Man I have been a Remarkable user since the initial crowdfunding, but I feel like they are about to throw it.
Many of these features were free up until now. Yes, we get grandfathered in, for now, but you gotta agree to a new TOS which I am sure makes this a time limited offer if they so choose.
These niche devices need their community, people who are not only taking a lot of notes, drawing a ton or annotating many pdfs, but are willing to invest in this particular platform.
These people you probably want on your side as a company. And yet, look at this lackluster announcement.
Who is to read this and come away with a positive opinion? Current users don’t gain anything that wasn’t already free or announced. They just face the danger of eventually having to pay for what they thought was free.
And new users? 8 bucks for yet another cloud storage and little else.
I mean, I appreciate that we now teach revelation principle and two part tariffs in intro econ and mba classes, but you can also blow it in other ways, exhibit A: this announcement.
They should fire the individuals responsible and blast that news to the world, and focus on providing a device that doesn't become yet another wallet sucker. If they don't, they won't even be a footnote in gadget history. e-ink screens are becoming accessible, patents are expiring, and sbcs and socs are becoming trivial to develop with.
As-a-service models are rent seeking grift and doomed to failure once a sufficient portion of the population becomes tech literate.
Yeh I was a big fan and waited over a year for the original. Its main drawback has always been it's crappy sync with Dropbox etc. 100 dollars are year for that? Get last time I buy a Remarkable...
I started bullet journaling for work a couple of months ago, and I was about to pull the trigger on buying a remarkable because I like everything about bujo except for the book itself.
I was waiting for my next paycheck to buy one, and then this happened right before. Now I’m opting to just stick with my book.
Smooth move, remarkable.
My favorite part is how they tell you that you’re saving money on the hardware, but having just recently checked all the pricing I can tell you that they increased the base cost on everything to mitigate that.
$100/year or else I "won’t unlock the full potential of (my) paper tablet" that I just paid $400 for? $60/year for cloud storage? What happened to connecting to the Dropbox/OneDrive/iCloud storage I already have and calling it day? Oh, right, recurring revenue. (EDIT: OIC, 3rd-party cloud storage is in the $100/year tier. But then WTF would I need your unlimited cloud...oh, never mind.)
I've recently been trying to talk myself into a remarkable. Now I don't have to. Thanks, Remarkable.
The PineNote is unlikely to be ready any time soon - the development devices will probably ship next year, and it might take years for the software to become stable and usable afterwards. For people who need something sooner, there are still multiple alternatives to Remarkable - Kobo, Onyx Boox, etc.
Charging for cloud storage is fine, but gating features like Dropbox sync, handwriting recognition and sending emails behind the "premium" tier monthly subscription is ridiculous. If a $50 tablet can do all this out of the box, a $450+ one should as well, especially when it is sold specifically for the purpose of note taking.
Totally lame. I have tried so many note taking services and apps that my head spins when I think about it. Notion, Notability, OneNote, Evernote, Apple Notes, Google Keep, Squid, and more...
At this point, I am 100% OneNote and a physical paper notebook. I use OneNote on every single device I own including a Raspberry Pi. I use the handwriting features of OneNote with an iPad pro to sketch ideas while researching. I can also keep handwritten todo's for bigger projects organized with OneNote. I use klipper from my Desktop and Laptop to capture websites into OneNote books all organized by topic. I can get these on my iPhone and iPad. My garage houses my CNC and 3D printers running on Raspberry Pi's. I can look up settings and configurations for my machines inside the notebooks and modify them as needed or just copy and paste from notebook to commandline... all sync'ed to EVERY.DEVICE.I.OWN with a browser or native support in most cases.
These walled gardens are sooooo tired. My paper notebook is the backup and used when I want to sketch or think without distraction from the internet's ubiquitous pull. I take pictures and post those notes into OneNote every now and then to develop the idea further. OneNote on the iPhone makes that super simple and the friction is literally two clicks.
Sometimes, my handwriting will be legible enough to strait OCR into a notebook! I find the OCR to be remarkable for most things, but its not perfect and fails too. However, the whole ecosystem is very much worth the price!
It's for emphasis. You might see this stylized as with the hand clap emoji between words in other contexts. HN isn't advanced though to support emoji, however.
