What amazes me is how many people care about this piece of crap in the first place. Like WHY is everyone talking about it? It could have been one of thousands of shitty tech products that I had never even heard of, but everyone wants to talk about it for some reason.
Probably getting paid to spread sentiment, but the guys writing their checks really only know the steps to marketing a product while forgetting that the product also has to be, ya know, good. Typical MBA shit: put out a new thing that does an old thing in a new, walled garden sort of way then go absolutely HAM on pushing all the units before the influencers that still have souls start bashing it
And finally, the whole thing is just an app and the device is entirely pointless
edit. and after watching someone use it - whats the point?! Its just a phone with a much worse interface, a terrible form factor, and it doesn’t even function.
Oh ffs, what a shitty, juvenile website. All lowercase, no real explanation of what it does, other than track users by having everything go through their servers.
Sounds like a scam to me.
And push to talk? Who uses that anymore? Welcome to 2000.
At least the stuff I've seen is more a criticism of the lack of functionality for the Rabbit, esspecially unique functionality or areas where it excels. The fact that it is basically all able to be contained in one app is viewed as evidence of the relative simplicity, and the fact that (as reviews highlighted) a phone provides a better interaction method compared to the dedicated devices just highlights how unnecessary the hardware is.
Basically, its competing against phones in functionality, but a phone at that price can do everything it can and better, plus so much more. Even worse when considering everyone also already owns a phone and won't be able to replace with a Rabbit.
Also a little bit with it being advertised as "not an app", when it turns out to be an app, and doesn't have any special magic that makes it need that dedicated hardware.
They expected companies not to make badly-designed not-phones that depend entirely on internet services, most of which will undoubtedly be shuttered by the end of the year.
I think the Rabbit R1 is an underbaked and dumb product. That said, Rabbit would have had to have had a few too many kicks to the head if they seriously considered not just running Android under the hood. Android is open source, and there is no good reason to not utilize the hundreds of millions of dollars that Google has already poured into developing mature a mature operating system with all the drivers and frameworks they need.
There is NO appeal for this product. We already carry an AI device, it's called a smartphone. We already have an AI device on our bodies, it's called a smartwatch. This thing solves no problem and creates a lot of new ones, like being an annoying tamagotchi that doesn't even bring the pleasure to use it. It's a scam to pocket VC money.
It's not a "public narrative" when the product is objectively trash. You don't get to have an opinion about a fact like "don't eat plutonium because you will die" and say "oh, I don't think so, it's your narrative".
200usd is 10 months of chatgpt subscription. So it definitely has objective value. I'd buy it just make my own little bot or as casual toy. There's no subscription or anything either.
I agree that the hate is meme levels of stupid. Sure the device sucks but people pick on the weirdest shit like "it uses android" or "it runs VM for actions that have no API" - well duuuuh.