The AI Pin is in this ranking as evidence. It is unranked, because it does not work — every consumer unit stopped functioning at 12pm PST on 28 February 2025 — and it is documented here because it is the clearest demonstration available of the risk every device on this list carries.
What it was
A 34.2 g pin with two microphones, a 13 MP camera, depth and motion sensors, a 720p laser projector that painted an interface onto your palm, and a “personic” speaker that used HRTF to put a bubble of sound where only the wearer could hear it. An eSIM on Humane’s own MVNO meant it needed no phone. There was deliberately no mobile app at all; everything ran through a website.
The privacy hardware was better than anything shipped before or since. The Trust Light — a bar of three RGB LEDs — was driven by a dedicated privacy chip, and if that chip detected compromise the Pin would shut down and require service. There was no wake word; Humane’s own launch materials stated the device “only activates upon user engagement”, so it was not listening between interactions. Compare that to the continuous-capture devices ranked above, and it is clear the AI Pin’s failure was not a failure of intent.
What happened
HP acquired Humane’s CosmOS platform, 300-plus patents and the engineering team for $116 million, announced on 18 February 2025. Sales stopped that day. Ten days later, at 12pm PST on 28 February, the Pins stopped connecting to Humane’s servers — taking with them calling, messaging, AI queries and cloud access, which is to say all of it — and remaining consumer data was permanently deleted. Refunds were limited to purchases inside a 90-day shipping window, with claims due the day before the shutdown.
There is a postscript worth recording, because it is the part that does not usually get
written down. Checked on 16 September 2026, neither humane.com nor support.humane.com
resolves in DNS at all. The shutdown notice Humane posted for its own customers is gone, along
with the specification page. Every figure on this page is therefore cited to Humane’s launch
release on a wire service or to contemporaneous reporting, because the manufacturer’s account
of its own product no longer exists on the internet. When a device in this category dies, the
documentation dies with it.
The subscription was structural to this, not incidental. At $24 a month it was mandatory, and lapsing it made the hardware inoperable before Humane ever shut anything down. A $499 device with a hard dependency on a monthly payment to a single startup was never yours in the sense buyers assumed.
What to take from it
This is the reason the value axis in this ranking uses year-one cost including subscription rather than sticker price, and the reason device pages here note where transcription runs. A device whose processing happens on your own phone — Omi’s free tier, the Pebble Index 01 — can survive its manufacturer. A device that is a thin client for someone else’s servers cannot, and the AI Pin is what that looks like when the bill comes due.