How not to build a hardware product

Hello 👋🏻

It's Wednesday morning, a perfect time to sip your coffee while I talk about a topic dear to me. Sustainability.

More precisely Sustainability in hardware products.

10 months ago, two start-up founders went on stage and unveiled the Humane AI Pin.

A wearable AI device that was supposed to replace your smartphone and assist you in your daily lives.

The keynote was met with skepticism, the mood was a mix of "A pretty dark Black Mirror episode" x "Do they see themselves as the next Apple" x "OMG please I do not want to live in this future"

A few months after that the first units were shipped and, as everyone would have guessed, the reviews were bad.

MKBHD called it the worst product ever.

• Overheating product
• Bad battery life
• Constant hallucinations.

This happens when you build a product solely on LLMs. Hallucinations are part of the game, but it's not all bad when you can close the ChatGPT app and search online to verify results, it's problematic, and borderline dangerous when "you don't do apps, you do AI experiences"

I hate AI scams, but let's say that for the sake of this article, I do not care. If investors are willing to pump money into these products, it's their problem, not mine.

Now we meet the part of the timeline that is dear to me. The returns. The verge states that "between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased". So how does Humane deal with these returns?

They do not.

I'll quote the Verge again:

"Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone".

The secondhand market for the AI Pin is impossible.

I want to make my point very clear:

It is inexcusable and unacceptable to use resources to build a bad product that cannot be repurposed or re-used after the first purchase.
Scam people all you want. Take their money, and sell them air, but you do not waste the earth's resources. Period.

Let me tell you another part of the same story of sustainability in hardware products.

I'm part of the team building a new voice assistant at Nabu Casa & Home Assistant. We're soon going to release our own hardware.

The hardware will be open, and the software running on the hardware will be (already is) open, guaranteeing a long and sustainable life for every unit we release in the world.

Nevertheless, we produced a bit of waste during the development process. We went through 3 main revisions of the board. This means that boards were shipped to us, we tested them, found improvements, and asked our manufacturing partner to implement these hardware changes.

These intermediary boards had a lifetime of about a week and became "end of life" pretty fast. All in all, I think about 30 of these boards exist, only shipped to employees for internal testing.

This week is the production of the batch of 1000 units. With the development rush behind us, we are now spending a bit of time to make sure these boards do not end as dead weight.

Just because deep inside my guts, I was not sleeping well knowing I was part of a team that produced 30 boards that were destined to rot in a drawer.

Am I writing this to tell you "Their way is bad, our way is good"?

Absolutely not.

I am writing this to tell you "Their way is unacceptable and inexcusable, and our way should be the baseline for every company building hardware"

In every hardware pitch, we should see the following:

How do we make a product that does X while making sure it will keep working when our business model collapses, our servers shut down and our company dies.

Humane is not an isolated case, Spotify made the same move with their first (and only) hardware product a few months ago, we wrote about it too

Congratulations Humane on your first hardware product launch, the world hopes it will be the last.

Be better.