Apparently the peak of ROBOTICS in 2026 is a 399 duck on roller skates. Microduck pre-orders topped 2.6M in 24 hours. Now there’s a 4–6 mo…

Apparently the peak of ROBOTICS in 2026 is a 399 duck on roller skates. Microduck pre-orders topped 2.6M in 24 hours. Now there’s a 4–6 month backlog. Not a humanoid. Not a warehouse robot. A duck. That’s where the joke gets inconvenient. Microduck is from Pollen Robotics, now part of Hugging Face. The duck is 25 cm tall, weighs under 800 g and ships with seven trained behaviors. You can teach it new ones and upload them for other people to use. For years robotics has been showing us expensive machines doing impressive things behind ropes, inside factories or in suspiciously perfect demos. Then someone puts a beak on a small robot, charges $399 and suddenly people want one in the house. I laughed at it first. Then I got annoyed that THIS might actually be what cracks consumer robotics. Then I started thinking about what I would teach it. That may be the whole point. People buy the toy, teach it something stupid, upload the behavior, copy what someone else made, and suddenly a lot of people are tinkering with real robots at home. Necessary? Absolutely not. Do I want one? Annoyingly, yes. Maybe robotics does not enter the home when robots become essential. Maybe it enters when they become impossible to resist. Media

Source: Clem Delangue (X) | 2026-08-31

Related