Introduction:
So this is the rabbit R1, and it's another AI in a box, and it's a sign of the times. So this thing here, it has a lot in common with the Humane AI pin for better or for worse, but it's also supposed to have two specific things that are supposed to set it apart from that, supposed to anyway, and we have to talk about it. So stop if this sounds familiar at any point, but check this out: this is a virtual assistant in a box, but it's a different box.
This one is not wearable; it's a thing you have to carry around with you in your pocket like a smartphone. I'd say it's about the size of a stack of Post-its maybe, but it's this lightweight plastic cube designed by Teenage Engineering, and boy do people love some Teenage Engineering right now, and it's super—I mean, you can tell exactly what it is from a mile away. This thing is very recognizable. The thing has one button on the right side—that's the one you press and hold to ask it questions—and then instead of a projector, it actually does have a built-in screen here.
And instead of built-in cellular, it has a SIM card tray right alongside that USB Type-C port for charging. I'd say it does seem to send basically every single request to the cloud, but I will say it does feel significantly quicker to answer questions than the Humane AI pin. Now, that is a very, very low bar to clear, but it is. It's consistent.
It's consistently quicker. How far away is the Moon? The average distance between Earth and the Moon is approximately 384,000—or it would do that automatically after a few seconds. Then hit the button again to wake it up—boom, just the rabbit waiting for you there. And then to get to settings, there's no button to press for that. There's no gesture on the screen or anything—you just shake it like an Etch-a-Sketch.
As long as you do that, then from there you can scroll up and down with this scroll wheel and select with the button. That's how you get around the UI. So the other two things it has are the scroll wheel and a swiveling camera. So the scroll wheel for navigating around the UI instead of the screen is—I'll get to why it's odd in a second—but then, of course, the AI assistant is multimodal, and so you can use Vision to answer questions about what it sees.
Basic:
So we've seen this before. With this one, you double-tap to swivel it open and then press and hold to ask, I don't know, "What type of plant is this?" Taking a look. "Now, the plant in the image appears to be a Monster delicious, also known as a Swiss cheese plant. This is a type of tropical climbing evergreen plant native to Southern Mexico and parts of Central America.
The large, glossy green leaves with distinct..." As a reviewer testing this thing, I just feel like that DJ Khaled clip after a while, where I'm just pointing at stuff like, "Okay, what is this? And what is this? And what is this?" Those are pickled banana peppers. "And what is this?" Berries and seeds. "And perhaps what is this?" Water.
But I've also just pointed it at my computer screen with a really long email on it and asked it for a summary, and it just reads it instantly, gives me a summary of it. It's done that with articles, too—I think that's pretty cool. But yeah, it's just an AI in a box. It's best at just answering questions. So yeah, this thing is also bad at a lot of stuff, and this list is going to sound pretty familiar. Somehow, the battery life is just as bad as the.
Features:
Humane Pin, it has a 3000 mAh battery inside, and it's brutally bad. Like, it's already bad enough when you're carrying around another whole device alongside your smartphone, but when this one can sit in front of you doing nothing, and the battery just visibly drains and dies in like 4 hours, then you have to charge it multiple times per day, and it's still dead when you wake up in the morning—it’s just exhausting.
Also, it took 45 minutes to charge this tiny battery from 0 to 100, and it's also just straight up missing a ton of what I would consider basic features. Like, it can’t set alarms, can't set timers, can’t record videos, can’t record photos, can’t send emails, there’s no calendar built in—there are just a lot of things that I would want an assistant to do that are not here.
And of course, being an AI assistant, it also does still hallucinate and confidently answer questions wrong. Like, my baseline of asking a question that I know the answer to and then getting the wrong answer happens all the time—just one of the downfalls of this category. So this device was designed by Teenage Engineering, and they’re really leaning into that.
Like, that’s why it’s this bright orange, really friendly-looking device—I would say intentionally. But yeah, they really love their analog controls. This scroll wheel here doesn’t surprise me, but it’s actually really frustrating to use.
Firstly, it protrudes out the back a little bit, as you can see, which looks kind of cool, but that means if it was really sensitive, it would actually scroll if you just put it down on a table or something. So they've dialed down the sensitivity of the scroll wheel, so it’s actually super slow.
