Exactly, it's an early stage proof-of-concept prototype (TRL 3, if you prefer that scale). While I have my reservations about how difficult it will be to actual

Exactly, it's an early stage proof-of-concept prototype (TRL 3, if you prefer that scale). While I have my reservations about how difficult it will be to actually get this into something you can safely and reliably use on a consumer without lawsuits (that's a long road), it makes no sense to judge the idea solely based on an early bench prototype. They're just proving out the idea - it makes perfect sense to buy/rent/borrow a COTS robot arm and use commodity hardware (iPhone X 3D scanner) to demonstrate that there's potential and that the software can be made to work. What follows are progressively higher and higher fidelity prototypes to eventually converge on a marketable solution (maybe with a custom mechanical solution rather than a generic 6DOF manipulator - several iterations are required for sure). Hardware is a long road, something like this takes years. They are doing exactly the right thing by producing a basic demo - it doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to show that the idea has the potential to work. After this they can go and try to raise some money for the next step. I think there is real under-appreciation by a lot of software engineers on HN regarding how much hardware development actually costs in dollars and time terms. The robot arm in the video costs north of $20k. The prototype phases between here and a consumer product will probably consume tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials and likely a few million in labour. It's not at all like firing up a pretty-looking SaaS MVP with a few months of labour and some negligible AWS costs, and I think the HN crowd often forgets that.