“Truly a middle finger”: Humane bricking $700 AI Pins with limited refunds
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Duped? I would say yes, except it was such an obviously bad, dead end product (before it started literally catching fire), that anyone who bought one has no one to blame but themselves.
Don't buy stupid products!
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A lot of people with more money than sense fancy themselves as “early adopters” of this kind of tech.
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Yes, that's the most interesting part of this story IMO. According to the NY Times, "Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno will join the company, as will the majority of the start-up’s employees, an HP spokeswoman said."
So in addition to spending $116m on AI software of dubious value, they now have to pay the salaries of an entire team, including the two people who lit the dumpster on fire in the first place. My guess is that a year or two from now, HP will realize they'd have been better off burning the $116m for heat.
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I knew it! The whole purpose of the company really WAS just an educational effort, getting the word out about enshitificafion!
What a fantastic public service!
What a fantastic public service!
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HP is a very, very poorly managed company. Honestly, it makes total sense that they'd be the acquirer, just because there aren't that many companies with hundreds of millions of dollars to throw around and totally incompetent management teams.
Boeing would've been an option, I suppose. "We are thrilled to announce that with this acquisition we have meaningfully expanded our portfolio of 'battery-operated devices that catch fire.'"
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Oh well, time to raise the DRM-protected ink and toner prices again.
(Sigh, I remember long long ago when HP made good printers.)
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In that vein:
DUH!
Jesus, you buy into some rushed hack because "AI IS BIG!" and you don't stop to consider that outside of a few relatively niche areas, AI has no real good use at all? That Reddit user needs to hear that they were not duped. They were gullible and talked themself yourself into a really, really stupid decision.
Some good may come of this for the folks who bought into this half-baked nonsense. A thing that's desperately needed in today's world: Stopping and actually THINKING about what the fuck they're buying into.
But, since people these days don't seem to understand that this decision was on THEM, since all the hype for this screamed that they were biting off a whole lot more than they could chew from the start, I expect that self-righteous indignation is about all we can even hope for.
God, make the population stupid and they will whine.
Too much, "Shut up and take my money" syndrome here.
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Just because someone isn't smart, that doesn't justify robbing them. It's their fault for buying a bad product. It's not their fault that criminals decided to brick the product they just paid a lot of money for. The former doesn't justify the latter. Stealing is wrong whether the person you steal from is stupid or smart.
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Love Chaudhri's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imran_Chaudhri Looks like it's managed by a PR firm, with no mention of just how much of a disaster Humane has been (for both customers and investors, though I suspect not for the founders).
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To expect a refund is silly. It's a startup that has been circling the drain for a year. Why would they give money back that they don't have anymore? When a large tech company launches a failure, they refund the users because they have a name to uphold (see Amazon with that home robot, and Google with Stadia and their round audio device many years ago).
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I will say this--and this should not be taken as support for Humane the corporation or any of the people primarily responsible for making decisions there--the basic concept is kind of cool, for certain very carefully modulated values of "cool." Having a TNG-type communicator pin is something that a lot of people would like as a wearable (and there have already been attempts to market Bluetooth-enabled speaker pins that could do that), and the laser quasi-HUD was also not the worst idea in the world. But it was too expensive and the tech wasn't there, and the makers of this thing forgot the lesson that Theranos and other companies like it had already learned at a very heavy cost: "fake it until you make it" only works if you don't have to fake it for very long.
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Friendly reminder: If its an "AI" device that requires a connection to a backend service to work, it's not an AI device. It's a communications device. And the service it connects to can go away at any time.
“All device shipments prior to November 15th, 2024, are not eligible for refunds. All refunds must be submitted by February 27th, 2025.” - Read as, "Thanks for the money. OK, byeeeeeeee!"
“All device shipments prior to November 15th, 2024, are not eligible for refunds. All refunds must be submitted by February 27th, 2025.” - Read as, "Thanks for the money. OK, byeeeeeeee!"
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Fun note, Humane's return policy on their site is actually listed as 30 days. They are stipulating 90 days for these refunds because that's the timeframe for most credit card disputes, and they know they would lose every single one.
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Come on, let's be fair! I'm sure it will also be able to report that it is unable to connect to the server!
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I fully expect Chaudhri and his founding partner to have a couple of fatal accidents in a year or two... Really weird boating accident and a really oddly timed car accident perhaps?
(ref: Autonomy )
(ref: Autonomy )
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Yes, I think at this point it's not so much a cloud as a thick, impenetrable, bronchi-clogging smog of skepticism.
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In a perfect world, Chaudhri and Bongiorno would never work in tech again after such an obvious grift. Obviously we don't live in a perfect world...
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For some reason what offends me most is that the return window ends before they brick the device. So if you're a happy customer (ha!) who doesn't religiously follow tech news and you don't realize that your AI Pin is about to be rendered (even more) useless... too bad! By the time your device stops working, it's too late for a refund, even if you would otherwise have been within the refund window. Talk about screwing your customers.
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300 of them. So like $380 thousand a patent. just a few of them. https://patents.justia.com/assignee/humane-inc Cheaper then individually getting lawyers to do this i guess?
I mean if someone sued HP for making a Wireless charger that works through clothing and transmits data between the battery and device. They got that covered by a How the hell did they get approval for this patent. https://patents.justia.com/patent/11722013
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Haha - I can't believe it took this long for me to be introduced to the Heisenberg Battery Uncertainty Principle!
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As a fan of checking my battery level, I feel like I've gotten my money's worth.
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I'm amazed anyone bought one, but they still deserve a refund. This should be mandated by federal law. If you buy a product that requires a company's servers/etc they should have to refund you if they shut the servers down before 5-10 years
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Honestly if you bought into this you should have known it was a product with no purpose or raison d'être and you were basically using a technology plaything that could die any second.
All the signs and risks were evident.
It's like being surprised when you sign up for cryogenic freezing and then nobody thaws you out. I mean, if you could be surprised, cos ya know ... frozen and dead.
All the signs and risks were evident.
It's like being surprised when you sign up for cryogenic freezing and then nobody thaws you out. I mean, if you could be surprised, cos ya know ... frozen and dead.
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The really shitty thing is their total sales was apparently less than 10% of this deal. According to older linked articles, they sold on the order of $9M worth of devices. The current deal is reported to be for $116M. So they could refund all the money and still be getting a hefty payout. It's not like the money isn't there. Greed is a hell of a drug apparently.
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The most hypocritical name since MAGA and GOP.
I hope the lawyers get them before they are protected by the Orange manure pile.
I hope the lawyers get them before they are protected by the Orange manure pile.
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I'm assuming a smart printer is one that knows it can still print black text, even if the yellow ink cartridge is empty.
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Well...the problem they said they were trying to solve is a valid one, namely that people are spending too much time burying their faces in their phones. The problem they actually tried to solve is the Star Trek communicator badge, which is also not a bad idea IMO.
Where they fundamentally went wrong is to claim that the latter doubles as the solution to the former, conveniently ignoring the depiction of Federation officers carrying tricorders along with their badges.
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I was waiting for a repeat of WebOS. Thanks, HP, I never doubted your ability to waste or squander money.
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HP is insane shelling out a single penny for any part of this dumpster fire, no way in hell are the assets they're buying worth $115 million, but hey now I'm sure they'll have an excuse to do more layoffs instead of using that money to pay employees
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Nora Lenderbee
Ars Tribunus Militum
The financial pages say that Humane is a private company with just 16 total investors. They never went public, so mom and pop investors didn't lose out, just the venture capital people, and of course the early adopter customers who bought the gadget. It could have been worse.
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