Matthew Mandel

Growing up, the tech hardware landscape was highly polytheistic. I had a Gameboy for games, an iPod for music, a camera for pictures, and a phone for communication. Then the smart phone collapsed all of that into a single device, and so for most of my adult life, the only hardware on my person has been a phone (with headphones). The itch to play with new gadgets has had to be scratched by novel smart phone apps.

Last week, Meta announced a smart glasses product that will incorporate an AI chatbot you can access via voice. It also came out that OpenAI is working with Jony Ive on an AI-native piece of consumer hardware. Humane debuted their Ai Pin at Paris Fashion Week, and yesterday Avi Schiffmann demoed a wearable that persistently records ambient audio to give AI companions more personal context.

These companies presumably see an opportunity to make it easier to interface with their apps and to better capture more multi-media data. Voice and new screen surfaces seem like promising media, but it all still feels unsettled. It’ll be interesting to see whether this shakeup reintroduces multi-polarity into consumer hardware or if glasses or pins or something else becomes the new singularly dominant interface.