I have a ReMarkable 1 and II (which I bought for my partner as a gift). They are nice e-readers that are well built. They really do fail on their key promise as a paper replacement however. The one saving grace of having spent so much money on the device is the "Send to ReMarkable" extension in my browser.
I received the email a few days ago telling my that those cloud based services, which were advertised as part of the product when we purchased it, would be switching to a subscription service.
Thew new service appears to be offered for FREE to us because we already purchased the devices. Phew!
That said, I think this is going to tank their sales going forward. The TCO on the device has now increased dramatically.
The new service is currently offered for free to people who purchased a device from them before October 12, 2021, if they accept the new terms and conditions. I have to wonder how long that free subscription will last. There is nothing in the notices they sent about how long the subscription will last. There are FAQ entries, which, rather than making any concrete promises, have statements like 'We plan to offer free access to Connect for as long as we're able to. There are things we can't control that might affect this', and 'If we do make any changes, we’ll strive to give you free access for as long as you want it'. This type of change seems vaguely familiar, and I would not be surprised if 'things we can't control' will happen to arise about one or two years from now.
When the change does happen, the new terms of service require you agree that, by them sending you an email with 30 days notice, you'll be deemed to automatically consent to any new charges and fees if you continue to use the service, so you'll probably want to keep a close eye on your inbox:
>reMarkable reserves the right to change the subscription fees or applicable charges and to institute new charges and fees, upon thirty (30) days prior notice (which may be sent by email). Your continued use of reMarkable Connect after the end of the notice period of the aforementioned changes to fees or charges constitute your consent to such fees or charges.
None of this affects me too much, as I've never used their cloud services, use syncthing for synchronization, and bought the device for its (partial) openness, even if that openness appears to have been forced on them by GPLv3 requirements.
I'm in the same boat. I use the rM extensively for meeting notes, but I have never been able to give up on having a paper notebook as well. The problem is mostly the ease of page-flicking; skipping forward and backward on an e-ink device is an O(N) operation, while in a physical book it is O(1). The same problem has basically forced me towards using a Kindle only for fiction where the content is linear - for technical material, I still buy physical books.
Not that I'm going to buy a reMarkable, but I do wonder what kind of organization tools it provides. Being able to tag a given note with arbitrary categories and have the device produce a date-ordered index on any category seems like it would help with this a lot.
(I use a similar system in my paper notes, with a topic index mapping to page numbers. A few minutes of grooming a day suffices to keep it up to date, and it speeds lookups enormously.)
I have not figured out how to jump directly to chapters yet, and not sure if it’s possible. I uploaded a 900 page ebook, and gave up trying to browse to the page where I left off.
I’m a very happy ReMarkable 2 user, and I have pre-ordered it more than a year ago which means I don’t have to pay anything.
Yet I think the linked page is an example of a terrible marketing: instead of highlighting the benefits of the premium service, they are emphasizing how horrible your user experience will be if you don’t buy one.
Regardless of your stance on their pricing action, that’s a grave marketing mistake. I hope they will fix that.
The user group on Facebook did not take the news of this new subscription well at all.
Personally I’m on the fence about it, I got my remarkable 2 last year and I’ve been very pleased with all the updates and features they’ve added to it, I’m also pleased that existing purchasers and users are grandfathered in to the new plan.
What I’m less enthusiastic about is for the potential of new features being exclusive to a higher tier plan than the grandfathered connect plan.
I’m less enthusiastic about recommending the system to new users as well because of the initial expense of the tablet and the ongoing increased costs to ownership that new users will face.
I know many creative types who would love to use this solution, but the expense of the subscription on top of the cost of the device means that it’s prohibitively expensive for them.
I wish remarkable well with this venture because it was probably a difficult choice to make, the risks of potentially closing the door on some new users must have potentially outweighed the revenue gains on new customers. It can’t have sat well with everyone at the organisation, given how they’ve been so good with new features and updates to both versions of the hardware.
Completely agree with you. I preordered both gen 1 and gen 2, and after receiving the gen 2 I passed my gen 1 around among friends interested in remarkable to help them decide if the device fits their usage pattern.
