Methodology has one rule that does more work than the weights: only shipping devices take a position. Announced and preorder hardware is listed. Discontinued hardware keeps a page. Neither is in the order. The reason is not purity. It is that a ranking you cannot buy from is a brochure.
Sandbar is why the rule has to be written down. The Stream Ring has a real thesis — no wake word, microphone only while the touchpad is held, whisper dictation The Verge described at announcement (The Verge, 5 November 2025). It also has four unpublished physical specs and a summer ship date that is already mid-July without a general customer SKU. Batches sell out. That is demand. It is not availability.
The other side of the gate
Pebble’s Index 01 was announced in December 2025 with a March window (The Verge). Until it is generally for sale it stays unranked even though the spec sheet is unusually complete: 4.7 g, 5–20 cm, lifetime hours, on-device ASR. Completeness does not ship a ring.
Vocci has been a CES object and a specification page. Same gate. Limitless and Humane show the gate’s other leaf: shipping is necessary, not sufficient. When sales stop or the cloud is switched off, the page remains and the number in the table does not.
What “shipping” is not
A demo in an office is not shipping. A Kickstarter video is not shipping. A store page that takes $249 against a summer 2026 window is not shipping. Reviewer loaner units are not shipping. This site will look slow the week a YouTuber wears a pre-production Stream. It will look accurate the week a batch slips.
| Cost | |
|---|---|
| Price | $249 |
| Plan | Notes free, or $10/mo after 3 mo |
| Year-one on the encoded plan | $369 if you pay for twelve months of the encoded plan. Not the ranking column. |
| Capture | |
| Microphones | Not published |
| Capture mode | Press to record |
| Audio out | None |
| Battery (active capture) | Not published |
| Speech recognition | Cloud |
| Language model | Cloud |
| Body | |
| Form factor | Ring |
| Weight | Not published |
| Materials | Aluminum outer, resin inner, glass touchpad |
| Charging case | Not published |
| Recording indicator | No |
| Connectivity | Bluetooth |
| Companion app | iOS |
| Data export | No |
Shoppers use leaderboards as buy lists. Putting an unshipped ring above a $50 clip that Amazon will sell you today would be a fashion statement. The Stream Ring’s design still belongs in the corpus, because tap-to-energise is the argument against Bee. It belongs under a heading that says you cannot order it. When that heading comes off, the empty battery field is the first argument, not the preorder queue.