Live data from Hacker News

reMarkable Connect subscription plans

support.remarkable.com

51–60 of 133 posts

Re: reMarkable Connect subscription plans

#51
post #8

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…

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 technica…

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.)

Re: reMarkable Connect subscription plans

#53

This has soured me on reMarkable, and probably means that I won't buy the gen3 device when they get to it - despite me having been a big advocate for them until now. Not everything needs to be a subscription. I don't care about your cloud storage (in fact, I would prefer to just use my own), and the other "features" should be table stakes for something which costs so much to buy in the first place.

> Not everything needs to be a subscription.

Everything needs to be a subscription, according to Wall Street.

Re: reMarkable Connect subscription plans

#54
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that the reMarkable has pretty poor hardware, and a rather exotic software (for a tablet). Which means they are limited in what they can do on the device, and the support they can harvest from community. Which also means, outsourcing stuff to the cloud is a natural effect, which means demanding money for running the cloud is also natural. For similar reasons the device is expensive and still has a ra…

I like hardware. Love it infact. For me the subscription service itself is not the issue, it is far far far too expensive for what they offer in it, and they have broken my trust. The first thing I did after their announcement was disable auto-updates, I dont really use their cloud services anyway prefering to interact with the device either with SSH or a 3rd party tool (RCU), my fear now is a future update will disa…

disabling ssh would violate GPL licensing, right?

Re: reMarkable Connect subscription plans

#55
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.

Re: reMarkable Connect subscription plans

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware for the gen 2 is pretty good in my opinion. The only "exotic software" is the notetaking app, the rest of the system is linux. The device is running ssh and the root password is in the licenses file. That's a lot more than you get from most devices of this type.

> The hardware for the gen 2 is pretty good in my opinion. My 5 year old android-tablet has more ram and cpu than the gen2 remarkable. So I assume they outsourced parts to the cloud simply because it's not running well enough on the tablet itself. > the rest of the system is linux Linux, especially on tablets is very exotic. There is no way to benefit from the big ecosystem on android or iOS. Everything must come fro…

The reMarkable is not supposed to compete with an Android tablet, think of it more like a Kindle you can write on.

The hardware is perfect for the target audience and there are very few comparable products, but the software is pretty bare-bones and most people have issues with it.

Re: reMarkable Connect subscription plans

#57
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying that for every trend there's an anti-trend. I do wonder when we'll reach a critical mass of subscription services such that a preference against subscriptions in general becomes a trend.

I don’t care about subscriptions in general and why should I? Netflix adds new content and my VPS is also a subscription, it just doesn’t call itself that. They have running costs and I’m not dependent on them. But there are services where the sole intention of the subscription is to generate a steady cash flow (almost all software, things like ink catridge subscriptions), subscriptions where the platform prohibits a…

In general, I don't mind subscriptions for the streaming services (so long as they're easy to cancel). I get a few, keep my eye on how much I'm using them, and cancel any that aren't giving me value. I can always get back in if I want to some day.

My philosophy is that there's pretty much no content I can't live without and the amount I save from canceling my cable TV pays for the other subs and more.

Software subscriptions I'm much more leery of. I do get Lightroom/Photoshop but I use LR a lot so don't really mind.

Re: reMarkable Connect subscription plans

#59
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 featu…

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.

Based on tax filings other users have posted on reddit, they are a profitable company, now their level of profitability is probably not enough to satisfy the venture capital they took though.

The issue here, with niche products you must interact with the community, you must listen to the users, you must have a good communications team to show the users what is commming, what your plans are, etc..

Remarkable does none of that, they act like they are apple, but they neither have the marketshare, the deep pockets, nor the cache that Apple does.

Hell I would be more than happy to donate cash to fund features but they do not even have a public roadmap, or uservoice, or any indicate they give a shit at all about what their users want.

hell one of the most basic features, 3 years running, has been custom templates. Which are literally just a PNG file background layer. No official support but several 3rd parties have filled this gap very well.

Remarkable is remarkably bad at customer service, and communications. Which is more likely to be their downfall than the subscription service. Niche product live and die by their community, remarkable ignores the owner community

One of the reasons I selected the SuperNote a5x as my target replacement if/when I need to replace my Remarkable is the fact that the developers of the SuperNote are very active in the community, on reddit, and publish roadmaps which they deliver on...

Re: reMarkable Connect subscription plans

#60

When I see a hardware company shifting toward subscription revenue, it makes me wonder if they see decreasing revenue opportunities for their hardware business. Apple has shifted toward subscriptions, undoubtedly in part because they could see that iPhones are no longer changing significantly from year to year. Could this be one of the reasons Remarkable is launching this service? Or are they just trying to get more…

> “When I see a hardware company shifting toward subscription revenue, it makes me wonder if they see decreasing revenue opportunities for their hardware business.”

it’s almost never because of a revenue decline. it’s almost certainly revenue plateauing that’s seen as a problem, in a political economy that simplistically only values ‘more’. i’m sure remarkable could be a good niche business (where niche is many, many millions of dollars), but that’s clearly not enough. diverting limited resources from developing better on-device software to cloud-based software is the telling move here. many companies are capable delivering enough incremental value over time to create a (more slowly) growing, sustainable business without instituting a subscription model (logitech or even pre-itunes apple, for instance).

Post reply on HN