Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why I Wanted The Rabbit R1 To Win”.
Sponsored by surf shark by now, you probably already know what the rabbit R1 is, and you probably also know that you shouldn’t buy it. I was at the launch party at the tww hotel on April 23rd. I bought the R1 like everyone else there and, like almost every other reviewer, I too spent the next couple weeks in a cloud of confusion. How could a company ship something so obviously UNF finished, especially just weeks after a very similar product, was very publicly roasted in part for making the same mistake? I wanted to delve into those questions in my rabbit R1 review, which, unfortunately, I’ve had to cancel because of personal issues. I’Ll touch on at the end of this video.
So in lie of Simply repeating what everyone else has already said about why the R1 is destined to become the next Dust Bunny in our Gadget, hidey holes. I thought our time could be better spend, taking a look at the reasons why so many of us are so unhoppy about it reason number four, it’s all in the timing. The R1 was unveiled in January at CES, which isn’t always the best place to debut a product, but sometimes it really pays off. For 2024, most of us media SL influenzas were expecting exactly what we got a lot of single-purpose heavily Niche gadgets with the buzzword and AI tacked on like an afterthought, I’m talking like a robot companion for your dog, a grill that uses AI to cook the perfect Steak and I sh you not an AI powered baby cry translator thanks to CET for rounding all those up, so I didn’t have to you believe any of that anyway, into that sea of Shameless gimmickry leapt the R1, an endearing little box painted a color. You couldn’t possibly ignore with Hardware by a beloved design, firm and a limited but focused feature set. The R1 was anchored by a simple promise, best encapsulated by David Pierce at The Verge. It would make your life easier by using your apps for you, thanks to something called a large action model more on this in a second, it was unveiled by CEO, Jesse Lou in person not on an ostentatiously oversized stage, but in a modest ballroom at a hotel. On the strip and as hard as Jesse’s announcement, video tried to strike a tone of jobian visionary shtick.
It failed and to be clear, I’m saying this was a very good thing. Jesse was obviously proud and possessed of a Clear Vision for rabbit’s first product, but his sheer passion both on film and in person overcame the Slick veneer. The launch video was trying to project. This was a guy. A room full of fellow Geeks could relate to the kind of person you just kind of naturally fall into a first name basis with, and he answered questions frankly with a refreshing lack of Polish. Unless you think I’m dwelling too much on the cult of personality, his product sounded compelling at 200 bucks with no subscription.
It wasn’t particularly expensive. It wasn’t overly ambitious because Jesse explicitly said it wasn’t meant to be a phone replacement and, most crucially rabbit, wasn’t Humane. Up till this point. In January 2024, the only AI powered consumer Hardware that had really made a mainstream Splash was human’s. Ai pin, as subscribers will know, I covered that combadge in a dedicated review, and I was heartbroken by how undercooked and unreliable it ended up being. But even before the pin got onto my chest, Humane was already chest deep in we.
We call him Skeptics the company’s announcement, video alienated, almost everybody. It was chock full of that Silicon Valley self-importance that normal people are by now, rightfully sick of and hume’s outsized ambition to replace the smartphone was interpreted by many as hubris. Now, for the record, I did have the opportunity to meet hum’s, co-founders and in person. I found them to be much more down to earth than I expected, as we would see in later videos from the company, but at CES in January. All people knew about Humane was that it came from people who, as the times told it, were inspired by a Buddhist monk named brother Spirit, whom they’ met through their acupuncturist before he referred them to Mark Benny off the price of freeing you from the smartphone. You probably love $ 700 plus a $ 24 a month subscription in that context, the quirky rabbit R1, with its bouncing bunny head and cutesy name and design put forth by a CEO who Rick Rolled himself in his own launch.
Video like it was 2008, was a breath of fresh air, and it certainly didn’t hurt that it was driven by one really good idea as it actually exists. The R1 is a novelty. In fact that was the thesis of my aborted review. A bunch of us who’ve been covering phones for more than a decade. Have, I think, approached it too much like it’s a phone when what it really is is a toy. You can use it to ask perplexity, which is an AI chatbot for answers to common questions, or you can point its camera at objects in the world and it’ll interpret what it a little more than half the time. You’Ll get a response, that’s actually truthful or useful. Before becoming the home of descendant of Thieves, the address 247 mulbury Street was the site of the ravenite social club, which was a notorious hangout for the gambino crime family.
The club was founded in 1926 as the alto KN social club and later became the ravenite club under the leadership of Carlo Gambino. Well, the rest of the time you end up with unreliable trash. In my experience, that’s just just large language models in 2024. It is what it is, but rabbit distinguished itself, because the dream it was really trying to sell was the large action model, a feature that would let you teach the R1 to perform tasks for you, the examples rabbit gave at CES and at its launch event, were Ordering food through door Dash calling a car via Uber and playing music on Spotify, oh and generating terrible AI artwork in mid Journey, but I’m as confused as Miriam jar was on her podcast.
About that. Why do I need this for Mid Journey? Mid journey is something I want to do on my Mac or like on a big screen to see that big image and refine. My prompt, like the whole thing, is like that anyway, none of that works – or at least none of it works well.
