Can’t subvert the iPhone’s Ai Pin, it is expensive and difficult to use.
Author: No.1
Editor: Meimei
Ai Pin may not be "iPhone in the AI era".
As an impressive "new species of AI hardware", Ai Pin has both the blessing of former Apple executives and the aura of investment by OpenAI CEO. At the beginning of its release, it was selected as one of the "Best Inventions in 2023" by Time magazine, and through pre-sale, it got quite hot sales. Since November 16th, last year, it started booking for $699 (equivalent to more than 5,000 RMB), and in less than one month, the booking volume exceeded 4.5 million units.
Everyone is waiting to get started and experience this new AI hardware that may "kill the smartphone". Finally, in recent days, Ai Pin began to deliver. With the delivery of the first batch of Ai Pin, the first wave of media evaluation was also lifted. However, after the real machine experience, it can only be said that it was a big surprise and a series of bad reviews. What is going on?
Want to make a device without a screen
Humane was founded based on a very "idealistic" belief: leave the practicality of smart phones and abandon their addiction. Its two founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, have worked in Apple for many years, among which Imran Chaudhri even served as Apple’s design director, and the interactive design of sliding and dragging iPhone came from him, and the Home screen was also his design.
In addition to the two founders, about 100 of Humane’s 260 employees have worked in Apple. It can be said that this company has a strong "fruity taste".
If you don’t want a screen, how can you interact? Humane chooses to treat Ai Pin as a brooch, positioning it on the chest, and interacting through voice commands, touching the panel, gesturing in the air and projecting it into the palm for display. It has a built-in 2.1GHz eight nuclear Qualcomm Opteron processor, 4G memory and 32 G storage space, a 13-megapixel super wide-angle camera, a 3D depth sensor, a motion sensor, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a GPS, a microphone and a speaker. It can be said that only looking at the hardware, except that there is no screen, it is not much different from the mobile phone.
This combination of software and hardware, voice control and projection, as well as the integration of reality and AI big model, makes people hold Ai Pin as the next subversive consumer electronic product that is most likely to replace iPhone. Therefore, Humane has also received financing of 230 million US dollars, and its valuation has also risen to 850 million US dollars.
It’s really bad in practice.
Well-known science and technology journalist Mark Gurman, as the first experiencer after the listing of Ai Pin, said mercilessly, "It shows that smartphones will not disappear". Similarly, another media also gave a very low evaluation, saying that Ai Pin is a semi-finished product, and it is completely impossible to let users get rid of the shackles of smart phones. On the social platform X, there are also many complaints about its heat dissipation, performance, interface and speed.
When users make requests continuously or use the projector for too long, Ai PIn will heat up quickly and inform users that it needs cooling. In severe cases, this will happen in just three minutes. However, the official information of Ai Pin shows that Ai Pin’s laser projector is "designed for short-term interaction (up to 6 to 9 minutes)". This overheating can easily make users feel a "warm baby" on their chest.
Moreover, the projection of Ai Pin can only be cast into the palm of your hand, which is easily disturbed by the external environment. It has been mentioned that the projection of AI Pin is only 720 resolution, and under strong light, it will completely stop cooking. In addition, because there is no screen, the interaction of Ai Pin relies heavily on the user’s gestures, but many experiencers report that these gestures are too complicated and difficult to use, and sometimes Ai Pin can’t understand their expected choices and operations. Moreover, the experience of taking pictures is particularly poor, not only the response is slow when taking pictures, but also the preview is not seen, and the effect taken in dark light is not even comparable to that of Nokia E7 in 2012.
In addition, Ai Pin has many shortcomings such as poor endurance and poor ecology. It can be said that it has actually experienced it, and it is really not amazing when the original iPhone was born.
The form of Ai new hardware needs to be explored.
In the face of overwhelming bad reviews on the Internet, Ken Kocienda, director of product engineering at Humane, defended on social platforms, arguing that there is no perfect product, whether it is Ai Pin, laptop or smartphone. Only when users really use this device can they understand how the product suits you.
No matter whether people can finally adapt to Ai Pin, as far as the current situation is concerned, it really can’t be called "iPhone in the Ai era". Although the founder Bongiorno said, "Today is not the first chapter, but the first page. We have an ambitious roadmap, including software improvements, new features, additional partnerships and our SDK. All these will make your Ai Pin more intelligent and powerful over time ",but obviously, the current Ai Pin has not become a template for the design of new Ai hardware, and new Ai hardware needs more exploration.
We look forward to the new hardware that will be born in the next AI era.
References:
https://36kr.com/p/2734275102222601
https://36kr.com/p/2731468090845444
https://36kr.com/p/2734236165417224
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Original title: "Can’t subvert the iPhone’s Ai Pin, it is expensive and difficult to use."
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