The AI gadget graveyard: why every AI pendant, watch, and pin has flopped

Every few months some company tries to sell us a gadget that’s supposed to kill the smartphone. So far, all of them have ended up in the graveyard. The Verge’s own Vergecast said it straight — after years of AI pins, pendants, watches and glasses, there hasn’t been a single great one. I’ve been watching this whole cycle from my HDB, and honestly? You don’t need any of it.

Just look at the track record. Humane’s AI Pin launched with all the hype in the world, then got killed off in about a year and its assets sold to HP. A S$900 magnet that got hot and forgot what you just said. Rabbit’s R1 shipped a S$300 “AI companion” that was half-baked on day one and is now mostly a cautionary tale. And the AI pendants and watches? A whole parade of crowdfunded promises that either never shipped or shipped completely useless.

Even the one “winner,” Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, sells because they’re actually decent sunglasses with a camera bolted on. The AI part is an afterthought. Nobody’s buying them for the assistant.

So why does this keep happening? It’s not that the AI is weak. It’s simpler than that.

Your phone already does the job. Translation, summaries, dictation, photos, maps — the slab in your pocket does all of it, with a screen you can read and apps that don’t crash. These new gadgets solve a problem nobody actually had. A pin on your shirt? A pendant around your neck? You already carry a phone.

And let’s be honest about what most of these things are — a microphone and a Wi-Fi link to an LLM in the cloud. Add lag, battery drain and heat, and you’ve built something strictly worse than just opening ChatGPT on the phone you already own. For S$900.

The trick, if you actually want AI in your life, is to want the features, not the device. Siri’s long-overdue glow-up, Gemini baked into Pixel, live translation in your earbuds, meeting summaries on your laptop — those earn their keep because they ride on hardware you already trust. For a Singapore commuter, your phone plus a decent pair of earbuds already covers translation, podcast summaries, hands-free everything. No new toy required.

From an HDB point of view it’s even clearer. Space and money are both tight here. That S$900 is better spent on a proper robot vacuum or a NAS that actually does something. And if a gadget’s whole pitch is “ask it questions,” your phone already answers questions — faster, and with a screen.

The AI gadget isn’t dead because the tech is weak. It’s dead because the phone already won. Until something does what your phone genuinely can’t, in a shape you’d actually carry every day, the graveyard’s just going to keep filling up. Spend on the thing you’ll use, not the thing that demos well.