IoT & Connected Devices — 2025 Predictions and Outcomes
Year ten. AI-on-device was supposed to be the big 2024 category. It mostly wasn't. Smart glasses were supposed to be the long-shot. They quietly won. Glasses + ring + watch + earbud is the new four-piece body-sensor stack for 2025.
How 2024 actually played out
Vision Pro launched February 2024. $3,499. Quarterly unit sales bled from ~200K (Q1) to under 100K (Q4 estimate). Apple won't disclose. Channel checks suggest under 500K calendar-year units — exactly the range I forecast. Reviews praised the hardware, panned the use case. Hit.
Humane AI Pin shipped April 2024 — and got destroyed. Marques Brownlee's review titled "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now." Battery, latency, heat, hallucinations, $699 price + $24/mo subscription, chest pin form factor — every problem I called. Humane laid off staff in October, exploring sale by year-end (HP reportedly interested at $1B). Hit, brutal.
Rabbit R1 shipped May 2024 — equally panned. The "Large Action Model" turned out to be Selenium scripts wrapping a phone-emulator. Reviews tore it apart. Company pivoted toward "creature companion" positioning by Q3. Hit.
Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses became the breakout wearable. Gen 2 sales accelerated through 2024. By Q4, run-rate cleared 2M annual units. The most successful AR/smart-glasses product of the decade so far. Hit, possibly understated.
Apple Watch Series 10 (skipped "9 → 10," no Watch X label) shipped September 2024. Bigger display, wider case, no blood-pressure sensor (rumored but didn't ship). Hit on display, hit on no-blood-pressure call.
Samsung Galaxy Ring shipped August 2024. $399, sleep + activity tracking, no display. Strong reception, sold well into Q4. Hit, exactly priced.
AirPods Pro 2 became a clinical-grade hearing aid by firmware. FDA cleared the Hearing Aid feature in September 2024; it shipped in the iOS 18.1 / firmware update late October. A $249 earbud now does what a $5,000 prescription device does — over-the-counter, no audiologist. The single most disruptive wearable move of the year and almost nobody outside the hearing-health world noticed. Hit on the thesis that earbuds eat the hearing-aid market — earlier and cleaner than I expected.
Matter v1.3 shipped Q2 2024 with cameras, energy management. v1.4 in November added more device types. Hit, slightly earlier than I forecast.
Sonos shipped Ace headphones May 2024. $449. Reviews mixed. App-launch disaster predicted came true: Sonos rewrote its app in May 2024, broke speakers for millions of customers, CEO resigned by January 2025. Hit on shape, the app debacle was worse than I called.
iRobot acquisition by Amazon collapsed January 2024. Killed by EU. iRobot laid off 31% of workforce, replaced CEO, fighting for survival. Hit.
Net 2024 scorecard: roughly 90% prediction accuracy. The Sonos app collapse was the biggest miss-of-magnitude (I called the launch issues, not the executive bloodbath). Glasses-vs-headset was the biggest win.
What I got wrong
The Sonos app story was bigger than I called. The headphones landed; the app rewrite broke the entire installed base of Sonos speakers for months. CEO out in January 2025. Brand damage permanent. I called the issue, not the magnitude.
I also missed the Brilliant Labs Frame ($350, July 2024) and the early signal it sent on "AI glasses without Meta's scale." A small but real product category I should have flagged.
2025 predictions
1. Apple Vision Pro 2 doesn't ship in 2025. Strong rumor of a cheaper model (under $2,000) targeting Q1 2026. Apple does NOT pull a Series 9-to-10 marketing trick here; they sit on inventory and bet on the cheaper model. Vision Pro becomes a $3,000 dev kit for the next 18 months.
2. Meta Ray-Ban Gen 3 ships with a display. September 2025. The "first real consumer AR glasses with a heads-up display" launch. Will be the 2025 product-of-the-year and Apple's biggest competitive concern.
3. Apple announces consumer AR glasses at WWDC. June. Ship target 2026. The Vision Pro was the dev kit; the glasses are the real bet. Apple admits this only by shipping the cheaper Vision Pro variant first.
4. Humane Inc gets acquired by HP for ~$200M-$1B. Q1 announcement. The IP and the team find a soft landing; the AI Pin product is killed. (Update needed if HP walks; secondary buyer is Salesforce or Adobe.)
5. Galaxy Ring Gen 2 ships at Unpacked in summer. Refinements only. Oura responds with Ring Gen 5 at the same price tier.
6. Apple Watch Series 11 ships with blood-pressure sensor. September. FDA-cleared. The feature delayed twice will finally land — but only as "trend tracking," not as diagnostic-grade. (The blood-glucose holy grail still doesn't ship.)
7. Matter expands beyond US/EU/JP into broad APAC adoption. China-domestic Matter alternatives compete; the global stack stabilizes by Q4.
8. A competitor matches Apple's hearing-aid move — and the disruption goes mainstream. Apple cleared the OTC hearing-aid bar in October 2024 with an AirPods Pro 2 firmware update. In 2025, Samsung (Galaxy Buds) or another major earbud maker ships its own OTC hearing-aid feature to chase it, and the FDA's 2022 OTC pathway turns from a single product into a category. The $5,000 traditional hearing-aid market starts pricing against $250 earbuds for real. (Watch for international approvals lagging US clearance — EU and Japan medical-device review is the gate, not the silicon.)
9. AI on the device gets meaningful — not as a category creator, but as a feature. On-device LLMs (Apple Intelligence, Galaxy AI, Pixel AI) become table-stakes for new phones / watches / earbuds. The standalone "AI device" category stays a graveyard.
10. The first connected-device class action for AI hallucination harm. Some smart-home agent will execute the wrong action (heat up the wrong room, unlock the wrong door, message the wrong contact) and the plaintiff's bar will move on it. Q3-Q4.
Gratitude beat
Big thanks to every Humane and Rabbit engineer who shipped real working hardware against impossible timelines. The products didn't land but the attempt taught the category what doesn't work. Negative signal is still signal. Thank you.