Live data from Hacker News

Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

youtube.com

31–40 of 88 posts

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#31
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a product class that's racing against the clock of Google and Apple baking basically the same functionality into their operating systems and making these dedicated widgets (even more) pointless. I'm not optimistic that Google and Apples take will be significantly more useful than these half-baked attempts, but at least they won't require you to pay for and then juggle an extra device.

These devices have no reason to exist. This entire device could be an app on a phone and be 500% more useful and less expensive. I understand this particular product is [edit] designed by Teenage Engineering and it's kinda what they do. But that makes it a niche product. But there is no reason for a serious product to have a screen, a camera, a speaker, and a network connection and not be a smartphone.

[deleted]

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#32
post #22

I love how people compare products like this or Apple Vision Pro to the original iPhone to make the point that products with limited appeal can flourish into something incredibly useful. The comparison is bad. The iPhone promised to be three things: a phone, an iPod, and a web browser. And it performed these tasks well! It didn’t oversell what it was, and it was a revelation. I owned the first gen shortly after it ca…

The Apple Watch is a useful device. It integrates seamlessly with my phone, has various fitness tracking features including water activities, delivers important notifications without making noise, and gives me access to use voice commands on my phone. Its overnight charging gives me a nightstand alarm clock.

It's not a world-changing device, but it's a very useful accessory.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#33

Off topic but all these LLM-pin/tool/device keep building around chat. Chat is a genuinely horrible interface for conveying information to users, but it provides a nice layer of polite plausible deniability when the response is total garbage.

Likewise, after mastering how to find answers by typing in the correct few keywords, why go backwards and use slow/ambiguous written or spoken conversation as a query language?

Not sure if I understand this complaint, since you can still use just a few keywords if you want, and it works fine, but you can also now be much more precise and it works even better.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#34
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

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#35
post #34

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

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

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#36

It should be called the MINECRAPIFICATION of EVERYTHING! Who knows if Notch was the first to herald in this new paradigm of half-finished products? It's the first thing that comes to mind every time I experience, read about or witness a product, service or idea that isn't quite fully baked. I say, "Self, they are just cashing in while they iterate and extend... or not."

Am I missing something? What does Minecraft have to do with half-baked products? It seems like they went with an approach of having a free alpa/beta release until they had a release ready game, then have spent a decade adding more content to it?

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#37

It should be called the MINECRAPIFICATION of EVERYTHING! Who knows if Notch was the first to herald in this new paradigm of half-finished products? It's the first thing that comes to mind every time I experience, read about or witness a product, service or idea that isn't quite fully baked. I say, "Self, they are just cashing in while they iterate and extend... or not."

I think the difference is that Minecraft alpha/beta was fun and actually promised very little. I paid for the beta (used cracked clients before then, when I was 12) and enjoyed it for what it was, I couldn't have cared less about "future updates". There was never any mention of "future features" in Minecraft (then-guerilla) marketing.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#38
post #22

I love how people compare products like this or Apple Vision Pro to the original iPhone to make the point that products with limited appeal can flourish into something incredibly useful. The comparison is bad. The iPhone promised to be three things: a phone, an iPod, and a web browser. And it performed these tasks well! It didn’t oversell what it was, and it was a revelation. I owned the first gen shortly after it ca…

That's a bit too charitable to the first iPhone. I had one too, and it was heavily lambasted for being virtually unusable with an Edge connection as well as being attached to AT&T... and unsubsidised. Even on wifi it was fairly stuttery, but yes, it had a real web browser which was remarkable.

It was a great product though if you wanted to be future-shocked and to draw a ton of attention in public. But the 3g is where it took off as a consumer device.

Of course something like this product is on the verge of snake oil in comparison.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#39
post #14

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell. Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've…

I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.

The product owner in a company should be defining success for the development goals in agile, not beta tested on the paying public.

Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

#40

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell. Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've…

It's his core philosophy: "Never. Ever. Buy a tech product based on the promise of future software updates." https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1383616274693951494

Similarly, promise of future plugins from “the community”.
Post reply on HN