Meanwhile, I have syncthing and gocryptfs installed on my remarkable 2 and have blocked all telemetry domains with the hosts file. If i wanted to, I could even disable xochotl completely (however you spell it).
This is all good and shows that they respect their customers. We should praise this! Of course theyre not perfect--from what I understand the display driver is a big blob so its unlikely that well ever have a totally free OS running, but its way better than any of the chinese spy tablets that fill up the eink tablet space or American spy tablets sold by our favorite advertisement companies directly to our children's schools.
Plus here in Australia we pay a significant premium for these types of devices - f.e. they're advertising the remarkable2 with Connect for USD$299 - but for Australians it's AU$499 (~ US$366).
On top of the death by a thousand cuts that is yet another subscription service, the AU version of that page indicates a subscription price of AUD$12.99 / month - compared to the USD$7.99 / month. USD$7.99 is around AUD$10.89.
The AU page's FAQ retains the ".. bought your reMarkable before 12.10.21 .." qualifier, and I think that translates to 2021-12-10, which sounds like an encouragement to buy before December to get this offer grandfathered in, but 12.10.21 (if assuming dd.mm.yy) would make more sense given today is 2021-10-13. (This is why we have unambiguous, international standards.)
If ordered, a cool $956 delivered. So this isn't happening, what a rip off those extras etc are for us down under. (Switching to US Store: USD $570 = AUD $776, maybe add 4-5% sales tax?).
PS agree completely about the date confusion. They should simply use 12-Oct-2021 or Oct-12-2021 to make it truly readable by as many as possible, as much as I like YYYYMMDD.
Edit: An Intuos Pro pen is $100 AUD, by comparison. This has tilt and pressure, with eraser and extra buttons, and comes with a number of nibs - https://www.kayellaustralia.com.au/product/2681-wacom-intuos...
Looks like the cutoff date was yesterday.
> If you bought your reMarkable before 12.10.21, we want to give you full access to Connect. If you have a reMarkable account, go to my.reMarkable.com and approve our new terms and conditions to get Connect.
On the "Connect" section of my account:
> As one of our valued early customers, you have full free access to Connect. This is our way to thank you for believing in us from the start. Your free plan includes all launch features, such as Google Drive and Dropbox integration and Screen Share.
I don't use these features right now, but it'll be interesting to see how the plans expand in the future. As a recent-ish owner of the device, the update cadence has felt pretty good and the new features have been relatively impressive, but I hope we don't see more features eventually get locked behind monthly plans.
So to make up for the under powering and non-upgradeable storage space on that tiny 8 GB reMarkable 2 tablet, they cleverly introduce a subscription plan only for you to get more storage space.
I had high hopes about Remarkable and hoped it will improve its shortfalls after criticising them [0], but a subscription for even basic 'Google Drive and Dropbox integration' seems like a complete turn off compared with the PineNote.
Not surprising that we now know why the device storage was so low after all. Maybe they don't have any plans of increasing the internal space you will likely be paying for their plan AND potentially the cloud storage of your choice if you run out of space.
No thanks and no deal.
The thing that stood out for me is the way they push for a subscription as you purchase your device. The Marker Plus used to be $99, but they inflated the price to be $129 so that if you choose the Connect plan, it "slashes" the price back to $99 - how it originally cost before, according to the video.
You can't advertise a price as having a discount if it was never sold at the higher price.
Since you can technically buy it at the higher price now without the sub, perhaps they could argue that they increased the price of the pen, and introduced the discount in the same stroke, and maybe ACCC would let it slide - but they certainly wouldn't be amused.
The pen pricing is even better in AUD, btw.. and that's WITH the "discounts". AUD170 for the eraser one.
Mind you, those rules don’t stop such things from happening, even from purely Australian companies. I’ve tracked a Clevo-ODM laptop seller for years that’s perpetually at 25–40% discounts across all of their products (though they cycle through some of the specific components that are discounted), and I’ve been tracking one manufacturer’s only-sold-by-them 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ battery for 15 months when they’ve had a $1,299 RRP marked down to $489–$469, with the alleged RRP recently reduced to $899. I’ve never complained to these companies or to the ACCC, but from other vaguely similar things that I have reported a couple of times I don’t expect much to happen.
I could see it being amazing, with screen-share, in diagraming and sharing visually with webex/zoom colleagues.
Now it looks like I'll need to pay them $7.99/month for the privilege ? Instant hell-no.
But screen-sharing, essentially what's on the table to an app on my Laptop, should not require cloud services nor a recurring monthly subscription.
The coupling reeks and has really turned me off my decision to buy.
https://github.com/rehackable/awesome-remarkable#gui-clients
I don't see an integration into excalidraw yet, maybe that's my next project...
Their website makes a real spammy impression, and really doesn’t inspire confidence. I need to keep paying their subscription to have handwriting conversion - one of the key reasons I would buy this? What if they go out of business? I lose device functionality? What about iCloud or OneDrive integration? I need to use Chrome for some functionality?
Nothing about this leaves a good taste in my mouth. It’s a real shame since I had my wallet ready, the device as such looks awesome, but the only hardware I want on a subscription is a new car.
So if you look around you'll probably find a similar device with the tradeoffs you're willing to make.
Why is the practice scummy then? If they did a bait and switch for existing customers, I get that would be scummy. But what’s scummy about raising prices for future customers (who have a free and informed choice whether to actually become customers)? Genuine question, I might be missing what you’re getting at here.
The price hike on the Marker Plus to incentivize the subscription is a nasty choice too.
I never even created a cloud account, partly for privacy, partly to avoid crap like this.
It also doesn't preclude devs from developing 3rd party sync solutions.
The jump in features between lite and is huge: Handwriting (yeah good luck with mein), screen share, are all advanced features.
I am too cheap to pay $8 per month for it.
As more, and more and more software / products moves to the subscription model I have become extremely selective. $5 here $3 there $15 for that one etc it all ads up quick
The PineNote in 2021 will NOT be a consumer device, it may or may never end up being one depending on what the community of developers manage to develop in the next few years...
If you don't subscribe, you still get cloud backup, but it's limited to files you've used in the last 50 days (files will no longer sync if left unopened for 50 days).
I really can't believe they're doing this, the writing recognition sucks already, now they want new users to pay for it?
I am speechless.
I love the device, but recommending it without the grandfathered benefits feels like a ripoff to me (even if I never use them).
On the other hand, my iPad and Apple Pencil get used constantly. I run “write” by stylus labs. That combo of hardware and software provides the workflow I hoped the remarkable would (but didn’t). — True the remarkable is “more open” than the iPad… but not open enough to let me install software that matters to me.
So it’s just more ewaste.
Plenty of people have and use a Remarkable. You prefer something else? Fine. It doesn't have to sit on your shelf until you get around to throwing it away.
Resell it. Give it to a friend. Donate it. You have many options besides your shelf.
But yeah it's lame that that's tied to the cloud account for the official stuff.
But I'm certain this idiotic step by remarkable will push more and more devs and hackers to polish their tools create more and more full/complex environment without their cloud.
Having a garbage free tier is not.
Basic things you can't do in free tier: - export your documents (email is the only high quality export, today, going through the app exports PNGs at half resolution) - have a warranty on your device (the ToS was changed to give warranty only to Connect customers)
Sure. Let's say you can sell handwriting conversion and screenshare. Maybe. But ugh, they combined so many dick moves in 1... I doubt they'll get enough new customers anytime soon.
I no longer recommend the platform, have told everyone considering to get one the news and my thoughts. They agree and immediately started looking at competitors.
