I’m one of those people who ordered the Rabbit R1. It hasn’t arrived yet. The reviews of the first batch are out and are uniformly terrible. I’m not too worried. For one thing, by the time my device arrived, the OTA updates will have fixed a bunch of things that reviewers complained about. For another, many of the things the reviewers complained about don’t affect my use case for the Rabbit R1. The Rabbit can’t use Doordash or Uber properly? Well, Doordash and Uber don’t even operate in my location, so that was never an issue for me. Can’t play your Spotify playlists? I don’t use Spotify and seriously, what kind of sound experience do you expect off a plastic puck? Can’t save your bullshit Midjourney pictures? Tough shit. Go and look at art made by people or learn how to draw. The AI hallucinates? All AI hallucinates. I’ve been messing around with Perplexity AI, the system Rabbit uses, and I’ve only caught it hallucinating once.

I want to try a separate AI knowledge device. I have an iPhone. Siri is not very good. I can’t summon Perplexity from the lock screen. Siri may well get a big AI-related update, but I am betting 1) you’ll have to buy a new iPhone to get the full effect 2) it otherwise won’t be as frictionless as pressing a button and speaking to get the knowledge I want. At night I sit downstairs with a notebook on a lapboard, writing and researching, and a little puck on the board next to the notebook that I can thumb and talk into to get the information I may need does seem a hell of a lot easier than having to pick up the phone, clear the notification scroll, swipe and tap and tap and tap to get to the same point. The Rabbit R1 seems to me like a calm little box full of libraries, rather than a slab of screaming glass, and that’s what I paid for. Maybe next month I’ll see how wrong I was.