Down the Rabbit Hole
Like many others, I was one of the many people who was blown away by the ingenuity and innovation that came from Rabbit R1 by Teenage Engineering at CES 2024. I think it was the first time, in a long time, that a company tried to do something completely new with mobile interfaces (no, foldables are not "new").
In the age of GPTs, it's only "natural" for us to consider what operating systems would be like if they were reimagined for natural expression. In a time where many of our mobile interfaces are still essentially mobile-responsive reworks of desktop apps instead of evaluations of a mobile-first or mobile-independent app experience, we're sorely in need of a reimagination of the operating system as a whole.
Rabbit is attempting to change all of that with a beautiful device (from experienced hardware creators) that both invites further exploration and brings a smile to your face. It feels refreshingly different.
If it lives up to the product demo, this will be magical.
Producing another device is exceedingly hard
As much as I'm excited by what Teenage Engineering has done with the Rabbit R1, I can't help but think this is going to be one of those devices that never exits the hobbyist status. The friction of introducing another device to how people operate is just so high at this point. We're nearly 15 years into having mass-market tablets being a part consumers lives, and yet we continue to sit on <2% market share of web traffic. Tablets, wearables and other non-phone mobile devices are continuing to see massive declines in purchases across the board and the trends aren't reversing any time soon.
And Rabbit R1 is set to experience the worst of every world when it comes to mass-market consumers' perceptions of what a device can and should do. It's an entirely new way of interacting with devices, and it comes on a strange new device. It's large enough that it would be hard to fit in a pocket with your phone, but it's also not meant to be a standalone device (and meant to work as a companion to your phone). It has some of the features you expect from smartphones, but not all of them, and none of them are particularly good (as it was built this way).
Is Rabbit the right solution to the problem?
Ultimately, Rabbit is solving for providing a superpowered assistant to interact with computers in a language humans are comfortable with. But to do so, it's decided that the only way forward is through an entirely separate device. While I think there are merits to the argument, it just doesn't seem like the right answer (for most people). And I honestly imagine they designed and built this before we had started making some of these exponential leaps (I'm assuming that hardware takes longer than say, 6 months to develop).
lots of ppl were asking, why not an app. here’s my personal opinions on a thread 🧵:
— Jesse Lyu (@jessechenglyu) January 11, 2024
We are in the age of accessible AI, where the only limit to what we think AI can do for us is what we can think up. It's already been widely reported that OpenAI is building so that ChatGPT could soon replace Google Assistant on your Android phone. GPT Agents were already developed to do exactly what R1's RabbitOS was designed to do on desktop and it's only a matter of time before we see them transferred to mobile, especially with the rise of AI-specific chips on mobile devices. If I had a choice between a separate OS & device to talk to my phone or an 80% feature parity assistant that was already on my phone, I don't think it would be hard to choose.
And maybe that's all okay. By introducing something as beautiful and accessible as the Rabbit R1, even in concept or hobbyist form, Teenage Engineering has already accomplished a goal of inspiring the masses to expect more from computing and engineers and builders to think bigger in designing new interfaces. In that way, Rabbit is already a major success and I'm excited to see what we hop to next.