IoT & Connected Devices — 2024 Predictions and Outcomes

Year nine. AI-on-device became a real category in 2023 — at least as a pitch. Whether it becomes a real category as products is the 2024 question.

How 2023 actually played out

Apple announced Vision Pro at WWDC. June 5, 2023. $3,499. Ship date "early 2024" — which in Apple-speak means February 2024. M2 + R1 sensor chip. Exactly the prediction. Hit.

Matter v1.2 shipped October 2023 (not May like I called). Added robot vacuums, refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, ovens, smoke alarms, air purifiers, room air conditioners. Cameras + doorbells still not in Matter — pushed to v1.3 or later. Half-hit — right on the shape and content, wrong by 5 months on the date.

AI-on-device announcements stayed announcements. Humane AI Pin was demonstrated (TED, October 2023) but didn't ship in 2023. Rabbit teased an "R1" reveal for its CES slot next week — a pre-announcement, not a product. Brilliant Labs shipped its Monocle AR clip-on to developers. Hit on the prediction (announcements not products).

Apple Watch Series 9 was incremental. September 2023. S9 chip, double-tap gesture, no new sensors. Ultra 2 added the new display. Hit, exactly.

AirPods Pro 2 USB-C shipped September 2023. Just a port swap. Hit.

Smart ring market expanded. Ultrahuman Ring AIR shipped, Circular Ring launched (mostly Kickstarter messy), and a Samsung "Galaxy Ring" is the worst-kept rumor heading into Unpacked. Hit.

Robot lawnmower category crossed the threshold. Mammotion LUBA AWD shipped, Husqvarna's RTK-GPS Automower NERA expanded, EcoFlow Blade launched. Most under $2,000 by year-end. Hit.

Sonos confirmed headphones at year-end. December 2023 rumor confirmation. Ships fall 2024. Hit on shape, timing as predicted.

Matter compliance recalls — there was no public mea culpa, but multiple Matter-bridge firmware updates fixed pairing bugs through the year. Quiet, not noisy. Half-hit.

Net 2023 scorecard: roughly 84% prediction accuracy. AI hardware was hard to call on date (everyone announced, nobody shipped); Matter timing was the worst miss.

What I got wrong

I missed Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses Gen 2 (September 2023). Quiet hit; sold steadily through the holidays. The first wearable-camera-on-face product that's a) good-looking and b) socially acceptable. This category needs a slot in 2024 predictions.

I also missed how completely boring the Pixel Watch 2 (October 2023) would be. Google's wearables story stalled. Hard to recommend.

That Ray-Ban miss is the whole 2024 thesis in one data point. There are two ways to ship "AI you wear," and they're not equally good bets. One is to invent a brand-new device and try to manufacture a use case for it from zero — the AI Pin, the R1. The other is to bolt the AI onto a thing people already put on their face every morning and already know why they're wearing. The AR-glasses category learned this in 2016: a sci-fi product without a real use case kills the funding round and the company. The AI-hardware category is about to learn it again.

2024 predictions

1. Vision Pro launches February, sells under 500K units in calendar 2024. $3,499 plus $200 in necessary accessories puts it firmly in enthusiast/dev territory. Apple won't disclose units. Channel checks will leak roughly 300-400K. Apple will frame it as success. The product will be technically brilliant; the use case still won't be obvious to most.

2. Humane AI Pin ships and is panned. Q2 launch, $699 + $24/mo subscription. Reviews land brutal — battery life, latency, hallucination rate, plus a hilarious chest-pin form factor. Will not survive the year as a category.

3. Rabbit R1 ships and is panned. Q2 launch, $199 + subscription. Reviews land equally brutal — most of the demo'd "Large Action Model" capabilities will be smoke and mirrors. Will refund or pivot by year-end.

4. Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses become the breakout wearable. Gen 2 (Sep 2023) sales accelerate through 2024. By Q4 Meta is shipping at run-rate of 1M+ units annually. The category Apple was supposed to own is being lost to Meta in real time.

5. Apple Watch X (or similar) gets a marketing splash for the 10-year anniversary. September 2024. Bigger display, blood-pressure sensor in Watch Series 11 or X. Bet on a wired-rumor blood-pressure feature that gets demoed but doesn't ship. Like blood glucose before it.

6. Samsung Galaxy Ring ships at Galaxy Unpacked (August). $399, sleep + activity, no display. The first credible Oura competitor with mass distribution. Will sell well in Q4.

7. Matter v1.3 ships with cameras, doorbells, energy. Q4. Two and a half years late. The protocol will finally be useful for the products most people actually own.

8. Sonos headphones ship in fall. $399-$449. Reviews mixed; the Sonos brand carries the launch but the actual product isn't class-leading. App-launch issues plague the rollout (Sonos's 2024 app rewrite is going to be a disaster — separate prediction).

9. iRobot acquisition by Amazon falls apart. EU/FTC kills it formally in H1. iRobot survives as independent but with a smaller balance sheet.

Gratitude beat

Big thanks to every visionOS developer porting a SwiftUI app to spatial computing in Q4 2023. The launch-day app catalog is going to be modest; the people racing to fill it deserve credit for showing up early. Thank you.