YouTuber Marques Brownlee has taken a look at Humane’s new AI Pin and described it as “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.” However, he did have a couple of positives things to say about it, too.
For those not in the know, the Humane AI Pin looks like a strapless Apple Watch that you pin to your shirt. It deploys artificial intelligence and is supposed to one day replace your smartphone. But it has no display as such, with most of the interaction prompted by voice and coming via an interface that’s projected onto your palm.
The diminutive device was unveiled in 2023 and it launched last week as an AI assistant that’s always with you. But tech reviewers have pretty much hammered it, tearing it apart for being “too bare-bones and not all that useful,” and for simply not working as well as promised. In an article that looked at all of the hands-on reviews for the Humane AI Pin, Tom’s Guide included the words “this is a disaster” in its headline.
Then on Sunday, Brownlee, known as MKBHD on YouTube, shared his take on the device after using it for the past week. And it’s not good.
Not mincing his words, the popular YouTuber said the AI Pin was “too much of a pain to use” and was “bad at almost everything it does.” Responses to voice inquiries are often slow, he said, and they’re sometimes wrong because generative-AI chatbot technology still has a ways to go.
Battery life is poor, too, with the device lasting just a few hours with heavy use. Photos snapped with the AI Pin “look pretty bad,” the tech specialist commented, and the videos “look even worse.” Brownlee added that the projector isn’t bright enough, so it’s hard to see written content on your hand when outdoors. Oh, and it only projects text and images in green. Watch the video to find out everything he had to say about the AI Pin.
On the positive side, Brownlee liked the ease with which you could save quick voice notes while, say, you’re driving, and he also liked how it can be used for first-person videos, even though the quality at the moment is pretty poor. He added: “As a brand new product and a team trying to make something new — that I respect, I respect the attempt.”
But he concluded by saying that the AI Pin has “a long way to go” before it becomes properly usable, and said to “never buy a product based on the future promise of updates to it.”
