The story of the infamous Humane Ai Pin is coming to an end. This week, the company announced that HP—known for its computers and printers that always seem to need a refill—will acquire several assets from Humane in a $116 million deal expected to close at the end of the month.
HP will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, a few Humane employees—including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno—and Humane’s Cosmos operating system. Late in 2024, Humane looked to license this operating system so that third parties could inject the AI voice assistant into other products, like cars. However, nothing materialized.
Humane became Silicon Valley’s “next big thing” in late 2023 when it unveiled its AI wearable, equipped with a ChatGPT-powered assistant and a laser-projected display, that promised to replace your smartphone. But when reviews arrived at launch in 2024—you can read ours here—it was panned. The issues were seemingly endless: It frequently overheated; the AI hallucinated often; there were hardly any useful features; the projector was annoying … and so on.
Unsurprisingly, HP doesn’t want to do much with the Ai Pin hardware. Sales have effectively stopped, and Humane will issue refunds to anyone who bought a pin after November 15, 2024 (if you did, why?). Existing Ai Pins will cease to function after noon Pacific on February 28. Almost every core feature will stop working—but you can still find out how much battery is left!—and your data will be deleted, so make sure you sync and download it now.
As for HP, it plans to integrate Humane’s Cosmos AI into its products to “unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI.” Good luck with that. In the meantime, Humane engineers will form a group called HP IQ, an innovation lab that will apparently build an ecosystem of smart features throughout HP’s line of products. Maybe that’ll mean a printer that will finally not drive its user crazy? Fingers crossed.
Gear Roundup
All the top gear news of the week in one place. Here’s more you may have missed this week:
Photograph: Apple; Getty Images
Table of Contents
Apple Improves the Vision Pro’s Guest Mode
Apple announced this week that Apple Intelligence will be coming to its Vision Pro headset as a part of visionOS 2.4, though the update is expected to roll out in April. It doesn’t just bring the suite of artificial intelligence features—like ChatGPT-powered writing assistance, Genmoji, and Image Playground—it claims to greatly improve the guest experience on Vision Pro.
Currently, if you want to let someone try the Vision Pro, the owner has to wear it first to authenticate and unlock the headset, and then enable Guest Mode. Running visionOS 2.4, guests can wear the headset, and owners will receive a notification on their iPhone or iPad (which needs to be nearby) to allow access. AVP owners can also now choose what apps guests can see, and guests can save their eye and hand setup for up to 30 days so they won’t have to run through the tutorial and setup of the headset every time.
Courtesy of Apple
A new app—Spatial Gallery—is also bundled into visionOS 2.4. Curated by Apple, it will feature spatial videos, photos, and panoramas designed to be viewed on the headset. Apple says you can expect new content regularly from photographers, brands, and behind-the-scenes moments from Apple Originals like Severance.
There are several other minor features in visionOS 2.4, but one notable addition is tied to the rollout of iOS 18.4. In April, Apple Vision Pro owners will magically find a new app on their iPhone running iOS 18.4 (it will also be available to download for everyone else). The app is called Apple Vision Pro, and it’s designed to let you discover new content to enjoy on the Vision Pro, allowing you to queue up a movie or remotely download an app so that you don’t need to spend extra time in that headset you dropped $3,500 on. The app will also feature tips and headset software information, too.
On a related note about Apple Intelligence, Apple confirmed this week that Visual Intelligence (which lets you use the iPhone 16 camera with a ChatGPT-powered Siri to identify and learn more about objects around you) will come to the iPhone 15 Pro models in a software update. This comes after the announcement of the iPhone 16e, where Visual Intelligence is baked into the Action Button. iPhone 15 Pro users can trigger it via the Action Button or the Control Center.
Eero Debuts Cheaper Wi-Fi 7 Mesh Routers
Every new version of Wi-Fi brings faster speeds, better security, and enhanced stability. The first wave of routers is always super expensive, and there’s little point in updating until you have devices that support the new standard. But now that the latest phones and laptops support Wi-Fi 7, companies like Eero are introducing reasonably priced Wi-Fi 7 mesh routers. Say hello to the Eero 7 and Eero Pro 7, announced this week and shipping on February 26.
Building out its Wi-Fi 7 range, the Eero 7 is the dual-band (2.4-GHz and 5-GHz) entry-level option, which promises wireless speeds up to 1.8 Gbps and two 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports on each router. An Eero 7 two-pack can cover up to 4,000 square feet, and, though it lacks the speedy 6-GHz band, it does offer all the other goodies Wi-Fi 7 has in store, including enhanced WPA3 security, Multi-Link Operation (MLO) to connect on multiple bands and channels simultaneously, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) for more connected devices, and 4K-QAM to pack more data into each signal.