[slightwinder]

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 rather poor situation because it's quite special, with a relative small market. Which means it's trapped in a situation where it needs more supporting customers to deliver a good device, but to gain more customers it needs to deliver a good experience.

[AstroDogCatcher]

I actually think the hardware (at least in gen2) is pretty good, and the software has progressed from "OK but a bit rough" to also being pretty good. I can accept the high device price given what a niche market they have, but the subscription prices are a massive over-reach relative to the value delivered. Charging business customers (eg for more flexible isolated/shared storage accounts and other collaboration features) would have made sense, but the current model feels like they just plucked a number out of the air based on what other subscriptions cost, with no reference to the consumer value delivered.

[kayodelycaon]

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.

[slightwinder]

> 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 from the users, the company or regulary desktop-linux, which is not optimized for tabled or eInk. Linux is a good selling point for hackers and nerds, but irrelevant for casual users.

[burkaman]

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.

[AlotOfReading]

It's also worth noting that unlike the broader tablet market, eInk readers commonly use Linux. Kindle and Kobo devices are examples.

[kayodelycaon]

I think you have an issue with the entire class of eink notebooks because both of these points are completely immaterial to their designed purpose.

You want a general purpose eink tablet. The reMarkable is most definitely not.

[AstroDogCatcher]

I assume the hardware targets battery life rather than performance; the lack of on-device features is quite deliberate. As far as cloud offloading goes, the only thing which seems to match that framing is the handwriting recognition, which is honestly pretty rubbish and I'd happily live without.

[enduser]

Your Android tablet probably does not last for two weeks of daily use on a single charge. The reMarkable 2 is power-sipping, especially with wireless disabled, without compromising note-taking or PDF-reading experiences.

[KingOfCoders]

What Android tablet with eInk did you buy that can display A4? Id be interested.

[kayodelycaon]

There is one actually. https://shop.boox.com/products/maxlumi2

[KingOfCoders]

Do you have experience with that one? Does it work with A4? The reMarkable works but could be slightly bigger for two-column A4 scientific papers.

[syshum]

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 disable SSH and the ability for people to opt-out of their cloud.

I am grandfathered in, so I get it for free, but I have no intention of using

Today if I needed to replace my device I would buy a SuperNote A5X

[COGlory]

disabling ssh would violate GPL licensing, right?

[Fnoord]

No, what makes you think that? OpenSSH isn't even GPL.

[chrismorgan]

Excerpt from my reMarkable → settings → Help → Copyrights and licenses → General information:

> The General Public License version 3 and the Lesser General Public License version 3 also requires you as an end-user to be able to access your device to be able to modify the copyrighted software licensed under these licenses running on it.

> To do so, this device acts as an USB ethernet device, and you can connect using the SSH protocol using the username 'root' and the password 'hunter2'.

(Incidentally, “an USB”—are they pronouncing “usb” as one syllable or something?)

So COGlory is actually roughly right. They could disable SSH, but would need to replace it with something at least vaguely similar for GPLv3 and LGPLv3 compliance for other parts of the software.