MKBHD calls Humane's AI Pin the worst product he's ever reviewed

What happens when the most anticipated wearable designed to replace your smartphone finally ships, and the world’s biggest reviewers universally pan it?

Humane officially launched its AI Pin last week. First unveiled in 2023, the screenless square clips to your shirt like a strapless Apple Watch, projecting a green laser interface onto your palm and relying almost entirely on voice prompts to run generative AI tasks.

Tech reviewers immediately tore the device apart, criticizing it as bare-bones, clumsy, and simply incapable of delivering on its promises. Tom’s Guide summarized the media consensus with the word disaster in its headline.

MKBHD delivers a brutal verdict

On Sunday, prominent tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) dropped his review after a week of hands-on testing. His video title pulled zero punches: The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed... For Now.

Brownlee explained that the AI Pin is too much of a pain to use and bad at almost everything it does. Voice replies are consistently sluggish, and the answers are frequently wrong due to the current limits of generative chatbots.

Hardware flaws pile up quickly. Battery life lasts only a few hours under heavy use. Photos taken with the onboard camera look pretty bad, and video clips look even worse. Outdoors, the green laser projector is nowhere near bright enough to read on your hand.

The promise trap

Brownlee did acknowledge a couple of minor bright spots. Taking quick voice notes while driving was genuinely handy, and he liked the concept of hands-free, first-person video capture, even if the footage quality is poor right now.

He also gave credit to Humane for swinging big, noting that he respects any team trying to build something genuinely new.

Still, his final takeaway was an unequivocal warning for tech shoppers: never buy a product based on the future promise of updates to it.

Why it matters

We think this wave of reviews is a massive reality check for the entire AI hardware gold rush.

For everyday consumers, the verdict is simple: do not buy this device. Spending hundreds of dollars on a gadget that struggles with basic tasks, overheats, dies within hours, and cannot be seen in broad daylight makes no practical sense. Smartphones already run AI apps faster and more reliably.

For the tech industry, Humane’s misstep exposes a fundamental flaw in the rush to kill the smartphone. Software can be patched overnight, but physical constraints like optics, battery density, and latency cannot be updated via an over-the-air fix. Trying to reinvent personal computing without the reliability of screens and instant feedback looks like a classic case of building for an imaginary future before mastering present-day utility.