Okay, technobros. I’ve had enough with your wearable AI devices already. When new product trailers can double as a Black Mirror remake of American Psycho, you know it’s gone too far.

I get you are just trying to Elizabeth Holmes your way into the checkbooks of investors desperate to cash in big whenever the Next Big Thing goes public. I totally get you, trust me. But no matter how much you practice your pretend keynote while wearing Steve Jobs cosplay pajamas, your glorified AI junk will never be the iPhone heir you think it is.

I’m talking about your Friend AI, Limitless, and Omi AI pendants. Your Bee AI and NotePin wristbands. Even the Humane AI pin and that Rabbit AI screen-camera brick. These are the past and future devices of a debacle of AI wearables that has already happened. None of your horses will be winning the Silicon Valley Derby, my dear Victor Lustig apprentices. In your head they were awesome, yes, but your devices won’t even sell in a scrapyard.

Humane launched its pin in early 2024 after raising approximately $230 million from investors. It had wanted to sell 100,000 units within the year, but only sold 10,000 (of these, around 30% were returned). You don’t need their pin to do the math. Rabbit’s launch was not as embarrassing, but it was still bad. It sold a estimated 50,000 units at $199 a pop, which resulted in almost $10 million in sales vs $64.7 million in investment.

At least these two products had a little rhyme and reason behind them. They were seemingly trying to articulate a vision—albeit blurred, misguided, and ultimately dead on arrival—of what the next generation of computing hardware could be. The Rabbit even came with some beautiful retro hardware design, which in the end wasn’t enough.

All of these electronics have one thing in common: none has succeeded at turning AI’s natural language capability into the promised fourth user experience revolution. You know, the one that will come to replace the smartphone that took over the mouse-driven graphical user interface that destroyed the command line interface that shredded the punch cards.

Take Omi as the ultimate example of vacuousness. Its inventor claims it will be “the future of computing” (it won’t, not now, and not in five years, not in a million years) because it “reads your mind” via an electrode that activates with concentration. This glowing forehead button doesn’t ready anyone’s mind. It’s just a dumb microphone talking to some cloud AI through your phone. Just like the rest. Everyone can do this now. You just need to get some Gorilla tape, stick your MacBook to your head like a cowboy hat, and talk naturally to ChatGPT. It works! Or just, you know, take your phone out of your pocket or, even better, talk to the mic in your headphones. Imagine that.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe that AI will be the key to the fourth and definitive UX revolution. It will someday eliminate the barriers between users and computers. It will give people full access to computing power that will be truly invisible because it will be indistinguishable from interacting with other humans and real world objects. A dream of Star Trek Enterprise‘s computers and Tricorders, but better.

See? I know what really turns you on beyond REI fleece vests. I get you. I told you that. But we are just not there yet. The AI models are insufficient. They are dumber than waterproof teabags and incapable of processing and understanding the world in real time like a human brain does, so they can’t really get the nuances you need to be truly useful to anyone. Plus the hardware has nowhere near the power it needs to give instant feedback, locally.

I venture that the person who will come up with the right idea that can take over the phone hasn’t been born yet. And perhaps they will never come along because, well, maybe we don’t need a new UX revolution. Maybe we just need the current UXs to keep getting a lot smarter and less intrusive. Perhaps the problem you have to solve is elsewhere in society, not in another piece of scrap hardware or another stupid dating-food delivery drone-connected app. Who knows.

What I do know is that these novelties—the pendants, the pins, the wristbands, that AirTag stuck to your temple with a LED soldered on it—are just faux futuristic visions of nobody’s actual future. If you want to change the world and invent the next iPhone, maybe go and develop AGI. But these thingamajigs you are peddling feel less like the iPhone and more like a weekend hack.