2024 is undoubtedly the year of AI hardware. It has seen the launch of products like the Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit R1. Rabbit R1 has been getting a lot of negative press lately, and now someone on X has managed to install Lineage OS on the Rabbit R1.
X user @MarcelD505 posted an image of the Rabbit R1 with a “Welcome to Lineage OS” message on the screen. Marcel confirmed that the camera works but the motor that controls the camera is stuck pointing down.
oops pic.twitter.com/cloSY35fmg
— Marcel (@MarcelD505) May 9, 2024
This is not the first time they’re messing with the Rabbit R1
The Rabbit R1 is a controversial piece of hardware. It costs around $200 and similar to the Ai Pin, it is mostly bad at what it’s advertised to do. It was recently unveiled that the trick behind Rabbit R1 was an Android app. Someone dumped the APK file for the Rabbit R1 and Marcel got it working on a rooted Android phone.
The Android app behaves identically to the real thing. According to Marcel, He used a flipper zero to emulate a scroll wheel and set up a Rabbit account with it. Other Rabbit R1 features like Vision and Spotify are unstable in the Android app.
AI Hardware like the Rabbit R1 are promising but are in dire need of improvement
The Rabbit R1 and Ai Pin are the first devices that come to mind when you think about AI hardware. The AI hardware industry is still young, and there is room for improvement.
One of the biggest criticisms of the current market offerings is that they do things our smartphones can already do. AI hardware manufacturers must provide compelling reasons for users to carry a secondary device alongside their smartphones. Right now, a lot of the AI products we’re seeing look to be over-engineered GPT wrappers. The industry needs something more than that.