The reviews for Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin are here, and they’re bad. These AI-enabled devices promised to reduce our dependency on smartphones, but now everyone is wondering why they’re not apps to begin with. I have no idea if we’ll be using Rabbits and AI Pins five years from now (if so, I hope they can set alarms by then), but much of the technology we use today received terrible initial reviews.
Early reviews of a device are important as they can set the tone of whether the hardware, the company that made it, and even the whole concept of the device will succeed or fail. Getting a bad review isn’t necessarily a death sentence, but it’s a big hole to dig out of.
In some cases, companies produce a product that flops with reviewers and then make a better version themselves based on those critiques as well as what customers want. Other companies never learn from the bad reviews, and someone else comes around to make the better product. In a special third group, no one made another version because it was just a dumb idea. The common thread here is that if there’s a good idea, it gets made eventually. We don’t look back at these negative reviews as being harsh, the products were just unfinished.
Some have been quick to scold reviewers of the AI Pin and Rabbit for bad reviews, but these critiques provide an important service to the tech industry. Negative initial reviews signal to the tech companies what went wrong with the first version of a product, and what needs to get better in version two. Countless products we use today had first versions that were pretty rough around the edges, or downright awful.
In startup culture, there’s a phrase thrown around a lot called “failing fast.” Say your project completely hits a wall, falls flat on its face, or maybe someone determines it’s just an Android app. Failing fast can quickly indicate what needs to be changed about the business. Some companies learn, and innovate, as long as there’s a good idea at the center of it all. Some don’t though.
Even looking back on some of these historically negative reviews, there’s a lot of positive remarks for the products that were truly great. Here are 10 tech products that initially got terrible reviews.