Marques Brownlee just eviscerated the Rabbit R1. Here’s why Apple should pay attention

Marques Brownlee, who is perhaps the most influential tech reviewer in the world, has released a ">review of the latest AI-in-a-box device, the Rabbit R1. Even if you aren’t interested in the Rabbit R1, the review is worth a watch. Brownlee takes a moment to eviscerate the device for perpetuating a concerning trend in tech that has been going on for years now: selling a product today based on the promise of features to come in the future.

“It used to just be ‘Make the thing and then put it on sale,’” Brownlee said. “Now it’s like ‘Put it on sale, and then deliver the half-baked thing, and iterate and make it better, and hopefully with enough updates then it’s ready and it’s what we promised way back when we first started selling it.’”

Regarding the Rabbit R1, Brownlee points out that some of the coolest features aren’t even fully usable yet. For example, Rabbit says the R1’s Large Action Model (LAM), which users can command to do various things (sort of like Siri but supposedly smarter), has been trained to use more than 800 apps. For example, you could tell the Rabbit’s LAM to order your favorite meal from your favorite restaurant in your favorite food-delivery app. But despite having trained its LAM on 800 apps, Rabbit has only enabled its current user interface to show four of them, meaning that users can’t currently access the other 796.

Brownlee notes that publicly announced features such as these that aren’t available when a device ships to customers make a device hard to review. He also notes that this kind of “it’s coming later” product feature creep isn’t just limited to recent products like the Rabbit R1 or the Humane Ai Pin. For at least half a decade, the video game industry has been rife with this kind of behavior—selling a game before significant bugs, or even entire levels or play modes, are fixed or added.

But it’s not just startups and video game developers who seem to have steadily moved to a “promiseware” model. Since at least 2021, Apple has increasingly been guilty of doing the same—particularly when it comes to iOS and iPadOS, the operating systems that power the iPhone and iPad, respectively. This iOS and iPadOS promiseware has been a growing point of contention between the Apple faithful and the company.

It hasn’t just been a matter of delaying one or two highly touted features of a new operating system when it ships to the public. Apple has delayed so many features in recent years that popular Apple blog MacRumors now publishes roundups each September of all the features Apple promised for iOS and iPadOS that have been delayed.

For example, in September 2021 Apple shipped iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 missing seven major features it had touted when it previewed them the previous June at its Worldwide Developers Conference. And these were by no means small features—they were headline ones, including SharePlay, Wallet IDs, App Privacy Report, AirPods Find My support, and more.

A year later, Apple shipped iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 missing nine features, including Live Activities, the new Freeform app, and iCloud Shared Photo Library. And just last year, Apple shipped iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 missing 11 features, including the new Journal app, AirDrop transfers over the internet, and collaborative playlists in Apple Music.

It’s one thing for Rabbit to fall into the promiseware trap—the company is still a relatively small startup with limited financial and technical resources. But to see Apple embracing promiseware in recent years is something else. Apple is a trillion-dollar company with nearly unlimited technical resources. Constantly delaying major features doesn’t just irk iPhone users who had been hyped up by Apple itself about those enhancements. It’s also a worrying sign that Apple increasingly cannot handle its own road map.

Apple hasn’t announced the next features coming to iOS 18, but this promiseware creep has me worried. Since iOS 18 is reportedly the most significant overhaul to the iPhone’s operating system in years—mainly due to artificial intelligence tech expected to be baked in across the board—I’m wondering how many of the new AI features that Apple actually shows off at WWDC in June will make it into iOS 18 when it launches in September.

In my opinion, it would be best for Apple to underpromise on AI features and preview only the ones it knows it can get out the door by September. This, of course, probably won’t happen, since Wall Street wants to learn as much as it can about Apple’s AI plans as soon as possible.

If Apple’s promiseware streak continues, it’ll be proof of Brownlee’s assertion that this problem of unfinished products being delivered is “gonna get worse before it gets better.”

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