This is the reason behind the blowback rabbit faces today. It launched as the very definition of a minimum viable product and still I’ve never successfully gotten food via door Dash. I’Ve never successfully called a car on Uber and Spotify is broken in several different ways, and all I had to do to see for myself how broken these features were, was log into a virtual machine on one of rabbit’s servers somewhere and trust it with my logins.
I mean that’s okay, because rabbit can be trusted right now. Despite all this, I really do love the idea behind the large action model, the notion of just pressing a walkie-talkie button and telling the R1 to take me to poly G’s or order. My usual from Emmy, squar or other non-pizza related requests that fire and forget action. Like you’re just talking to a personal assistant, I don’t know, maybe I’m easily impressed or just too damn busy all the time, but I find it compelling rabbit, didn’t invent the idea of teaching a computer to do things like this. For you, in fact, some reporting suggests the company is actually using an off-the-shelf automation, solution called playright to sort of fake a large action model which is yet another ding to the company’s credibil. If true, but packaging up that idea into a cute cheap Gadget that I can carry and a cute, not cheap, teenage engineering, pouch and promising a future of computers that no one needs to learn how to use it makes me excited for gadgets again and that’s actually.
That’S not something I’m proud of, because the last reason I and I think others wanted the R1 to live up to the hype is because we’re all so bored I’ve had this steamer trunk desk since I launched mrmobile in 2016 and I’ve been stockpiling old review devices Within it, basically from the beginning, picking out a drawer at random Jesus Christmas, let me show you what most of those products have looked like this, as I’ve often lamented is the state of smartphones today, slight variations on elongated rectangular boxes with ever narrowing differentiators, mostly focused On cameras that many of you don’t care much about cuz, you tell me in the comments very often even foldables, those one-time saviors of my sanity in this ever duller world, have slumped into a cycle of iterative successors combined with the recent loss of fossil in the Wearable world and the similarly Relentless sameness of tablets and laptops. You know I I desperately want gadgets to be fun again. So can you blame me for wanting something like a holographic, tric combadge, to be the disruptor that its brother spirit and Benny offb Visionaries claimed it to be? Can you blame me for wanting a bright orange toy to change our relationship to technology? I suppose you could, but I won’t sit for it because, just as I told everyone they shouldn’t buy the AI pen, I’m also saying here redundantly now that most every other reviewer has said it that no one should buy the R1 either even at 199. It’S simply not worth it because Apple and Google are just going to build better versions of the r1’s features into the next generation of virtual assistants, which is probably why rabbit was in such a rush to get the R1 out in the first place.
Look: it’s not about the fact that the thing is just a cheap, Android phone running, an app that you can hack to run on other phones. People have made a big deal out of of that, but, like the Humane, AI pin, is also just a tiny Android phone truthfully. I wouldn’t mind it if the R1 delivered anything close to its original promise, but the product is criminally unfinished and the company’s Origins are charitably complicated. This Refugee from The Island of Misfit Toys is no more the SV to the Sea of sameness than any of the rest of them are, and no amount of boredom or disillusionment can get me to call it any other way. Even if it makes me want to tear my hair out 30 days, that is the longest. I have gone without posting a video on the channel since the Channel’s Inception. So I figured I owed you a little explanation: meat steam pot, one of two cute little kitties that I adopted recently, the other when is Tugboat and he’s off, causing trouble and probably breaking something. Steampot was diagnosed recently with a very serious illness that required treatment requires treatment for 12 weeks in the form of daily painful injections that I must administer myself.
So that is the principal reason for the disruption in the production rate. I’Ve had to learn how to do kitty injections and learn other things about Kitty biology and book, vet texts and house sitters and things for the travel that is coming up to make more Mr mobile videos, and so that’s the short story. The Silver Lining the medication is working well and her spirits are up and she is much like her old selfelf again so fingers crossed it’s going to be a happy ending for us all, not asking for any money.
Not not I’m fine, but I just wanted to let you know that uh I didn’t just up and leave for a month for no good reason. It’S been very difficult, very stressful, but I think the indicators are trending positively. Oh and there’s tugboat.
Yes, he’s cleaning me before he eats me: they are very sweet kitties. We don’t do that. We don’t bite come on anyway. Thank you for your patience. I look forward to posting videos regularly once again, as we all three adapt to our new reality. Privacy is a big deal these days and, if you’re looking for a way to protect that privacy, consider my sponsor surf shark with surf shark, you get a lot more than just a VPN clean web automatically blocks more than a million malicious websites, fishing methods and other Threats while alternative ID builds, you a brand new online identity, so you can stop giving away your phone number or email every time you register on a new website and with multihop you can put more than one server between you and your destination for even even greater Privacy and security surf shark doesn’t log its users activity a claim recently verified by a thirdparty audit from deoe, and it’s also converted all of its infrastructure to dis list servers. That means that any information that would usually stay on hard drives is automatically deleted. Whenever those servers are turned off, secure your privacy with surf shark visit the link in the description and use coupon code, Mr mobile, for an extra 3 months free. This video was produced following several weeks with the rabbit R1 review sample purchased by Mr mobile. At the rabbit R1 launch event in New York City, I received no compensation from the manufacturer for this review and I never offer manufacturers the ability to provide editorial input or grant them any copy approval rights.
Concerning the content I produce, Please Subscribe if you’d like to see more videos like this until next time from Michael Fischer Captain tones on threads thanks for watching and stay mobile. My friends .