ReMarkable firing up to 40% of their workforce | Hacker News Reader

ReMarkable firing up to 40% of their workforce

e24.no

50 pointsdavisr18 comments

What an absolute failure of their management. I've been using and developing for reMarkable since 2018 and the writing was on the wall back in 2021 when they moved their focus from making a useful, durable product (the RM1) to flashy marketing and poorly designed hardware. The company I originally liked died when their original CTO, Martin Sandsmark, left.

They had so many opportunities for growth. They could have written more useful software. They double-downed on a bad file format, their program data should be natively represented in PDF objects, not JSON+binary with extra rendering required. They didn't engage with the developer community hardly at all, who literally does free work/evangelism for the brand, and knows their product better than their own employees. They can, and still should, make their software as open-source as possible, and take the best community improvements back into their mainline. They need to fire their "UX" people and put someone in charge who knows what good software should be (hint: it's not putting commonly-used buttons behind another button, just to make way for your brand's logo at the top of the screen).

I don't even want to know what their cloud spend is, but they are absolutely getting ripped off there. They need to get on owned infrastructure, and second they need to move off all of it as quickly as possible and give people the means to host data on their own network storage. It should not cost users over $40/year to host <8 GB of files. They need to give users a native option for self-hosted cloud sync and stop trying to lock customers in to their crappy SaaS-ware.

IMO if the company goes under, it will be a boon for RCU, rmfakecloud, and reManager, but ultimately after enough people pull away (and it's already started, no one can afford luxury goods, 50% of consumer spending is by 10% of the population), none of it will matter much in two years.

This is exactly how I feel. They had a golden goose on their hands and for some reason decided to shit the bed.

What's RCU? I'm a ReMarkable user and didn't know about rmfakecloud or reManager, thanks for those tips

reMarkable Connection Utility (RCU) is a desktop client for managing the device offline, licensed AGPLv3 but sold for $12. Be aware, it is my software.

https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

> 50% of consumer spending is by 10% of the population

This is startling.

I think gadget manufacturers forcing their users to use overpriced cloud storage (for stuff people can easily store locally) is like printer manufacturers forcing overpriced ink on us.

The manufacturers initially make so much from this enshittification of their product that they become dependent on the income from it, and their products are doomed to be shit forever.

Not surprised, the reMarkable Paper Pro has been the worst purchase I have made in the last three years. Support has been seriously unhelpful, and the tablet has only failed in greater ways once it was past the warranty period.

As an aside, the community is one of the worst I’ve encountered as well.

In contrast, the supernote manta has been a far better device, with much better support from the developers. The community is also more open to hearing criticism as well rather than attempting to silence those who voice regret in paying for a poor product.

Too expensive, and that money not spent on its software.

Too much marketing. Substance of the product is still lacking. The UX is cumbersome and after 5 years they still don't have a decent PDF viewer.

I really like their pdf viewer. It can be slow on complex documents, but I find it much easer to navigate around compared to the one on Supernote and Boox devices.

Their ebook reader though.. that really does suck. It’s had basically zero improvements in as long as I can remember, despite B obviously being a core feature for many people.

I got a ReMarkable a couple years ago. The writing and screen experience were phenomenal, but the ereader UX and file transfer UX turned me off. I returned it within a couple days. I've been disappointed by how other eink tablets I've tried have felt since, but since 90% of my use is reading I haven't minded.

It's unusable for architecture drawings :/

Yeah, that’s fair.

Doesn't that describe all eBook readers? I've owned a few Kindle and Kobo devices and meaningful improvements are never shipped to them. No actual performance improvements, no new useful features, nothing.

Supernote and Onyx Boox both do meaningful upgrades with useful new features on their devices.

There is also discussion about this happening in /r/RemarkableTablet:

https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1ssquyu/r...

We spent a lot of timing going back and forth on picking up a few ReMarkables, ended up going with supernote (https://supernote.com/) as it seems more open / less locked down at the time. No regrets so far after a few years of ownership.

What a shame, I use a remarkable pro at work for all of my note taking and to help organise my days/weeks. I’m really fond of it, because of its minimal functionality. I think spatially and it’s just the right feature set to organise my thoughts.

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