That was a year ago, with 2 million views and 39k likes. That is not sign of hype. Specially when contrasted directly to the reality of sales.

Dear lord, you can see on the TED talk when he does the obviously planned big reveal, Imran Chaudhri doesn’t even get an applause. He actually pauses a few times in the conference waiting for the audience to applaud and nothing happens a couple of times. When he makes jokes almost nobody laughs. There’s even a point where he jumps the gun and says thank you before the spontaneous applause™ happens. That has to be the most cringe TED talk in history (and that’s hard because almost all of TED in the past 5 years is cringe), other than the fact it was just an obvious ad.

Yeah, I don’t doubt there were people who were really hyped out of their minds for this. But it’s my impression they were a minority. Almost all press around the device was extremely skeptical, and only a few were cautiously excited. I follow a lot of tech circles in social media and there wasn’t really a buzz about the pin. But, I think the proof is in the pudding. 10,000 sales is not exactly evidence of an extremely popular device. Even if the end result was bad, if there was a lot of hype, one would expect higher sales. After all we knew the price and conditions of sales (subscription) for a long time before release.