Using a vulnerability not found until after the software stopped being maintained feels a bit like cheating :)

I definitely agree. Humane cared about physical device security a lot and it really shows with how they built out the firmware.

Me too. Kudos to the team.

Right. I think it's just a way of saying that he got the key through unorthadox means. But I'd say it's quite likely via a former employee.

It makes me think of those laser projection keyboards that were widely sold as novelty items about 15ish years ago. It was futuristic even back then but considered mostly impractical

Reminds me of juicero, apperently it's engineering was also pretty solid.

Is it that flawed? Maybe a bit early and not enough cash behind them as say a company like Meta or Apple (planning to pivot the VR headset into AR glasses).

While I agree it was ultimately flawed, I think it's likely that the core team at Humane genuinely thought this was the future of computing, and clearly put in a lot of effort.

... And maybe something like this is, it was probably just too early.

They engineered it properly, which costs a lot. Rabbit R1 was much like how you described; repurposed cheap Android phone with minimal gimmick.

This one looked a lot more lovely thanks to the amount of brain juice spent on it, but otherwise, the end result was ~same.

This is something you can accomplish very easily in a ESP32 form factor, streaming audio over wifi/bluetooth. However, it doesn't fully deliver the same experience; the goal was for it to replace your phone, so it needs to support a lot more functionality such as data persistence, offline support, notifications, cellular, maybe some form of visual IO (the laser projector), etc.

From my perspective I was just interested in the excellent industrial design, which is something that is virtually impossible for a DIY setup to attain.

What do you mean by 'making this a product?'

Building proofs of concept isn't that hard.

When you need to produce thousands of them, and you've got market/product/engineering requirements, V&V, component sourcing, production tooling to set up, and, importantly, a budget, things get hard (or at least time consuming) quickly.

It's got a nifty laser projector, that's it. It could be a smartphone app.

The actual idea itself seems flawed rather than just the implementation. Ordering an uber on your phone and seeing where it is on the map is always going to be easier than trying to do it through voice and a hand projector.

And the rabbit was just an android app bundled with a low end phone.

Smartphones exploded when devs were given a bunch of cool new I/O followed by rapid cost reduction. Shame that the startups doing the cool hardware don’t do that… can’t say it’s the funding. They sure had enough.

I guess I just don’t see the appeal over a smartphone. How often are your hands incapacitated where it warrants all the other advantages of that form factor? And the R1 form factor largely didn’t even have that advantage.