Top comment:

These AI boxes feel like a product people would use in an alternate universe where smart phones are still being developed

I think the way products like this get created is from a fixation with futurist media from creators’ formative years that is incompatible with living in the actual future that came to pass.

When I was a kid reading the Hunger Games, I thought those communicuff things they got in the third book were so cool. I wanted one so bad, it just screamed “future” to me. But in reality, it’s just a big impractical smartwatch with less functionality, like the Rabbit is a tiny impractical smartphone with less functionality. They want to create the future based on their conception of the what the future is, but that’s not how it works. The real future isn’t THE FUTURE, it’s things that look a little nicer and do a little more stuff until you look back and realize how far things have come. Skipping the queue and trying to predict the future in this way just doesn’t work unless you’re supremely lucky. How do I know? Another anecdote: As a kid I used to buy old popular science magazines for ten, twenty-five cents apiece from the library where my brother got tutoring. Usually just a year or two old, but some were older. None of the stuff they were predicting panned out, at least not really as they predicted it, and they do it for a living.