• The creators of the Rabbit R1 AI assistant device will begin shipping the first batch of pre-orders to customers in the US from 31st March.
• The device was revealed at CES at the beginning of the year and pre-orders sold out quickly after its debut.
• There will still be a long wait for those who missed the first batch of pre-orders.

At CES 2024 at the beginning of the year the Rabbit R1 was arguably the most interesting and exciting piece of consumer electronics to debut.

So much so that the device sold out of its first batch of pre-orders fairly quickly after going live, prompting Rabbit to launch several more batches of pre-orders for the device to meet demand. An estimated total of 10 000 devices were pre-ordered, at a price of $199 (~R3 778), and now that first batch is ready to ship to customers.

To that end, Rabbit has confirmed that its persistent digital AI assistant will start shipping to customers in the US this coming Easter weekend, and more specifically 31st March.

The creators of the device certainly have a sense of humour, using Easter to coincide with the first Rabbit R1 devices being sent out to customers, but there might be quite the wait.

This as the company will only be in customer hands by 24th April. The company is also set to host a handover party in New York City on 23rd April for customers in that part of the world.

Of the aforementioned 10 000 units, it will still be several months before the R1 reaches them, with no dates outlined yet for the other pre-order batches that went live following the presentation of the device at CES.

Co-designed by Teenage Engineering and running Perplexity’s large language model (LLM), the success of the R1 could spark interest in dedicated AI-powered hardware as a potential replacement for smartphones down the line.

We have already seen the likes of Samsung imbue its latest smartphone with Galaxy AI, but the AI features of the R1 far exceed what the Samsung option can do. That said, the latter boasts a stellar camera setup, not to mention being used as a fully fledged communication device.

It will therefore be interesting to see how this startup evolves the R1 with future iterations. We could therefore see more dedicated personal AI hardware at CES next year, and perhaps ones people in South Africa can more easily get their hands on.

For now though, it will be interesting to see what reviews and user feedback on the Rabbit R1 will be, from from who were/are able to pre-order one.