E-Ink iPad Rival 'reMarkable' Sells More Than 1 Million Devices

[michaeljk]

Starting at $299 and needs a subscription of $7.99 a month to really be useful. I think selling a million was a fluke.

I am so glad you mentioned this. I think the article is misleading in a huge way by saying it costs "$299." If that were true, I'd probably have one. Unfortunately, as you and others have pointed out, the $7.99 per month subscription puts the price at roughly $700 for real use ($299 purchase plus subscription for 4 years of use). The product has virtually no real-world use without the subscription. And, to begin with, $299 is not cheap for what this thing does.

Like others have said, e-ink is great, I like to read on my kindle way better than any other electronic device. I really want something like this to succeed. I will pass on this though.

 

[blizzerand]

I absolutely love this device and I use it for taking notes. It feels like a notebook with infinite pages rather than a tablet. I have an iPad, but I use it to watch something leisure, but find it too distracting when it comes to work.

 

[ahostmadsen]

I’m trying one out, in addition to my iPad. I’m not sure yet if it makes sense to have one of these in addition to an iPad. It is indeed much nicer for writing and reading than an iPad. I am also starting to appreciate the idea of distraction free. The iPad is such a versatile device that can do almost anything, which seems great, but the flip side is that it’s easy to get distracted (yes, yes, one could switch it to airplane mode, in theory, just in theory). Still, is this enough to have a reMarkable in addition to an iPad. Not sure yet…

 

[Solomani]

Does every single thing need a monthly subscription service fee?

 

[russell_314]

As soon as I read 'subscription' I turned away.

Same... I don't want to pay a monthly subscription just to make a device usable. Maybe if it's for your job and it makes you money then a subscription is okay. It's like professional photographers that pay Adobe $20 a month or whatever don't mind because they're making thousands from their work.

 

[Spock]

I absolutely love this device and I use it for taking notes. It feels like a notebook with infinite pages rather than a tablet. I have an iPad, but I use it to watch something leisure, but find it too distracting when it comes to work.

This message sponsored by reMarkable

 

[russell_314]

Geez I looked at the website and they sell their version of the Apple Pencil for $79 but if you want the optional eraser it's an extra $50.... This has to be owned by Apple ?

 

[Analog Kid]

A million units over 5 years does not an iPad rival make…

Didn’t iPod touch sell 3 million units last year alone and then get discontinued?

 

[NeoSe7en]

I’ll never understand the price point justification for these. The hardware, software and overall functionality is a huge drop off from the iPad (and pretty much any other modern tablet on the market) but it costs about the same or significantly more in many non-iPad comparisons.

 

[Yr Blues]

Starting at $299 and needs a subscription of $7.99 a month to really be useful. I think selling a million was a fluke.

Wow, I was just going to order one until I read your post. I loath the sub/model.

 

[twolf2919]

Absolutely. I have a kindle I bought in 2014 that I still use every single day and gets months+ of battery life and the reading experience is unmatched.

If the technology can continue to grow in terms of other consumption qualities - like videos, gaming, etc. I can definitely see a huge market for e-ink tablets and phones. That's really going to be a breakthrough of the only "one full day" battery life of current mainstream devices.

The tech has been around for a couple decades now and screen update speeds are only incrementally better. At this speed of progress, we can expect a few hundred more years before eInk gets to 60x per second.

 

[Max_G]

Imho, a cheap, yet very usable alternative for taking (digitizable) notes etc. is the Rocketbook.

 

[MauiPa]

While I will admit, that eink is far easier on the eyes for reading, this seems overpriced. for a do-nothing device. Kindles, even with amazon's crappy UI, are only about $100. I'm thinking I might go $200 because of the note taking. And maybe if you can get ebooks open source, but otherwise, good luck with that

 

[BornAgainMac]

Does every single thing need a monthly subscription service fee?

Seems like it. Someday a wife will be a subscription. Kids ... subscription. Dog.... subscription. Taxes.... subscription.

 

[FoxyKaye]

I have a reMarkable 2 and absolutely love it. There's a few pros and cons, notably, it can lag on navigation and typing on the virtual keyboard (which I use very infrequently), and sometimes the OCR makes interesting choices. But honestly, it has replaced a score of legal pads with a similar experience while allowing me to annotate and email PDFs. It's not meant to be an iPad replacement, for me, it takes the place of writing notes in margins of documents, scribbling down errant thoughts, and "whiteboarding," including making quick diagrams and process flows. I've even sent hand-drawn process and procedure diagrams as PDFs to folks for review before making them pretty in something like PowerPoint - it allows me to take notes, erase/change things very quickly on the fly, and get my thoughts out first. Yes, the changeover to subscriptions sucks for new purchasers, though they don't release hardware updates frequently enough for the technology itself to be their revenue model.