IMO remarkable already have extremely stiff competition from the iPads, and the only advantage is it’s eink display. The iPad is pretty much better in every other dimension except for the eink display, but then it’s different rather than worse, since it allows for much more applications (graphics, movies, etc). I truly wish the best for remarkable and for them to start the flood of more high quality eink reader/writer devices.
Not just iPads. Kobo has recently gotten into the big eInk screen notetaker game too. They have a 10" model that comes with the pen and a case for the same price as the RM2 by itself and they just introduced an 8" model with pen support. Oynx Boox seems to be stepping up their game too and there is the Pinenote. RM has better writing feel but to ask $100 a year to connect to Dropbox which your competitors do for free seems like a poor move. Especially when they STILL don't have basics like ePub support fully nailed down.
There 3 Options:
1. Connect: $7.99 per month
2. Connect Lite: $4.99 per month
3. No Plan: but the device costs more
I dug in deep to find the prices so others don't have to. Personally, I'm fine with this model a lot of the great features are probably supported by doing compute in the cloud and there are also huge advantages to having storage in the cloud.
1. the device without subscription is crippled in unnecessary ways (access to third-party cloud-services like Dropbox, for instance)
2. the already high cost of the hardware relative to other options.
I've been looking at ReMarkable since I saw a prototype that a friend was using. But in the end I just knew it would join the pile of unused gadgets (with good intentions) that litter my home.
A subscription service really is the nail in the coffin for me.
Outside of Cloud Storage (which is is not worth $8/mo) and handwritting there is nothing in their services that require cloud..
The storage integration should be on the device, they choose to make it via the cloud service. There is no technical reason they could not have made it work directly on the device.
Further their 2 largest competitors in the Space, SuperNote, and Boox all seem to be able to offers these features and more for free.
Agree with this I think the other thing to consider is that this is probably a long term fee to help keep a niche business afloat. They probably can't keep enough revenue coming in to support the business long term just by device sales. I think it's hard for a business like this to survive long term without a recurring fee model.
Handwriting also does not require a cloud. My 2002 Sony Clie TH55 (with Decuma handwriting recognizer) and 2003 WinMo devices (block recognizer) did it just fine on the device, on terrible (~200MHz, < 1.0 IPC)
CPUs.
The cost for the connect plans is what confuses me. For what you get, $5-$8 per month seems oddly expensive. I don't really use any of the features in the full connect plan. The cloud syncing is convenient, and I'd be willing to throw some money their way for it, but $5/month is a lot for what amounts to 8GB of storage.
Readit News
Many of these features were free up until now. Yes, we get grandfathered in, for now, but you gotta agree to a new TOS which I am sure makes this a time limited offer if they so choose.
These niche devices need their community, people who are not only taking a lot of notes, drawing a ton or annotating many pdfs, but are willing to invest in this particular platform.
These people you probably want on your side as a company. And yet, look at this lackluster announcement.
Who is to read this and come away with a positive opinion? Current users don’t gain anything that wasn’t already free or announced. They just face the danger of eventually having to pay for what they thought was free. And new users? 8 bucks for yet another cloud storage and little else.
I mean, I appreciate that we now teach revelation principle and two part tariffs in intro econ and mba classes, but you can also blow it in other ways, exhibit A: this announcement.
As-a-service models are rent seeking grift and doomed to failure once a sufficient portion of the population becomes tech literate.
I was waiting for my next paycheck to buy one, and then this happened right before. Now I’m opting to just stick with my book.
Smooth move, remarkable.
My favorite part is how they tell you that you’re saving money on the hardware, but having just recently checked all the pricing I can tell you that they increased the base cost on everything to mitigate that.
I've recently been trying to talk myself into a remarkable. Now I don't have to. Thanks, Remarkable.
At this point, I am 100% OneNote and a physical paper notebook. I use OneNote on every single device I own including a Raspberry Pi. I use the handwriting features of OneNote with an iPad pro to sketch ideas while researching. I can also keep handwritten todo's for bigger projects organized with OneNote. I use klipper from my Desktop and Laptop to capture websites into OneNote books all organized by topic. I can get these on my iPhone and iPad. My garage houses my CNC and 3D printers running on Raspberry Pi's. I can look up settings and configurations for my machines inside the notebooks and modify them as needed or just copy and paste from notebook to commandline... all sync'ed to EVERY.DEVICE.I.OWN with a browser or native support in most cases.
