
Who wants to run heist I'll give 50% (just kidding I'll kick you after the last setup)