So, of course, I’ve tried the Remarkable pad, as well as apps like Goodnotes on iPad that try to support handwriting while also supporting search. Goodnotes suited my needs better, as the Remarkable pad latency was too high, though I did prefer the feel of writing. Apple materials research needs to get their glass and pencil closer to this.

However, for recall, I find there’s something about the physicality of a paper notebook that gives the facts a place to live.

With real x, y, and z dimensions in space, perhaps paper notebooks offer a fine grained version of the “memory palace” method of storing facts for in-memory browsing and recall.

Digital notebooks as well as digital books on Kindle lack the physical depth of the relevant page. It seems likely a visual “depth” indicator would assist recall of information in e-books. Unclear how that would work in digital notepads unless they had a fixed quantity of “pages”.

Aside from this loss of physical memory mapping, iOS 14’s handwriting to text is compelling. One gets to write notes out by hand, exercising that pathway, but what ends up on the page is real text. Haven’t played with this long enough to have any opinion on whether this transformation defeats recall.