These walled gardens are sooooo tired. My paper notebook is the backup and used when I want to sketch or think without distraction from the internet's ubiquitous pull. I take pictures and post those notes into OneNote every now and then to develop the idea further. OneNote on the iPhone makes that super simple and the friction is literally two clicks.
Sometimes, my handwriting will be legible enough to strait OCR into a notebook! I find the OCR to be remarkable for most things, but its not perfect and fails too. However, the whole ecosystem is very much worth the price!
Just kidding… probably literal meaning.
I received the email a few days ago telling my that those cloud based services, which were advertised as part of the product when we purchased it, would be switching to a subscription service.
Thew new service appears to be offered for FREE to us because we already purchased the devices. Phew!
That said, I think this is going to tank their sales going forward. The TCO on the device has now increased dramatically.
When the change does happen, the new terms of service require you agree that, by them sending you an email with 30 days notice, you'll be deemed to automatically consent to any new charges and fees if you continue to use the service, so you'll probably want to keep a close eye on your inbox:
>reMarkable reserves the right to change the subscription fees or applicable charges and to institute new charges and fees, upon thirty (30) days prior notice (which may be sent by email). Your continued use of reMarkable Connect after the end of the notice period of the aforementioned changes to fees or charges constitute your consent to such fees or charges.
None of this affects me too much, as I've never used their cloud services, use syncthing for synchronization, and bought the device for its (partial) openness, even if that openness appears to have been forced on them by GPLv3 requirements.
(I use a similar system in my paper notes, with a topic index mapping to page numbers. A few minutes of grooming a day suffices to keep it up to date, and it speeds lookups enormously.)
Yet I think the linked page is an example of a terrible marketing: instead of highlighting the benefits of the premium service, they are emphasizing how horrible your user experience will be if you don’t buy one.
Regardless of your stance on their pricing action, that’s a grave marketing mistake. I hope they will fix that.
No need to put lipstick on a pig. It's a monthly fee to connect to Dropbox and Google Drive.
Personally I’m on the fence about it, I got my remarkable 2 last year and I’ve been very pleased with all the updates and features they’ve added to it, I’m also pleased that existing purchasers and users are grandfathered in to the new plan.
What I’m less enthusiastic about is for the potential of new features being exclusive to a higher tier plan than the grandfathered connect plan.
I’m less enthusiastic about recommending the system to new users as well because of the initial expense of the tablet and the ongoing increased costs to ownership that new users will face.
I know many creative types who would love to use this solution, but the expense of the subscription on top of the cost of the device means that it’s prohibitively expensive for them.
I wish remarkable well with this venture because it was probably a difficult choice to make, the risks of potentially closing the door on some new users must have potentially outweighed the revenue gains on new customers. It can’t have sat well with everyone at the organisation, given how they’ve been so good with new features and updates to both versions of the hardware.
IMO remarkable already have extremely stiff competition from the iPads, and the only advantage is it’s eink display. The iPad is pretty much better in every other dimension except for the eink display, but then it’s different rather than worse, since it allows for much more applications (graphics, movies, etc). I truly wish the best for remarkable and for them to start the flood of more high quality eink reader/writer devices.
I dug in deep to find the prices so others don't have to. Personally, I'm fine with this model a lot of the great features are probably supported by doing compute in the cloud and there are also huge advantages to having storage in the cloud.
1. the device without subscription is crippled in unnecessary ways (access to third-party cloud-services like Dropbox, for instance)
2. the already high cost of the hardware relative to other options.
I've been looking at ReMarkable since I saw a prototype that a friend was using. But in the end I just knew it would join the pile of unused gadgets (with good intentions) that litter my home.
A subscription service really is the nail in the coffin for me.
The storage integration should be on the device, they choose to make it via the cloud service. There is no technical reason they could not have made it work directly on the device.
Further their 2 largest competitors in the Space, SuperNote, and Boox all seem to be able to offers these features and more for free.