Every AI wearable we were told to admire is now switched off

If you designed a screenless wearable in 2024 you had three products to point at. In 2026 you can buy none of them.

Humane's AI Pin was a $499 screenless device from two former Apple designers. HP acquired most of Humane's assets in February 2025 for a reported $116m, against the roughly $230m the company had raised. Sales stopped immediately and the servers were switched off at the end of that month. Devices people had paid for stopped answering, and customer data was deleted.
TechCrunch's report: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/humanes-ai-pin-is-dead-as-hp-buys-startup-for-116m/

The Limitless Pendant was the one that actually worked. A $99 clip that listened to your conversations and turned them into searchable notes, from a team that had raised about $33m. Meta acquired the company in December 2025, pulled the hardware from sale and moved the team into Reality Labs. Existing owners kept working software. Nobody new could buy one.

Rabbit's R1 is still sold, and its reception is its own argument. Tom's Guide titled its review "Avoid this AI gadget". The recurring complaints were that it was slow, that battery life was poor, and that a phone already did the same things with less friction.

This is not three unlucky companies

Every one of them tried to be a second device with its own brain, its own connection and its own subscription. That sets a bar that is almost impossible to clear: it has to be better at answering you than the £900 computer already in your pocket, while having a smaller battery, a worse radio and no app ecosystem.

It also means the company has to stay alive for the product to keep working. That is the part that should worry anyone buying one. When Humane's servers went dark, the object did not degrade to a simpler version of itself. It stopped being anything.

Reviewers kept reaching the same sentence from different directions: your phone already does this. That was treated as a criticism of the execution. We think it was a description of the category.

So we did not build a second brain

Vyldor is a leather belt that works as an interface to the phone you already own. It has no processor deciding what you meant, no SIM, no subscription and no cloud of its own. The phone does the assistant, the routing and the connection. The belt does the part a phone is genuinely bad at: reaching you without demanding your eyes.

That sounds like a smaller ambition, and it is. It is also the only version that survives us. If this project fails — and most do — the belt still holds your trousers up, because the leather carries the entire mechanical load and no wire is ever part of that path. The haptics and the button talk to the phone over standard Bluetooth, so they keep working with no signal and no server. There is nothing for us to switch off that would turn it into a brick.

The earpiece in the buckle follows from the same reasoning. It is not a proprietary audio protocol; it is a Bluetooth earpiece that happens to live in a buckle and charge there. If our software disappeared it would still be an earpiece.

What we are not claiming

We have built nothing. There is no hardware, no price and no ship date, and every image on this site is a render from one parametric 3D model. So this is not a track record beating theirs — they shipped and we have not. It is a design position, and it is fair to hold us to it later.

There are real risks in ours that theirs did not have. Whether people can reliably tell a left tap from a right one through clothing is unproven and is the cheapest test that could kill the idea. A belt is a size problem in a way a pendant is not. And a mono earpiece in a 7 mm body is voice-grade, not hi-fi, which we say plainly rather than implying otherwise.

But the failure mode is different, and that is the point worth taking from three dead products. Ask of any device you are thinking of buying: if the company behind it disappeared tomorrow, what would be left in your hand? For the Pin, the honest answer turned out to be nothing.