The year is off To a flying start in terms of new product launches and availability, even leaving aside the usual mid-tier variety that is CES. Apple has just begun pre-sale of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, with shipments starting in early February; Meanwhile, Samsung launched the next generation of the iPhone’s only viable competitor, the Galaxy S series. Although these heavyweights are trying to take the lead this year, it’s a strange stance the startup has taken on what the future of technology might look like. Personality is the most exciting thing to happen in hardware in a very long time.
I’m talking about the Rabbit R1, the AI-powered device that was unveiled with a rather impressive, if low-budget impression of an old-school Apple keynote in a small conference room deep in the rabbit shelter of a Las Vegas casino during CES. The R1 deserves praise solely for its physical design, a tidy kit created in partnership with Teenage Engineering, the gadget brand for young millennials and Gen Z everywhere.
Unlike the Apple Vision Pro, which looks like the lavish, cumbersome fragment of tech’s past masquerading as the tech future that it is, the Rabbit r1 has a brief, satisfying economy that I think is much closer to what future generations want from it. Their technology. On the functional side, the Vision Pro is a UI exercise in saturation; r1 aims to be as close as currently possible to having no UI at all.
The premise of the R1 Rabbit, in case you missed it, is that it does most, if not all, of what your smartphone can do, but uses artificial intelligence to accomplish all tasks in response to natural language queries. This can be playing music, booking a flight ticket, providing directions, hailing a flight, ordering food, real-time translation and much more.
There are a lot of questions remaining regarding how Rabbit R1 will perform in real-world situations, and how Rabbit’s business model (which so far appears to only involve selling individual units for a flat price of $199, without any recurring subscription fees) will work. But the Rabbit r1 already has the kind of organic hype that would-be competitors like Humane AI Pin wished they could muster through their lengthy, carefully-tuned, but wildly exaggerated, promotional campaign.
On the other hand, we know a lot more about how the Apple Vision Pro works and performs, thanks to a recently expanded hands-on preview program that has engaged media and influencers to come and try out the headphones in demos happening in the run-up. As of today’s pre-order day, everyone seems more than impressed with the device’s performance and visual prowess. Reactions are more mixed on everything from setup complexity, to UI elements like the visual keyboard, to long-term wearability and comfort.
To be sure, the R1 Rabbit, like the Humane AI Pin and other early AI devices starting to hit the market, has a lot of kinks to work out before it gets to a place where it’s generally useful, but generative AI actually has something in common. In common with the last major computing model revolutionized by Apple – the mobile phone. Specifically, it is used and appreciated everywhere by ordinary consumers. I lost count of the number of people who told me that they use ChatGPT every day in their actual work, and have nothing to do with the tech industry. The opposite is also true: no one I know who isn’t a professionally connected person with technology owns or regularly uses a VR headset of any kind.
Apple made the iPhone when people already loved mobile phones and started falling in love with smartphones. Rabbit introduces r1 when people are already fond of AI, as the term applies to large language models like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Apple is bringing the Vision Pro to a world where a decade or more of attempts at creating any kind of mass adoption of virtual, mixed, or augmented reality headsets have completely failed.
If Apple is right and “spatial computing” becomes the next big platform shift, I guess I’ll be too old to care that I was wrong when that happens. But increasingly, I think companies like Rabbit are working with a more realistic and viable version of the future of computing than some of the older players who are trying, and failing, to unleash the next big thing.