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.
Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
#32I 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…
It's not a world-changing device, but it's a very useful accessory.
Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
#33Off 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?
Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
#34Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
#35When 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]
#36It 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."
Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
#37It 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."
Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
#38I 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…
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]
#39His 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.
Re: Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
#40His 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