Today technology isn’t for you, it's for me. You need to wait.

The tech world as we know it is always moving forward, as one thing becomes the norm another tries to take over. This is a cycle which has been going on for years.

Last night I started thinking about this cycle while watching two tech reviewers (who I have a lot of time for) gave an honest appraisal of the Humane AI Pin.

The Tech itself wasn’t important, what I started thinking about is how we approach new technology when it's released. It's almost as if we forget that the day-to-day hardware and software we use today weren’t always the polished minor iteration products we use.

The smartphone is the obvious example, I don’t mean the iPhone or Android devices.

If we take the current crop of popular phones they are polished consumer devices, across a range of prices which most people can buy, turn on, and use daily pretty quickly.

This has taken many years of iteration to get to this point...

Lets think about this journey

It's only in the last stages of the evolution of the mobile phone we can honestly say these are the usable, day-to-day products we have today.

I was imagining what a modern tech reviewer would make of that first mobile device in the timeframe it was released based on how we talk about new verticals today..

This was a device which was going to become for a lot of people the replacement for the well-established landline. the product had terrible battery life, and little to no coverage, it made poor-sounding calls, and it would cut those calls off a lot. There was nothing “smart” about it.

It was a brick which was for the wealthy, showed wealth and by all accounts failed at most of what it did as a product.

However, there was something there because we can see how it evolved from a one trick pony through branches such as the Nokia phones above which made the devices affordable and mass market, in parallel devices like the Palm Treo were paving the way and adding smart functionality to phones, again, this wasn’t seen as necessary at the time, a thing for the nerds in your life but most people had a paper calendar, took photos on a digital camera, had PC’s the internet was dial-up in most cases, that was so much faster than mobile speeds.

Over time, however, Palm made the “smartphone” popular to the point there was a good cottage industry of players in the space..

Iterations took us to the iPhone, the Android and where we are today..

The point to all these words is we started with a terrible device, that device however lit enough of a fuse to create many versions, these all iterated to the phones we have today the rectangular black slab with apps, fast mobile internet, and the world of information in our hands..

This takes me back to those reviews of the Humane AI pin, its a product based as one reviewer noted on aspirations of a world we have seen in sci-fi like Star Trek, it's an Idea we all would aspire to at some point, the untethering ourselves from the phone screen.

The implementation by all accounts sucks, it's slow, the AI isn’t quite there, the laser display on the hand isn’t quite there, and the battery sucks… very much like those reviews of that first phone.

Just like that mobile phone, that device isn’t a device for you, it never was and never will be, you’re not ready for it, it's not ready for you.

That device is for me, someone who rocked a Palm Trea, a Dacom gold card, attached to a Matrix-type Nokia using the internet on his Thinkpad in the 90s to connect to a BBS or using PC Anywhere from a pub in Newbury

And this is why I think we think about new technology wrong.

I hear year in and year out how CES is a place for pipedreams and vaporware, well yes, that's the idea…

The reviews of the Humane AI pin are the same as the Apple vision the month before, it hurts my face to wear, the display eyes are spooky, and there are not enough apps, whats the point, it’s an isolating device..

EV’s had the same back in the day and even today it's all about range anxiety and it takes too long to charge. I read a fact about the rise of the combustion engine car and the current crop of EVs, today there are percentage per car more charging stations in the UK and the US than there were petrol/gas stations in the UK and the US at the same time frame as the OG combustion engine cars.

So don’t look at cars in today's view, step back and envisage a world where cars were taking over from the horse and cart, there were no gas stations, there were fewer mechanics, and you could travel further distances in a day than ever before yet may find yourself without fuel.

Again, a toy for the wealthy and an expensive one going up against its landline phone, the horse, a transport system millennia old. with feeding stations, inns, etc.

We are at the start of the next wave of technology, what happens in the next few years will become the norm in the next 10, and there will be failures, there will be the ridiculous, the insane, however, there will also be diamonds.

Those diamonds will only rise because of all that tried before it..

While this happening keep in mind. You are not ready for this technology, this isn’t for you, and you don’t get to shape it. this is left to the nerds, the day one’s the early adopters. In today's world, these are the Marques Brownlees, the Michael Fischer (MrMobile) of this world.

These are as MrMobile said at the end of his review, the people willing to invest in these “flawed” devices because for all the problems the Humane AI pin has today, the hardware form factor and ideas are solid, those other problems are software. The software gets updates, lets have a look at these devices in 12 and 24 months time.

The same goes for the Apple Vision Pro, the Tesla CyberTruck and every other device like them pushing the envelope out there..

Let these individuals create the path to the iPhones, Samsung Galaxy and other devices you use.