Humane’s Ai Pin might be dead and gone, but its awful legacy may live on thanks to the company you’d least expect. According to a new report from The Information, Apple is currently developing its own crappy AI pin to follow Humane’s now-defunct and bricked crappy Ai Pin. Hooray for the sequel no one asked for?
The reported AI gadget sounds harrowing, to say the least. According to the report, Apple’s pin is a “thin, flat, circular disc with an aluminum-and-glass shell” and has two cameras, including a standard and a wide-angle one, built into the front. Those cameras are designed to take in the wearer’s surroundings via photos and videos for what I assume would be some kind of computer vision-based feature(s).
Naturally, the pin also reportedly has microphones to pick up sound, which means it most likely uses a voice assistant and could maybe be used for stuff like translation. Weirdly, the pin is also said to have a speaker and a “physical button along one of its edges” as well as a “magnetic inductive charging interface on its back, similar to the one used on the Apple Watch.” Size-wise, The Information’s sources say they’re aiming to make this thing about the size of an AirTag.
That’s quite a bit of info, but I still have lots of questions. For one, how does this thing attach? If it’s magnets, I have bad news, which is that the whole magnetic pin thing didn’t really work. There were a lot of problems with Humane’s Ai Pin, but magnets weren’t not a major one. Keeping an expensive AI gadget attached to your clothes is just objectively harder than it sounds, and I’m not sure that Apple has a solution for that.
Also, does anyone even want an AI pin? If Humane’s expensive failed experiment is any indication, I would wager that answer is no. Sure, maybe Humane just didn’t have the right resources or acumen to make the idea work, or maybe the idea of an AI pin that replaces the smartphone just wasn’t a good idea to begin with. Personally, my imaginary AI-generated money is on the latter.
Surprisingly, one of the most eyebrow-raising parts of the report isn’t that Apple seems to be retreading the dumpster fire that was Humane; it’s that it seems to be doing all of this to compete with none other than OpenAI. In case you missed it, OpenAI (with the help of ex-Apple exec, Jony Ive) also reportedly has several AI gadgets planned for the near-ish future, including what could be a competitor to AirPods and… a pen. The Information says that Apple is expediting the development of its ill-advised AI gadget to make sure it isn’t on the outside looking in at OpenAI’s success.
The problem with that picture is that I’m not sure there will be any success to look in on. AI gadgets are about as unproven a category as it gets in the tech world, and rushing to get in on that unproven craze feels shortsighted, to say the least. I have my doubts that this thing (if it truly exists) will ever see the light of day, but who knows. Maybe Apple is really that caught up chasing the AI dragon. It’s what the investors want, right?
Source: gizmodo.com
