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Comment by blindseer | Hacker News Reader

These features were free to begin with! Then they got greedy (imo a marketing / sales background product manager thought they should price more aggressively) and started charging for basic features! Honestly the device was completely unusable at that point. And now they are reverting ONLY because Kindle Scribe is going to be out soon, and they need to look like they are a similar product. I can guarantee that unless they have a major shake up in their organization or put it in writing that they will not change their service offerings, this will absolutely happen again.

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It's not just fiscal greed, either.

Their services are all hosted in Hong Kong, which means that they're subject to China's domestic spying apparatus and rules on encryption.

You'd have to be a moron to trust a device which uses Chinese-territory-hosted servers to store and OCR your documents.

The remarkable2 is a more expensive (if you count subscription fees for 2-3 years), far less capable, far less private device than an iPad with Apple Pencil. You can get the screen texture for a few dollars off Amazon.

Almost any iPad can do text recognition and handwriting recognition completely offline; this thing can't do any of that without an internet connection.

They keep having to pimp it on HN because it's not a competitive-in-the-marketplace device.

The use case for the ReMarkable is not the same as the use case for an iPad. There are other e-ink writing tablets out there besides ReMarkable obviously, but iPad did not at all satisfy what I was looking for in a note taking/paper reading tablet. It was like a glorified second phone with a shit writing interface. Very glad I switched to e-ink.

All cloud features remained free for people who owned the device before they implemented the subscription model as far as I know, it's not a bait and switch.

This is true for now. As someone who bought the original ~3-4 years ago, I feel very nervous that the way I use my $500 device is not aligned with the company’s long term road map. Add the fact that I recommended this device to a bunch of friends and family (the v1 is a great product) and I am personally on the hook for figuring out how to get half a dozen annoyed friends/family to get ssh access. The cost of them changing this is high for me personally and I really don’t have a lot of faith that they will not discontinue this subscription waiver at some point in the future.

This.

This is the true difficulty with clawing back features in order to charge for them: you break trust.

Businesses income in aggregate is not immediately affected by choices that break trust (in fact, the short-term balance sheet might even show increased profits) but it’s very hard to un-sour people once you’ve broken trust.

But if you're worried about greed ruining a good product, Kindle Scribe is an Amazon product and Amazon isn't exactly known for being a champion of its customers (though maybe I'm unfairly conflating their web store with the tablet branch).

> or put it in writing that they will not change their service offerings

Also I put zero faith in what a company puts in writing unless it's in a legally binding contract. Anything else is trivial to change or ignore.

> (though maybe I'm unfairly conflating their web store with the tablet branch).

this is exactly what you are doing. I've owned every kindle model since it was first released.

I no longer shop on amazon's marketplace and cancelled my prime membership. If i want to buy "made in china" products i can cut out the middleman and go to aliexpress.

The Kindle on the other hand is a solid product.

Amazon may have many flaws, but it is pretty much known for being a champion of its customers.

For something really important, I binding contract might not be enough.

IIRC there was a U.S. bankruptcy ruling where supposedly never-sharable info was sold off.

Maybe having the relevant technical data (keys, source code, etc.) held in escrow by a trustworthy party would work?

I think they just started to run out of money because nobody was buying and their competition annihilates them in terms of features.

Do you know one of the things people really want from the tablet?

The ability to draw shapes. They don't add it on the basis of idealism "it must be like paper".

Only time will tell. I'd be tempted to buy one, but at present I'd rather wait some more time for the PineNote to reach an usable state. My use case would be mostly at home, so it would be essential to be able to read from local NFS or SMB shares, caching on the on board SD card the latest accessed books, something that would be trivial to implement in a Open Source reader, but I doubt commercial ones would do. And of course any attempt to force me use a phone app or any online services would immediately turn me away.

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