I think we're simply such a small user-base that they don't think to include it on their landing pages. Most people probably don't care. But since we're on HN, we most likely care to some degree.
Also my experience with using those things is that you would be better off spending the time to learn sheet music because once you get past twinkle twinkle little star, the falling note style videos don't work. You can't keep up with them live and paused they only show you the very short term future.
Having said that, an e-ink reader that could read visual cues would be awesome, but I feel it could be very frustrating unless it was incredibly smart. Maybe some kind of blink gestures might be useful.
Also, eink screens are nice to look at but so expensive for non-kindle sizes.
chucking the ipad because of that is like chucking the baby out with the bathwater because the bathwater got cold. The baby still has value. you just replace the water.
I found it super helpful, and I believe it's based on technology originally developed for teaching guitar.
Not sure if it's open for programming your own songs in or not, and much of the library is behind a paywall.
And even if I'm mistaken and none of this matters, well, after all a sale is a sale.
They have been on HN a lot[1][2], and one of the founders posted here on some of the threads. My understanding is that they couldn't reach all of the openness they were hoping for, and in recent times they've taken VC money and (I predict) that will affect version 2 negatively for hacker types.
I recommend the Youtube channel "My Deep Guide", he uses Remarkable long term as a normal person (not trying to hack it) and has done several video reviews over the years about firmware changes, what he likes and dislikes; it's not a "great device thanks for the freebie, like and subscribe" hype channel, it's thoughtful and detailed: e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1B04TSL2cY (Looks like he's just done reviews of Remarkable version 2, I'll have to watch)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16321531
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I have a sense that "lack of restrictiveness" is not something most users prioritize, as witnessed by Apple's phenomenal success. My daily driver is Linux (I've used Kubuntu for over a decade) yet I own Apple devices and am rarely bothered by things being locked down because for the most part, the constraints are tastefully picked (well based on my aesthetic they are -- others may disagree).
I watch MKBHD reviews regularly and it's not lost on me that Android phones for instance are so much more cutting edge and unrestricted relative to Apple devices. (I've owned Android devices in the past and have to admit they're objectively better in many ways -- Google apps for instance are more responsive and have more features than their iOS counterparts).
But I still find myself preferring the iPhone experience because everything feels right.
p.s. I ordered a reMarkable 2 earlier this year, but canceled my order because I decided that an iPad Pro (for consumption) + fountain pen/paper (for scribbling) fit my habits better. No knock on the reMarkable -- from all the YouTube reviews I've seen, it seems like a solid device.
It's just that from a social perspective, it's unlikely I'd use a reMarkable in a meeting room. It's still a touch too tech-y and liable to make others feel I'm not paying attention/being present (a sentiment which somehow pen-and-paper don't convey -- folks are ok with me jotting down notes with pen and paper. Don't know why. It's weirdly psychological.)
p.p.s. it sounds like reMarkable might gain a few extra orders by including "dev-friendliness" as a benefit. Why not add it to the marketing material? (I remember when Apple laptops were marketed to creatives, but the dev crowd -- who weren't being marketed to -- jumped on board when OS X became the main OS).
I'd call it groupthink but your assessment is probably fairer.
Maybe because everybody had the experience of taking notes at school, university, work meetings. And everybody spent time googling and chatting on their digital devices when they should not.
"All your work is instantly synced to the cloud"
Ugh. Nope nope nope.
But now maybe sounds like I could turn that off and just rsync the files to my Debian tower.
That is more win.
Yes, I can confirm this. I have never connected my device to wifi. I backup my notes to my home server using rsync.
I mean rsync via USB (but over ssh protocol - the USB mounts as a network device, rather than as a disk drive).
> Or can you rsync by WiFi without allowing it to send requests to their services?
I have never connected the device to wifi, so I don't know about this.
https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000264829...
I think I'm missing out on features I don't care about, like OCR and emailing docs to people, but it's well worth it.
Shouldn't be too hard to figure out what it's communicating over the network, then put together a server to match that and do useful things with it.
