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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

When I see such things I immediately ask myself a question, why is this not an app? There’s no good answer to that question in this case. IDK why they even bothered with the hardware side. It’d seem to me that you could do it later if app gets sufficient traction

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I think a better question is: “what problem in my existence does this solve”.

This one is a definite none.

There are multiple problems this could solve, actually. I can think up of at least one every day that a sufficiently advanced agentic AI could do for me, freeing me up from mundane bullshit. Imagine having a secretary onto whom you could offload bullshit tasks using freeform human language without any accommodations needed for the AI, and with near perfect contextual knowledge of what you’re currently dealing with. That’s the promise. But that promise is years away and in the meanwhile I’d be inclined to conserve my runway a bit more, especially when entering the era where borrowing costs are relatively high.

I had a human one of them. I spent more time interacting with it and dealing with misunderstandings and corrections than I gained from not solving the problems myself.

As pointed out elsewhere I was gaslit into changing the subject by an LLM the other day and then it got stuff wrong. End game is it created more work than not using it.

And that’s what we need to be careful of. The promise versus benefits of technology are not always obviously swayed towards the benefit end.

You’re probably not using GPT4. If that’s the case, you aren’t really using an “LLM”. With GPT5 that gap will be even more obvious.

These AI assistants (Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin), as they exist now, probably can be replaced by apps. However, if you give them the benefit of the doubt and think about what they're supposed to be (or eventually will be), owning the platform is a must.

An example: Google/Apple doesn't allow third-party apps access to call audio. So you couldn't implement live translation/transcription, by just being an app.

Google/Apple will jealously guard their turf in their ecosystems (to make space for their own AI assistants probably), so this level of third-party access is unlikely to be forthcoming.

I agree as someone who's wanted to develop an iOS app for years but can't get over the App Store monopoly risk.

But, from a business sense, doesn't it seem like they're doing it backwards? Why not make a best-in-class AI assistant app, build a big userbase, and take the money to research hardware and harass Apple concurrently? Why start with hardware first?

Because money, we are really just talking about a company here, that has no real interest in serving customers.

When they decided to charge $80 for a plastic bag to carry the op1, that was made abundantly clear.

They don't make good products. What they do well is hype and style over substance.

Ya, my hope is that this device pushes Apple and Google to bake some of these features into our phones. For example, I should be able to tell my phone to email or text the photo I'm looking at to <a list of people> and it just does it.

I enjoyed this Youtube review: https://x.com/concept_central/status/1784701228829835546

Apple and Google take 30% of app revenue and love to implement in the OS the best features of popular apps. It's a bad deal for most businesses.

Is it a better deal to blow your entire runway + opportunity cost on hardware that nobody wants?

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