This bright orange square felt like a flimsy straw we grabbed onto while drowning in an ocean of Apps.
01. The Emperor’s New Clothes, or Just a Geek’s Toy?
The irony is palpable.
A few months ago, when Jesse Lyu showcased the Rabbit R1 like a magic trick at the launch event, my adrenaline spiked just like many others in the tech circle. We were desperate for something that could break the “App Silos”—something that meant we didn’t have to switch back and forth between Uber and DoorDash, or dig through damn sub-menus just to find “Confirm Order.”
The promise Rabbit R1 gave was too tempting: a “Large Action Model” (LAM) that could handle everything for you just by holding a button and speaking.
But reality gave all the idealists a resounding slap in the face.
What did we actually get? A laggy scroll wheel, an AI that frequently fails to understand human speech, and most fatally—it isn’t even as useful as Siri on your phone. Even more surreal, developers discovered that this so-called “revolutionary operating system” is essentially just a single App running on a modified Android (AOSP).
When the fancy coat of “Rabbit OS” is stripped away, what’s revealed is the familiar green robot. There’s nothing wrong with Android itself; the fault lies in trying to hide it.
People aren’t angry because “it uses Android”; they’re angry because they feel their intelligence has been insulted. It’s like ordering “molecular gastronomy” at a Michelin-star restaurant, only for the kitchen to serve you a bowl of instant noodles with some dry ice thrown in.
02. The Lie of LAM and the Victory of “Script Kiddies”
Here, I want to discuss something most reviews haven’t dug deep into.
Rabbit’s core narrative logic is LAM (Large Action Model). According to official claims, this is a new species capable of “understanding” App interfaces and performing operations just like a human.
But is it really?
From current reverse engineering and actual user experience, the so-called LAM at this stage looks more like a “cloud-based script cheat.” It likely doesn’t truly understand the semantics of the UI but instead uses automated testing tools like Playwright to click buttons for you in a cloud virtual machine.
This explains why it supports so few applications (only a handful like Spotify and Uber), and it also explains why if an App updates its interface, the Rabbit might instantly become paralyzed.
This is a commercial act of “manufacturing a software barrier just to sell hardware.”
If it were just an App, it would be worth $0.99, or should perhaps be free. But if you pack it into a beautiful orange box designed by teenage engineering and slap the “AI Hardware” label on it, it can sell for $199 and secure millions in VC funding.
It’s like building a reservoir just to drink a mouthful of water. The water is for quenching thirst, but the reservoir is built to sell tickets.
03. Hardware Arrogance vs. System Moats
If we zoom out and compare the Humane AI Pin with Apple Intelligence, the situation becomes clearer.
- Rabbit R1 & Humane AI Pin: They attempt to do “subtraction,” compressing complex phone functions into a device with no screen (or a tiny one). Their logic is “AI takes over everything.”
- Apple / Google: They are doing “addition.” AI is merely a Feature of the phone system.
In front of the mature smartphone ecosystem, independent AI hardware looks like an exquisite but fragile toy.
In a comparison of hard metrics, independent AI hardware is completely defeated:
- Latency: Rabbit R1 needs to send voice to the cloud -> convert cloud to text -> throw to LLM -> call script -> return result. This link is as long as the traffic jam on Beijing’s Second Ring Road during evening rush hour. Phones can handle many tasks on-device.
- Privacy: Does anyone remember the Hardcoded API Keys Exposed incident with Rabbit R1 a few days ago? This level of security failure is so amateur it’s appalling, exposing the startup team’s shortcomings in engineering capability.
- Ecosystem Access: Apple can call APIs from the system bottom layer, while Rabbit can only simulate clicks in the cloud. The former is walking through the VIP channel; the latter is climbing over the park fence.
To put it plainly, AI should be the “soul” of the system, not an independent “organ.” When a soul tries to exist independently of the body, we usually call it—a ghost.
04. Why Do We Still Miss That Rabbit?
Since I’ve criticized it as worthless, why do I still hold onto an “unfinished thought”?
Because Rabbit R1 asked the right question, but used the wrong solution.
We are indeed tired of phones. Tired of watching 5-second splash ads just to call a taxi, tired of red dots, tired of endless Notifications. That physical scroll wheel on the Rabbit R1, that pure feeling of “press, speak, done,” is the rarest luxury in this age of digital noise.
If we ignore its terrible completion rate and look only at the design philosophy: It attempts to restore humans from “screen slaves” to “masters of tools.”
I also wonder, if Rabbit R1 wasn’t an independent piece of hardware, but a Super Launcher, or a magnetic accessory attached to the back of a phone, would its fate be different?
Perhaps its biggest mistake was being born too early and dreaming too big. It wanted to revolutionize the iPhone, but forgot it only held a plastic spoon in its hand.
05. Final Thoughts
This orange rabbit will likely become a “martyr” displayed in a tech museum.
It launched a charge against the high walls built by the App Store in a clumsy, perhaps even clumsy way. Although the posture was ugly, even a bit comical, its fallen figure at least proves that some people are unwilling to spend the rest of their lives “doom-scrolling.”
Don’t be in a rush to throw it in the trash. Keep it, if only to remind us: In this world ruled by algorithms, sometimes, all we want is a simple button.
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