LAN-only.
When I'm elsewhere it can continue to not have the passwords to anyone else's wifi.
For those with more expansive threat models, intentional dvice or network spoofing or cloning might bebrisks.
Since firewalling is performd off-device (on the home-LAN router), this will resut in an unsecured evice.
My preference would be for some on-device configured networking limits. Putting full reliance in fixed-site infrastructure migh be unpleasantly surprising.
That's assuming the device doesn't use straight IP addresses for whatever it's communicating with. That's possible, but pretty unlikely.
Again my point is that relying on off-device, local-netork hardware and configs is brittle.
It's opt-in, FWIW, it doesn't work unless you log in to a ReMarkable account and you can just store everything locally. It has ~6GB of usable space (8GB but 1-2GB reserved by OS)
And if you mod it, it looks like you can fairly trivially handle the syncing yourself: https://github.com/verbavolant/reMarkable-autosync
Us 'hackers' have the dual detriment of being cheap people and demanding on company resources. It's just more profitable to focus on the larger client base.
That said, it may work well if they launch their own software sharing platform.
I have a feeling the HN crowd is a rather unusual one :)
High-quality normal user experience and a good power-user experience luckily aren't mutually exclusive at all (just appear together much too rarely).
I'm in the second batch and because of delays, I won't get it until early October (they claim) but it's the hackability that sold me on it, rather than anything else. I have an 11" iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and a 2018 Kindle Oasis (second-gen is I guess the parlance), so I don't actually need something like this, but I want it.
That said, I don't think they are marketing it wrong at all -- they might just not be marketing it to all potential audiences. This is definitely an enthusiast device with a niche audience -- people that want really a really good drawing/writing experience that is as similar to paper as possible. There are a number or e-Ink devices similar to this and most run Android, which has the advantage of opening it up to more consumer apps (Kindle, Kobo Reader, etc) but also tends to lead to a less ideal writing/drawing experience.
Some of the people who really want that pen on paper experience are like you and I and are really intrigued by the open nature/hackability of the device but the vast majority really want something simple and task focused. If you look at the Reddit for the reMarkable and the community around YouTube/Facebook/etc, although there are plenty of people who are hacking on it, that's not the core audience at all. In fact, the original reMarkable was criticized a bit for not being intuitive enough, even though the ink performance was always excellent. Even now, the biggest complaints are about the lack of features (primarily an e-reader), even though this is very much a uni-task device.
Small companies like this have limited marketing budgets so I don't think going after hacker enthusiast types at first is the right move -- especially when the people willing to spend $500 on an e-Ink notebook in the age of the iPad is fairly small. That said, I hope that the marketing can expand to the DIY/hacker crowd more after the rM2 is released because I do think that could attract some additional users and also help contribute to the ecosystem.
I understand what you mean but it makes me uncomfortable.
> there are plenty of people who are hacking on it.
https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable Has many great examples indeed.
I was remembering mostly as binary patches on the UI components and it seems that it developed further, with source project on GitHub... I feel a lot more comfortable with this kind of community than with Android mods, which always felt like colourful forum posts Over git, binary packages over source and leet speak over documentation.
In the mean time, no one has come with a way to export Apple iOS notes to markdown + images.
It has no capability to be used as an e-reader? eg ePub's, etc.
Ouch. That outright kills the idea of this for me. :(
All a business needs to be successful is a good product, and word of mouth. Advertising gets people to buy stuff they don't need. Instead companies scrimp on the product and spend more on advertising. The sooner society finds a way to clothe, house and feed everyone the better all of us and our planet will be.
They could add all of that, though thatd be disrupting their intended Apple-like presentation of the product.
If I'd seen the "open-source" pitch it might have enticed me to stay onboard.
Now I'm not sure what effect this site has on the average customer, and if making it more selling for me would make it less selling for them, but they actually lost me, and after reading your comment I'm seriously likely to pre-order. And it's not about your positive evaluation, of course. So I've got a feeling all these marketing people do advertising wrong somehow.