Jony Ive slams Rabbit and Humane's AI gadgets

Jony Ive isn't pulling punches on the first wave of standalone AI gadgets.

While discussing his new venture, former Apple design chief Jony Ive told Bloomberg that last year’s most hyped hardware debuts—the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1—were simply "very poor products." According to the 58-year-old designer, both gadgets suffered from "an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products."

Ive’s harsh assessment comes as his startup, io, works with Sam Altman and OpenAI on a reportedly $6.5 billion AI hardware collaboration, targeting a release date sometime in 2026.

One startup fold, another pushes back

Ive’s critique echoes early reviews of both gadgets. The Verge famously noted that the Humane AI Pin "doesn't work," while calling the R1 "a worse and less functional version of your smartphone."

Humane, founded by former Apple executives, basically vanished after getting acquihired by HP and shutting down all AI Pins this past February. Rabbit, however, is still kicking, even if the early frenzy around its "large action model" has mostly cooled off.

In a statement to The Verge, Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu called Ive his personal hero, but pushed back hard against the comparison. Lyu said Rabbit doesn't like being lumped in with Humane, which he described as "a company that stopped trying, got acquired, and shut down."

Lyu acknowledged the early R1 experience was rough, but pointed out that Rabbit is operating without the billions Ive and Altman have on hand. Rabbit just added a memory log to its assistant earlier this month and is currently testing Intern, an AI-native operating system designed to run multi-agent workflows, ahead of rabbitOS 2.0.

Why it matters

Ive is calling out what everyone already knew: slapping an LLM wrapper into a plastic shell or a lapel pin does not make a revolutionary product. For regular consumers, this is your cue to keep your wallet closed on tiny AI trinkets. If you want seamless AI right now, it lives in your smartphone or your browser, not in a fragile, half-baked dedicated gadget.

For the tech industry, this draws a massive line in the sand. By openly trashing the early attempts and anchoring his own target in 2026, Ive is raising the stakes sky-high. He and Altman have the compute, the capital, and the design pedigree to rethink human-computer interaction from scratch.

That said, talking down early pioneers is the easy part. Building an entirely new hardware category without relying on existing smartphone metaphors is historically brutal. If Ive's $6.5 billion bet arrives in 2026 and feels like just another fancy voice recorder with slow cloud roundtrips, the critique he leveled at Rabbit and Humane will land right back on his own shoulders.