 

[prisoner54]

Yikes, so much hatred in the comments. I bought version 1 of the device which had the cloud services grandfathered in, so no subscription needed. Version 1 came with a sleeve and a pen in a package. New, not great value for money, but used, it was OK. I loved using it to make notes, to read through PDFs, to review articles for journals, and to read through drafts of articles of my own for editing purposes. The transfer to/from the device happens wirelessly through an app (Windows/Mac), so if you have a PDF library it's a matter of drag and drop. The handwriting recognition was helpful.

But I did sell it, 6 months later. Why? The usable portion of the screen was smaller than it needed to be (huge plastic bezel, remember, version 1). Screen updates were slow. And when I found out that version 2 had a mandatory subscription AND the pen and folio were expensive accessories, it left a nasty taste in the mouth.

What did I replace it with? A Microsoft Surface Pro X. I love annotating documents on that thing, and it is so much more versatile. But I do kind of miss the ReMarkable and do consider version 2 from time to time, purely because it's great at what it does.

 

[Takeo Apple]

I have this and use it more than my iPad 12 inch with 2 TB and newest model lol.

 

[grjj]

A million units over 5 years does not an iPad rival make…

Didn’t iPod touch sell 3 million units last year alone and then get discontinued?

Granted it was Apple with their entire reputation and fan base driving this but I believe Apple sold over a million iPhones in the first year of launch and regularly sells tens of millions a quarter. And yes, I get they're different devices but I think you'd be hard pressed to find an Apple hero product that sells less than a million units a month.

I don't know why 200,000 units a year(average) is a talking point.

 

[mattyukmatty]

a great thing, all of the people presenting it writes with the right hand. Is it for lefties as well?

 

[opiapr]

I didn’t buy one but did a lot of research into this, the other e-ink notebooks out there and the conclusion seemed to be this was the best of them but handwriting search at the time was a deal-breaker.
I’ve since got an iPad mini 6 with an esr writing screen protector and GoodNotes, which still frequently amazes me with its ability to search accurately in my scrawl. I’ve kept installed apps to a minimum for work where it’s become a useful workhorse.

For me the Fujitsu Quaderno is a superior device but is also more expensive.

 

[coords]

Humans don’t have workflows. She is not a robot. I hope your life with her is not transactional.

Good grief!!

 

[Mousse]

Starting at $299 and needs a subscription of $7.99 a month to really be useful. I think selling a million was a fluke.

Nah. People have brought things in the past that have a lot of us scratching our heads at. The Pet Rock, mood rings, tamagochi...?

Rules of Acquistition #217: "You can't free a fish from water." If there were a million people willing to buy Pet Rock in the '70's, you can bet there will be a million people today willing to buy something that makes the rest of us go Huh??

This thing ain't for me. But for a million other people, it scratches an itch. Knowing which itch people want scratching is what seperates the wise from people like me. Rules of Acquistion #22: "A wise man can hear profit in the wind."?

 

[xnu]

I have been admiring this for a few years now to replace the moleskin notebook I use everyday... I am a visual guy, I like to drop hand written notes with doodles to remind me of stuff. Subscription? kinda makes me sad.

 

[AgeOfSpiracles]

Cool. Glad to see there’s room for other devices. Niches can be great places to do business, especially with how information travels.

However… a subscription service attached to it…?

Investors are addicted to subscription revenue.

 

[russell_314]

Why blame apple? They aren’t exclusively doing this. They were far from the first. Remember even pre cloud when AOL, windows, outlook, office and antivirus subscriptions?

You probably pay a monthly for your house, car, insurance, utilities, streaming TV. How are those subscriptions not illegitimate? How are they not Apple’s fault too?

Besides, very few developers are pro bono.

Unless you were born into a pile of money, somebody is paying you a subscription for your services every time you cash your paycheck.

You might have unreasonable and uneven expectations for certain if the services you use.

I think subscriptions have their place. Music and TV where you get new content or pay to use copyrighted content. It's basically like back in the day when people rented a movie. If it's providing content or some type of service but not a subscription to unlock an artificially imposed limitation.

I think they are being abused in an anti consumer way. When you lock out certain features of hardware then I think that's not right. There was an example of a car company doing this by locking out certain climate control buttons on the AC to a subscription. "Would you like your heated seats to work? Oh that's $9.95 per month... Oh you wanted to turn them on high? That's part of our Premium Package for $14.95 a month but it also includes allowing the use of the passenger heated seat." Yeah that's where things are going it seems...

I would never buy hardware for personal use that is locked behind a subscription paywall. That is just insane IMO.