The year is off for a jumpstart in terms of new product launches and availability, leaving aside the usual mid-tier smorgasbord that is CES. Apple has just started pre-sales of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, with shipments starting in early February. Meanwhile, Samsung debuted the next generation of the only viable iPhone competitor out there, the Galaxy S series. However, despite these heavyweights trying to lead the year, one startup’s curious take on how to looks like the future of personal technology is the most exciting thing to happen to gadgets in a long time.
I’m talking about the rabbit r1, the AI hardware that was unveiled in a rather impressive, if low-budget, impression of an old-school Apple keynote in a small conference room deep in the rabbit hole of a Las Vegas casino during CES . The r1 deserves praise for its physical design alone, which is a neat piece of kit created in collaboration with Teenage Engineering, the “it” gadget brand of young millennials and Gen Zs everywhere.
Unlike the Apple Vision Pro, which looks like a luxurious, overburdened piece of technology’s past masquerading as technology’s future, the rabbit r1 has a pared-down, satisfying economy that I think comes much closer to what future users want. generations. their technology. On the functionality side, Vision Pro is an exercise in UI over saturation. r1 aims to be as close as you can get right now to having no UI at all.
The premise of the rabbit r1, in case you missed it, is that it does most, if not all, of what your smartphone can do, but uses artificial intelligence to complete all the tasks in response to natural language queries. This could be playing music, booking flight tickets, giving directions, ordering food, translating in real time and more.
A lot of questions remain about how the rabbit r1 will perform in real-world situations, and how rabbit’s business model (which so far seems to only involve selling individual units at a fixed price of $199, with no recurring subscription fees) will work. But the rabbit r1 already has the kind of organic hype that would-be competitors, like the Humane AI pin, wish they’d been able to enjoy with their carefully orchestrated, but over-the-top, protracted promotion campaign.
On the other hand, we do know a lot about how the Apple Vision Pro works and performs, thanks to a recently expanded hands-on preview program that attracted media and influencers to come and try the headset at demos that will take place during the build-up until today’s pre-order day and everyone seems more than impressed with the device’s performance and visual prowess. Reactions are more mixed on everything from installation complexity, to user interface elements like the visual keyboard, to long-term portability and comfort.
The rabbit r1, like the Humane AI pin and other AI-first devices starting to hit the market, no doubt has a lot of kinks to work out before it gets to a place where it’s overall useful, but genetic AI already shares something in common with last major example of computing revolutionized by Apple – the mobile phone. In particular, it is widely used and appreciated by average consumers. I’ve lost count of how many people tell me they just use ChatGPT every day for their actual work, who have nothing to do with the tech industry. The reverse is also true: No one I know who isn’t professionally connected to technology owns or regularly uses a VR headset of any kind.
Apple made the iPhone when people were already in love with cell phones and were starting to fall in love with smartphones. Rabbit introduces r1 when people are already in love with AI, as the term applies to large language models like ChatGPT. Apple, meanwhile, is bringing the Vision Pro into a world where it has for a decade or so completely failed to create any kind of mass-use virtual, mixed, or augmented reality headset.
If Apple is right and “spatial computing” becomes the next big platform change, I suspect I’ll be too old to care that I was wrong until it happens. But increasingly, I think companies like rabbit are working with a more realistic and viable version of the future of computing than some of the legacy players out there trying, and failing, to call the next big thing.
