A Real Human Baby: A Hands On Demo And Review
I spend a lot of my time here at M2 reviewing things. It only seems right that I apply this same method of review to my own son, who I received just over a month ago.
As of six weeks ago, I received a review unit of a baby to keep. This is fine since in what little I received of a press release, I didn’t get a return address to post it back to in case of faults. As a first time user, I was pretty confident in my abilities to handle the device, but I was still fairly surprised at some of the features and challenges it provided.
The unboxing was a delightfully painless process, more so for me than my wife, but she was still very positive about the whole experience. Delivery was done through C-Section and half a dozen professionals. Personally, I think if Life is hoping to move more units of Baby, they should consider a lower barrier to entry, although I understand they made the initial purchase and production of Baby an enjoyable enough experience that needing to go somewhere and expose yourself to a bunch of strangers is a small price to pay.
The 2021 model of Baby is made of the latest cutting edge human flesh, which isn’t particularly resilient to drops, but does have self repair for smaller abrasions which is fantastic. Personally I’d recommend using Gorilla Glass and a stainless steel unibody if Life ever considered doing a redesign.
Charging is done via the orifice found almost directly in the centre of the face, where you expect it to be. This hole is also used for audio alarms when charge is low. Breasts provided during the production process are the free method for refuelling. Connection can be a little dodgy though and sometimes Baby doesn’t connect right. This seems to be a flaw in the design and false advertising led us to believe it’d be a smooth process. Prenatal classes and the hospital took the “Christian Private School Sex Ed” approach to formulae and bottle feeding. Meaning they hoped that if they never mentioned it, the whole problem might go away. So our Baby was running out of charge for the better part of two or three days before someone intervened.
This experience has led me to decide that user friendliness on Baby is pretty low and decades of well intentioned dogma continues to undermine the customer service’s best efforts. Also, the alarm used for low sustenance is used for all the other alerts as well, making it difficult to know what needs to be done to turn the alarm off again. I am assured though that software updates further down the line will negate this issue.
Charging is fairly quick, topping up in about 20 minutes. This is somewhat undercut by the fact that charging needs to be done roughly once every three hours and there doesn’t seem to be any way to set and forget. Baby is set to sleep mode most of the time so I don’t know where all that charge is going. On the topic of sleep, I should note that there is no aeroplane mode to speak of, but that’s fine since in 2021, aircraft went a bit out of fashion.
Security wise, Baby is a bespoke product customised to look somewhat like you and your partner. This personal touch goes a long way towards being able to overlook the other flaws in the design, and is a great way of ensuring that the product does in fact belong to you.
So would I recommend Baby? I’ve been happy with the unit I received so far, but I think as a consumer product, it hasn’t undergone enough testing. It’s still at the enthusiast level, requiring a lot of sacrifices that your average punter may not be willing to make. Really, if you require a recommendation to get one, don’t.
