Humane's Departure from the AI Hardware Market

The tech company Humane is set to abandon its Ai Pin users, giving them a mere ten days to prepare for the discontinuation. In a notification sent to users, Humane stated that Ai Pin would "continue to function normally" until 12 PM Pacific Time on February 28th. After this date, Pins will "no longer connect to Humane's servers," rendering them incapable of calls, messaging, AI queries/responses, or cloud access. Humane is urging users to download all stored data before February 28th, as they plan to permanently delete "all customer data" when shutting down the servers. This means that after ten days, the Ai product will essentially become a brick.

Refund Policies and the Fate of the Ai Pin

Most users will not be eligible for a refund, even if they have used the Ai Pin for less than a year. Only those within the 90-day return period or who purchased after November 15, 2024, are qualified for a refund, provided they submit their request before February 27, 2025. Humane suggests sending the Ai Pin to an e-waste recycling facility, as the device will only display basic offline information like battery level after the shutdown. Considering the device's price tag of $699 plus a $24 monthly subscription, this high-tech "e-waste" will be quite costly.

HP's Acquisition and Future Product Development

HP is acquiring the startup's intellectual property for $116 million but shows no interest in its hardware. This deal represents a significant financial loss for the founding team, who had initially hoped to sell for over $1 billion. After months of searching for a buyer following Ai Pin's market failure, HP managed to reduce the acquisition price by nearly 90%. HP plans to incorporate Humane's "engineers, architects, and product innovators" into a new team, HP IQ, led by Humane's founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. This team will focus on building an intelligent ecosystem across all HP products and services for the future of work.

Humane's Background and the Controversial Imran Chaudhri

Humane, founded in 2018 by former Apple design and engineering team members Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, includes key figures from Apple in its management. The company's CTO, Patrick Gates, also hails from Apple. Chaudhri, who had a 20-year tenure as a designer at Apple, was reportedly fired in 2017, while Bongiorno, who worked at Apple for 8 years as a software engineering director for iOS and macOS, left in 2016. Both are likely familiar with the long development process of Vision Pro. Approximately 90 former Apple employees have worked or served the 200-person team at Humane. Chaudhri has a mixed reputation, with some hailing him as a new Jobs and others, who have worked with him, accusing him of being a "complete fraud." Interestingly, Chaudhri's personal website lists a staggering 1000 patents, which might speak volumes.

HP's Gains from the Acquisition

In addition to Humane's technical personnel, HP will also gain over 300 patents and patent applications, as well as the AI operating system CosmOS developed by Humane. Launched by Humane at the end of last year, CosmOS was intended for other companies to use in creating AI devices and gadgets. Humane demonstrated CosmOS running on various devices, including cars, smart speakers, TVs, and smartphones. The operating system, envisioned as a high-level voice assistant with AI agent capabilities, can perform complex tasks and manage interactions between multiple devices.

However, Humane stated that the video was for "illustrative purposes" only, showing "working prototypes" and "simulated experiences," with all "designs, features, and specifications" subject to change. To date, Humane has not released a usable version of the operating system, and it remains unknown whether third-party developers will adopt it.

HP's President of Technology and Innovation, Tuan Tran, stated that the system aims to enhance the intelligence of future automotive and smart home devices. The acquisition will "help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices, from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promise of artificial intelligence."

The High-Cost E-Waste Dilemma

Considering the product's $699 cost plus a year's subscription fee, some users have invested nearly a thousand dollars in the product. After the server shutdown, the only remaining function is to display "battery level," which has led to user dissatisfaction. Some users have attempted to "hack" the CosmOS operating system, which is reportedly based on Android, to keep the device operational.

The abrupt service shutdown has angered many. The concept of class-action lawsuits seems tailor-made for such situations. The collapse of Humane may be the most unsurprising outcome in the tech industry for 2025.

Before the official launch of Ai Pin in 2023, Humane made a stage presentation at TED to build hype for the device, positioning it as a mini-replacement for smartphones and emphasizing its co-founders' Apple backgrounds. Ai Pin was finally released in April 2024, claiming to replace the iPhone. The device, resembling a square pin with an anodized or polished casing and a Corning Gorilla Glass touchpad, features an integrated laser projection module and a foldable ToF camera within the slanted top panel, along with signal lights to indicate the status of the camera and microphone.

Inside its compact body, Humane packed a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, 4GB RAM, 8GB ROM, and various sensors such as ambient light, accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS, while maintaining a weight of just 55 grams. Ai Pin has minimal physical buttons, controlled through voice, gesture, and touch, responding by projecting information onto the user's palm with a 720P resolution display, supported by ChatGPT for interactions.

The vision sounded promising, and even before its market launch, Ai Pin was named "Invention of the Year 2023" by Time magazine. However, post-launch, Ai Pin faced a barrage of negative reviews. The Verge stated, "It simply doesn't work," and prominent YouTube reviewer MKBHD called it "the worst product I've ever reviewed."

For a device primarily interacting through conversation, Ai Pin's issues in answering questions or executing commands doomed it from the start. Even when it occasionally fulfilled commands, the execution was peculiar, such as sending generic text messages instead of dictated content. The camera rarely functioned properly; photos displayed via the projector would cause the device to overheat, sometimes even shutting down completely. As for the projection screen, content was nearly illegible outdoors, even on cloudy days. Poor battery life,鸡肋 functions, and even battery fire risks plagued the device.

Some users on Hacker News attempted to defend Ai Pin's failure, arguing that Humane's founders were not like many Silicon Valley CEOs, ignoring幻觉 and common mistakes while praising technological marvels. However, another user provided "evidence" to counter this defense, as离职员工的言论 revealed that Humane's founders were not much different from those Silicon Valley CEOs. Many current and former employees reported that Chaudhri and Bongiorno tended to encourage positive feedback while ignoring criticism, leading them to overlook warnings about Ai Pin's short battery life and high power consumption. It was said that a senior software engineer was fired for raising product issues, and other employees left out of disappointment…

When employees raised concerns about device overheating, Humane's founders responded that software improvements could reduce power consumption…

In January of this year, Humane laid off about 10 people. A month later, a senior software engineer was fired for questioning whether Ai Pin would be ready by April. At a company meeting after the dismissal, Chaudhri and Bongiorno stated that the employee was fired for violating company policy with negative comments…

The result was that Humane has been seeking a buyer for its flagship product, Ai Pin, for less than a month after its launch, with an asking price of up to $1 billion. Moreover, Ai Pin seemed to sell quite poorly, with The Verge reporting last August that daily returns exceeded sales, leading Humane to lower the Pin's price in October.

This complete product failure case also highlights that most consumer-grade artificial intelligence technologies on the market are far from mature. While Google and Apple may aggressively promote Gemini and Apple Intelligence across almost all their products, these tools are add-on features developed on the strong foundations of their existing platforms. Humane, however, had no such foundation to rely on. Poor software functionality, coupled with immature hardware, made Ai Pin an impossible success.