The discontinuation of the Humane Ai Pin did not come as a shock. A lot of people had probably already forgotten about it (I know I did). Last year, I wrote about how its potential made me want the Apple Watch to be more than just a fitness device. Despite the immense hype leading up to its release, the final product was poorly reviewed, and sales were reportedly well below expectations.

HP recently announced an agreement to purchase Humane’s AI capabilities and assets, to serve as the foundation of an AI innovation incubator within the company. With this purchase comes the shutdown of Humane’s servers and the effective bricking of the AI Pin itself as of February 28th, 2025.

It’s easy to look at this as the deserved failure of an ill-conceived AI gadget, and for sure, many on social media do see it this way. But even with its many faults, I think the AI Pin was a genuinely unique and differentiated product from so much of what the tech industry is producing today. It really sucks that it didn’t live long enough to see its issues fixed over time.

Where Did This Product Go Wrong?

There’s no such thing as a perfect product, and the Humane AI Pin is no exception. It had a heavy reliance on cloud services for essentially all of its functionality. It required a separate subscription/data plan. There were reports of the device overheating. The software was buggy.

But I’d argue its biggest problem was its marketing. Specifically, its positioning as the smartphone replacement everyone was waiting for. Any product whose reason for being is presented as “so, people hate being on their phones all the time, right?” is almost certainly doomed to fail. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the original iPhone, people still seem to really like their smartphones. No one but tech enthusiasts is looking for a smartphone replacement.

The tech industry continues its mad rush to find what’s going to replace the smartphone (I’d argue there should be more of a focus on replacing the traditional PC, but I digress…). Focusing on what’s next is smart…no company wants to be caught as flatfooted as BlackBerry and Palm were when the original iPhone came out. But just as the tablet has not (yet) supplanted the PC, it’s unlikely the next big innovation will actually replace the smartphone. It turns out, one thing doesn’t need to die for another thing to be born. Different products can coexist, and consumers will choose what works best for them.

Trying Something New

Despite the failure of the AI pin, I give the people at Humane a lot of credit for trying. As much as humans like to celebrate new innovations, we also weirdly enjoy celebrating failure. It’s not hard to imagine a world where many of the shortcomings of the AI Pin were resolved in future iterations. The hardware would have gotten better, which would mean the Pin could eventually run models on devices and not be as reliant on cloud services. The projector would get brighter, and the camera would get better.

Hopefully some of the ideas in the Pin will live on in other, more successful products. Unfortunately, HP involved, I don’t have very high hopes. Over a decade ago, HP bought another innovative company that had good products with strong foundations, but needed more time and investment. Under HPs stewardship, Palm webOS went from a promising 3rd competitor to Android and iOS to a OS that runs on smart TVs.

What a waste.

Conclusion

We’re still in the relatively early stages of wearable computing. I firmly believe in the untapped potential of ubiquitous, always-on, and always-aware computers. We’ll never realize this potential if companies aren’t willing to experiment with various ideas and forms, even if they fail. Therefore, I choose not to revel at the end of a company whose product marketing got a bit ahead of it. Instead, I commend them for introducing a fresh new product to the market, lament the fact that HP is likely to mishandle everything it gains from Humane, and eagerly look forward to seeing which company will take the next big swing.