China’s Robot Juggernaut Unitree Debuts a $650,000 Personal Gundam

While the West continues its love affair with the money to be made from getting generative AI to do things for which it is manifestly unsuited, on the other side of the Pacific, it’s all robot everything. Not to be put in the shade by Honor and their marathon robot, Chinese robot company Unitree—you may remember them from such other automatons as the Lunar New Year kung fu dervishes and, um, the Jackass robot—have upped the ante with their latest creation, which is a freaking giant half-ton transforming mech suit. For a start, you’d think that $650,000 would get you a more comfortable… cockpit? I mean, who knows, maybe that’s enough for Unitree to reap a decent return on its investment—or maybe this is just a prototype/proof of concept for an actual Gundam, in the same way the first MacBook Air was a terrible machine that worked as a sort of overpriced public beta test for far superior iterations on the basic design.