Humane AI Pin

The $699 phone killer that HP switched off ten months in

Shut down
19902026

The Humane AI Pin was a $699 wearable built by ex-Apple designers to replace the smartphone: no screen, a voice assistant, a laser display projected onto your palm. It shipped in April 2024 to some of the harshest reviews in consumer tech history. Ten months later HP bought Humane's assets for $116 million and the Pins were switched off for good, ten days after the announcement.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2018
  2. 2018 Launch
    Humane is founded

    Two senior ex-Apple people set out to build what comes after the phone.

  3. 2023
  4. 9 November 2023 Feature
    The AI Pin is revealed

    $699 plus $24 a month. No screen, a voice, a laser on your palm.

  5. 2024
  6. 11 April 2024 Launch
    Shipping begins

    The reviews are historically bad. "Not even close."

  7. June 2024 Incident
    Charging case fire warning

    Customers are told to stop using a charging accessory.

  8. 2025
  9. 18 February 2025 Shutdown announced
    HP buys the assets for $116 million

    The Pin business is explicitly excluded from the deal.

  10. 28 February 2025 Shutdown
    The servers go off

    At noon Pacific, every AI Pin in the world stops working.

The site through time

Browse hu.ma.ne as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2024 2025 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno (Humane Inc.) 2018–2025 Founded Ex-Apple founders, over $230 million raised
HP 2025–2025 Acquisition, $116M Bought the software, patents and team for $116 million and left the Pin to die

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: HP bought Humane's software, patents and most of its staff for $116 million on 18 February 2025, explicitly not buying the AI Pin business. Humane told customers their devices would stop connecting to its servers at noon Pacific time on 28 February 2025, ten days later. Without the servers the Pin could no longer call, message or answer questions.

Our analysis: The Pin asked people to pay $699 plus $24 a month to replace a phone with a slower, hotter device that could do less, and reviewers said so in unusually blunt terms. The interesting failure is not the hardware, it is the dependency: the Pin was a thin client for Humane's servers, so when the company sold itself, every unit in the world stopped working on a date named in an email.

History [edit]

After the iPhone

Imran Chaudhri spent over twenty years designing interfaces at Apple, including much of the iPhone's. He and Bethany Bongiorno, a former Apple software engineering director, founded Humane in 2018 around the idea that the phone's successor should disappear into your clothing. The pitch attracted more than $230 million from investors including Sam Altman and Microsoft, and years of secrecy amplified the expectations.

The AI Pin was revealed in November 2023: a small square badge worn magnetically on the chest, with no screen. You talked to it, it talked back through GPT-powered assistants, a camera saw what you saw, and a green laser projected a minimal display onto your palm. It cost $699 plus a mandatory $24 a month for the connectivity and AI behind it.

Contact

Shipping began on 11 April 2024, and the reviews were among the harshest ever written about a mainstream consumer product. The Verge's review, titled "not even close", catalogued wrong answers, long pauses, overheating and a device that could not do most things a phone does. The most-watched review on YouTube called it the worst product its author had ever tested. The problems were not polish; the Pin was slower and less capable than the phone it was meant to replace, at a higher price.

Sales reportedly ran in the low tens of thousands at best, a charging accessory was pulled over fire concerns, and by mid-2024 the company was looking for a buyer.

Ten days' notice

On 18 February 2025 HP announced it was acquiring Humane's software platform, patents and most of its employees for $116 million, to build an AI lab inside HP. The Pin itself was not part of the deal. Humane emailed customers that at noon Pacific on 28 February their devices would lose connection to the servers permanently, taking calling, messaging and the assistant with them. Owners of a ten-month-old $699 device were left with a paperweight and advice to export their photos quickly.

The Pin's afterlife is as a case study, cited whenever a product's entire function lives on someone else's servers.

Similar projects

Zune Microsoft's answer to the iPod, five years late 2006–2015 HP TouchPad Killed 49 days after launch 2011–2011 iPod 1,000 songs in your pocket 2001–2022 Google Glass The face computer the public rejected 2013–2023 Microsoft Kin Dead in 48 days 2010–2011 Pebble The smartwatch Kickstarter built, and Fitbit buried 2013–2018

Sources [edit]

  1. Humane raises $100M TechCrunch 1 September 2021 [archived]
  2. Humane AI Pin review: not even close The Verge 11 April 2024 [archived]
  3. Humane's AI Pin is dead, as HP buys startup's assets for $116M TechCrunch 18 February 2025 [archived]

Last verified: 14 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).