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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

What does the ReMarkable really excel at? You can make notes, but the software is not that great from what I've seen. It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important. You can read PDFs but typing notes is much faster on a desktop/laptop, and for nontechnical books a kindle is much better form factor. You can use it to draw, but e-ink is inferior to a wacom tablet or iPad pro. e-ink is great in bright environments, but in most places where people work that's just not an issue. And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?

It's a cool product but I don't get it. I don't get who needs this.

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> What does the ReMarkable really excel at?

Writing notes with a pencil. I think they make this pretty clear. Anything outside of that is either a bonus or out of scope for the device.

> It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important

Don't use the cloud sync and instead manually sync things between your own hardware, encrypt at rest if you feel like it.

> e-ink is great in bright environments [...] And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?

Living in a country with lots of sunlight and as a person who sometimes visits the beach, this is exactly what I want.

One of the main variables I look at when I buy laptops is "How well can I read from the display when I'm in sunlight?", I'm sure I cannot be the only one who likes to sit outside with my computer, or have windows that let in sunlight.

I don’t think anybody gets real work done at the beach, and if you like to work outside you can use a laptop in the shade without issues. And if I have to sync my notes manually it’s easier to use pen and paper and snap a picture afterwards. The use-cases for this tablet seem contrived to me.

> I don’t think anybody gets real work done at the beach

Writing notes is not just about doing "real work"...

> if you like to work outside you can use a laptop in the shade without issues

The ambient brightness does matter, even if you put the laptop in the shade, having anti-glare and a display that works well is really necessary in those cases. If you haven't tried it before, I urge you to try it, because it seemingly works differently than you think.

> The use-cases for this tablet seem contrived to me.

Within your parameters of what "real usage" looks like, then yeah. But if you take a look at the real world, you see there are plenty of use cases.

> Writing notes with a pencil. I think they make this pretty clear. Anything outside of that is either a bonus or out of scope for the device.

Awful/barely functioning OCR kind of eliminates one of the main advantages it could have over paper notebooks, search and indexing, though.

I learn best via writing things out by hand in my own words, and almost never read the notes afterwards. I am also profoundly disorganized :) Before I got a reMarkable I had accumulated (and thrown out) dozens of bulky paper notebooks. Now those are all digital.

Despite reMarkable's marketing around high-quality hand-drawn professional notes, I suspect crappy "transient" notes to aid memory and mental organization are the most common use case. For me it's really a thinking device rather than a writing device.

If I actually need to reference or organize my notes I will type something out in emacs.

This is spot on, and my main use case as well.

However it would be good if it OCR'ed in the background and created a searchable index.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

If your notes are the kind that are written faster with a keyboard, you are not the target audience

I find it very useful when doing CAD (with intent to 3D print something). It lets me quickly sketch rough shapes and note measurements I've taken, visualize ideas to show them to colleagues, do geometry "math" with less chance of messing up. Paper would work just fine, I guess, but RM has editing and undo, so reworking large regions doesn't result in attempts of striking out with more ambiguous lines.

So, to generalize, I'd suggest it for people that do bespoke construction of some sort often.

> What does the ReMarkable really excel at?

I have the RM2, and my answer to that question is: nothing. Even when handwriting - which is their core feature - the screen is very imprecise at times - up to 1 mm. You can't search in notes, not even after converting them to text.

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