Humane’s AI Pin has had one of the more unified launch weeks in recent consumer hardware. David Pierce’s Verge review, published on sale day, answered the purchase question directly: “Nope. Nuh-uh. No way,” calling the Pin “so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways” that he would not recommend the $699 hardware or the $24 month (The Verge, 11 April 2024). Engadget’s Cherlynn Low reached the same buy/no-buy line: the Pin “doesn’t do enough to justify its $700 and $24-a-month price” (Engadget, 11 April 2024).
The Verge later summarised the week as possibly “one of the — if not the — worst-reviewed product launches in modern tech history,” citing Marques Brownlee’s “worst product I’ve ever reviewed” line alongside the Washington Post’s “promising mess” (The Verge, launch roundup).
What the reviews agree on is more useful than the adjectives. The Pin is slow to complete ordinary queries. It runs hot against the skin. Features that were in the marketing are missing or broken in the unit that shipped. Humane’s defence is a summer software update. Reviewers, correctly, scored the device in the box.
For this beat the Pin is now a sourced data point rather than a forthcoming one. It has a dual-microphone array, a Trust Light, LTE, and reviewer-measured battery life around four hours on the Pin and longer with the magnetic booster. It is not a meeting recorder. It is an assistant you have to keep feeding because it will not listen until you touch it, and then it often fails at the thing you touched it for.
Humane can ship updates. It cannot un-publish this week. The AI Pin page will keep the launch-release specifications next to the reviewer battery figures, and will not pretend they are the same kind of number.