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.
I pay for larger iCloud storage and I have a library card.
(I’m a big fan of the library.)
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.
It’s unfortunate, but I don’t see a reversal any time soon. If I was a developer I would also want to do subscription based services, would you (put yourself in the shoes of someone running a software company)?
It’s criminal how many times I have paid for Microsoft Office though.
In the case of some SaaS tools I pay for (like Todoist), I don't resent the model because I've seen steady improvements and the cost is low enough relative to the value I feel like I get. If they increased the price more than ~20%, I would probably cancel and use an alternative.
Netflix is different; I actually don't watch much content and would happily live without it, but it appears to be good enough value during the times I do use it, particularly given that I'm well aware of how expensive their products are to create in the first place.
The problems with reMarkable here are two-fold. Firstly, the existence of any subscription is problematic when the device has such a high up-front cost. Secondly, the prices they have chosen far exceed the value their "extra" services can offer. If they had priced it at $12 per year I would have probably grumbled but accepted it. By $24 we are around my personal tipping point where I think they are being unreasonable and I want to get out of the ecosystem. The real price of around $96 is totally absurd and makes me actively root against the company, at least enough to write these long comments and post them into the void.
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.
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
> 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.
That's a lot more than you get from most devices of this type.
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.
You want a general purpose eink tablet. The reMarkable is most definitely not.
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.
Caution however, the company violates the GPL, which might be a deal-breaker for some.
Everything needs to be a subscription, according to Wall Street.