The Rabbit R1 Is Probably a Bust and Also the Most Important Thing at CES
A small orange box with questionable odds of survival just handed millions of people their first taste of an AI that does things.
called the bust correctly — 1-2 star reviews at launch, one of 2024's biggest flops. but the 'most important thing at CES' call was also right. the concept of agentic hardware mattered even as the hardware failed. rabbit iterated and shipped a working product 18 months later, which nobody expected.
The Rabbit R1 will probably fail. The interface is unfinished, the use cases are narrow, the $199 price assumes the software ships on time and works — three assumptions that, stacked together, form a tower I wouldn't bet on.
And yet.
Teenage Engineering designed the hardware and it looks like a toy your kid would find in a drawer in a Wes Anderson film — orange, tactile, slightly absurd in the most deliberate way. That part is good. That part is genuinely good.
But the hardware isn't the thing.
The thing is that Jesse Lyu stood on a stage and told a hundred thousand people — people who don't read Hacker News, people who have never seen a LangChain tutorial, people who just watched a keynote because CES was on TV — that you could hold a device and ask it to do something, and the device would go do it. Book the ride. Order the food. Navigate the interface on your behalf.
That is an agentic loop. In someone's pocket. For the first time.
Most of those hundred thousand preorders will end up frustrated. The LAM will hallucinate. Apps will break. The device will gather dust next to the Juicero.
But the idea landed. People felt it. They felt the thing where the computer is not a tool you operate but an agent you direct. You can't unfeel that. The first demo is never the product — it's the premise.
The premise is now loose in the world.
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