Chinese robotics firms will happily take your money for a humanoid robot today. Whether you should actually give it to them is another matter.
Unitree, the Chinese startup behind the G1 humanoid you've probably seen doing kung fu routines on the internet, is now taking consumer pre-orders for its life-size robot at prices starting around $19,000. The rest of the industry looks similarly frothy:
- UBTECH just shipped its 1,000th Walker S2 and signed a deal with Siemens to hit 10,000 units a year by the end of 2026.
- Agility Robotics is heading to Wall Street via SPAC merger at a $2.5 billion valuation, aimed at staffing warehouses.
- Roland Berger projects humanoid manufacturing becomes a $750 billion market by 2035.
If you only read the press releases, this looks like the moment humanoids arrive.
Then you read the CNN piece from this week. China's humanoid rental market, which was supposed to be the proving ground where these robots earn their keep before consumers buy them, is already fading. Operators who rent humanoids out for weddings, storefronts and livestreams say bookings peaked earlier this year and have been drifting down since. The robots impress people for about 10 minutes, and then customers realize they don't actually do anything.
"The market for humanoid sales hasn't really taken off yet because today's robots still can't operate on their own," Ai Lin, an e-commerce livestreamer who rents humanoids in Hangzhou, told CNN. "They're basically oversized toys."
Zhao Xiaohong, who runs a rental business in Jiangsu, said his customers are already tiring of the tech because it isn't advancing quickly enough to justify a second booking. Omdia analyst Lian Jye Su was more direct about what's driving the whole scene: the industry has been "deliberately hyped up to a certain extent to tell a story about how strong China is in emerging technology."
When CNN asked Unitree when its robots would actually be doing useful work on factory floors, PR manager Yolanda Xie said it "will likely depend on technological breakthroughs and the overall development of the industry." Which is a polite way of saying nobody has a timeline.
There are still real bulls in this market. Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas told Business Insider that "humanoids are the PC of our time" and that the industry is currently in "the word-processing, spreadsheet phase of the game." It's a genuinely useful framing. Early PCs weren't very good either, and they still ended up on every desk in the world. The difference is that early PCs had a job the day you plugged them in. The consumer humanoid you can pre-order right now does not, at least not one that justifies $19,000.
The smart-speaker era should be fresh enough for everyone to recognize the pattern here. Hardware gets cheap, marketing gets loud, buyers get in early, and two years later the device is sitting on a shelf because the software never caught up to the pitch. Unitree and its rivals are effectively selling a bet that AI progress bridges that gap before consumer patience runs out. That's the actual product on order right now, and it's not something that gets built in a factory in Shenzhen.