Like, there’s a surprising amount of scroll motion required to go down one line in the settings, and then there’s no haptic feedback here as you’re scrolling to help you feel it out. So fine, okay, you can get used to that—you use the button to select—but then you’ve also noticed there’s no back button anywhere on this device. So to go back up a level, you have to scroll all the way back up to the top every single time. That also gets annoying.
And then to change brightness or volume, you actually need two hands. So you just go into brightness, select it, and hold the button with one hand, then scroll the scroll wheel with the other hand to adjust brightness. Which—yeah, you just—you can’t do it with one hand. It works so you can learn it, and you can say, “You know, it’s this quirky UI it’s got going on,” but I feel like a lot of these problems would be solved if this was a touchscreen.
So what if I told you this is a touchscreen, and they just don’t really let you use it for almost anything? Like, moving through these menus would be easier if I could just tap what I wanted to, right? Going back after a long scroll would be easier if I could just flick scroll back to the top of a list and hit back—but you can’t.
The only thing you can use the touchscreen for is basically typing on the keyboard in terminal mode. So, with terminal enabled, you can turn it sideways, a keyboard pops up, and you can type your questions and get text answers, which is great. And you can move between letters with the scroll wheel—it’s kind of a neat feature, I guess—but why can’t we use the touchscreen for anything else? Is it just them trying not to look too much like a smartphone? Maybe. Probably.
So okay, what’s the point? Why does this thing exist if it’s so similar to the other one that was also so bad? What are we doing here? Uh, and really, there are two things that I think they’re hoping will set it apart from the other one that should, in the words of their co-founder, Jesse. But I don’t think—I don’t think MKBHD will say this is the worst device he ever reviewed so far, which—low bar, but okay. Those two things are the price tag and the large action model.
So, the Humane Pin was so easy for everyone to dunk on because it cost as much as a phone. It was $700 with a $24-a-month subscription to not turn into a brick—it’s just insane. So this one right here costs $200 and no subscription.
So, you know, okay, that hits a little different. But also, you can tell it’s $200. Firstly, you will need a separate SIM card to get it to work on cellular. So while there is no subscription fee for Rabbit to keep the device working, that is still a fee you’re going to pay every month to get data outside of Wi-Fi. But then okay, the unboxing experience is extremely minimal.
It comes in a single cardboard box with a cassette tape-looking plastic container that doubles as a stand, but there’s literally nothing else—no charging brick, no USB-C cable, no stickers, no paper instruction manual—nothing at all. And then the R1 itself is made of plastic—not to say that it’s not built well, you know, there’s no flexing or creaking or anything like that—but it’s definitely plastic. The camera—very basic. The speaker—very cheap. You know, it’s a low-end MediaTek chip inside the same.
Conclusion:
Rabbit—I think that’s why they focused on getting the price so low. Like, this stuff is all a tough sell because you’re taking a gamble on what the product could be someday. But for the pin, you have to drop $700 and $24 every month on the chance that it might someday get there. Like, that’s a lot of money. But for this cute little thing, 200 bucks feels like a much easier investment to make, a much easier pill to swallow to just take a gamble on it.
And on the off chance it turns out to be awesome in a couple of years, it’ll feel like it’s worth it, you know? On the chance that some of those 800 apps are super useful, or, you know, even though you already have a smartphone, maybe the teach mode lets it do something with a single button press that you could never dream of before—then it could be totally worth it.
The whole situation reminds me, kind of, of if you look back at the beginning of when Tesla started shipping cars with all the autopilot stuff. They were selling cars, and they got popular for other reasons—it was a good electric car with good range and a good charging network.
And then people started sort of beta testing this autopilot stuff, and Tesla started collecting millions of miles and hours of data from how it works in the real world. And so all that data helped their systems learn and get the head start that they need on trying to make the best autopilot software.
So the Rabbit, I’m sure, would like to use their price advantage and get as many of them out into the real world as possible, into people’s hands, so they can start beta testing and having it trained in getting good at a variety of tasks. But the Rabbit’s problem is it doesn’t have, like, the other reason why people would get it anyway today.
So it’s—it’s like a kind of chicken-and-egg problem. So if you want my advice, you’ve heard it before: buy the product based on what it is today and not what it’s promised to be in the future. And with this category, that’s like the hardest thing to do, the hardest thing to keep in mind, because the promise is so big. But that’s still my advice. And I guess we still also have yet to see what big companies like Google and Apple are going to try to do in this space—probably this year. So, with all of that, we’ll see. Thanks for reading. Catch you in the next one. Peace.
