reMarkable Paper Pro

All devices can be broadly classified into two types: devices that promise and attempt to do everything (or many things at least), and devices that promise or attempt to do just one thing but do it better than everyone else. Devices in the former class can get away with being good enough in enough things that the benefit they offer as all-in-one devices outweighs carrying a second or third device. But those in the latter category necessarily have to do things flawlessly, and a key part of being flawless—at least in this respect—means being highly opinionated.

I expect my laptop to fall into the former category, and I believe a MacBook is genuinely the superior example in this class. Users rightly expect it to do a lot and it does; and they expect it to do it all well and it does. By contrast, I do not expect my Kindle to fall into this category: all I want it to do is offer a stellar reading experience, and it does.

An e-ink notebook and nothing more

The reMarkable Paper Pro does one thing—or one suite of tasks to be precise—and does them well. It is a device that bills itself as an expert in something, focusses on it and does absolutely nothing else. Sometimes this can be frustrating because you will occasionally find yourself wishing it did just that one other thing; and other times it can be hard to sell simply because we have come to view maximised capabaility as the norm for technology—as if the only way to get enough bang for our buck is if a device does many things.

This is what makes the reMarkable Paper Pro so hard to understand for many people (is with the company’s entire lineup really) and why so many reviewers eventually spout a variation of “I cannot read my Kindle books on this device” as some sort of con. But why should it? Use a Kindle to read your books; use a reMarkable to write your notes and, say, annotate PDFs. We never complained when a novel we bought could not double as a notebook or vice versa, but we do so now simply because we expect that the only way a digital device justifies its existence is if it does many things. I also do not know of anyone who properly read a journal article on a tiny Kindle screen without also printing it out to annotate later (ironic as that sounds).

Quantity over quality in feature set is a mindset that works for companies, but not always for individuals.

So what is the reMarkable at the end of the day? I do not want to jump to premature conclusions but there is a picture on the company’s website that I think sums up my experience really well:

The Paper Pro comes at an interesting time for me. I had just moved cities and was quite overwhemed by the number of objects I own. I felt there were too many, at least by my own standards, and one of the things I could get rid of were my many notebooks. While technically capable the iPad never felt like a proper ‘notebook’ for me. I had to write in dark mode at conferences, for example, so as not to have bright light shining in my face all the time (which is especially odd in a dimly lit room, as if you have a second presentation underway in parallel with the speaker). In such scenarios the reMarkable fits perfectly. And because it does nothing but serve as a notebook, I cannot be bothered to reach for it under any other circumstances.

Is the Paper Pro worth it?

The economics of this route are worth questioning, though. As a set of ballpark figures, the reMarkable Paper Pro with a Marker costs about £700, my Leuchtturm A5 softcover notebooks cost about £20 each and last me at least two months. But because I use more than one notebook at a time I shall limit each Leuchtturm to one month. Even if I run out of one 207 a month, that adds about £1 on top of the cost of notebooks. At this rate I should use the reMarkable Paper Pro for 33 months before it becomes as economical as buying notebooks.

However, the scourge of modern technology is the subscription plan and reMarkable is no angel. The company promptly offers their own plan to sync with the device at £3 a month (admittedly with a generous free trial period of 100 days). This comes up to £108 over three years. Compared to buying pens and notebooks this adds six additional months, or 39 months in total, before the reMarkable Paper Pro becomes cheaper than buying several notebooks.¹

Of course I can add some of the non-tangible benefits of the reMarkable for which some may put a price while others may consider them priceless: safely backed up, taking up almost no space, all notebooks always available everythere, multiple notebooks, templates, planners etc. available for no extra cost in one place et cetera. But since reMarkable Marker tips need replacement too—at the rate of one tip per four months or so—and they come with a box of six tips that costs £15 (or about £0.625 per month) which I did not factor into the previous calculation, let us call it even.

So my real question is, will a reMarkable Paper Pro last longer than 2.5 years without issues? My only indication along these lines is the reMarkable subreddit where people report enjoying their device since 2017, for example, putting it at an astounding eight years at which point it would have been more than just cheaper than buying notebooks. Hopefully I will be able to replicate something like it with the Paper Pro as well.

Speaking of the subscription plan, it was woefully unclear to me (and still is to a great extent given that I took up the 100-day trial²) what works without the subscription.

Business mumbo jumbo

Can you really blame reMarkable for indulging in publishing corporate advertisement-adjacent nonsense as a routine business task? At this price point, and given the narrow user base, the company has little choice but to extol its products as solving pressing societal issues.

For example, the reMarkable website recently published an article on ‘Why deep thought matters’ and on reading it I was a bit dumbfounded. I have no idea what ‘deep thought’ is but I gather it means either thinking about things deeply or allowing our thoughts to rest and blossom before we try to force some sense into them, because the article itself never clarifies this. Instead, it name drops some famous people in the human–tech interaction space like Ryder Carroll of Bullet journal fame, Sönke Ahrens the author of How to take smart notes and others. The article was clearly the brainchild of the marketing department because it said nothing, rehashed lines from popular folk and made a vain attempt at associating ‘deep thought’ with the reMarkable product.

As I said before, I am not against marketing. I am also not averse to calling out shallow marketing for what it is. The reMarkable is not about to solve ‘deep thought’ for people whose problem was an inability to sit before a notebook and pen and not the unavailability of such tools. Indeed I think such marketing does the product a disservice: the only undeniable advantage of a reMarkable is that it replaces a lifetime of notebooks with a single, replaceable electronic device. This too is not unique: the Boox and Supernote both do this. The Supernote is supposedly capable of more (viz. OCR) while the Boox is more of an e-ink iPad. For those of us who are convinced this is actually a disadvantage for the Boox devices, the real added benefit of the reMarkable is of course its inability to do anything else.

I would rather the company did a better job of touting things like the Calm Tech Institute award it won recently. They do mention this on their website—describing it as a “certification program [that] recognizes technology that prioritizes customer well-being by reducing their stress and cognitive load”—but they say so little about it that people might as well just read the headlines. Instead, the lengthier and more detailed explanation is hidden away in their press pages for some reason³.

Future usage

I was convinced within a few days of using the Paper Pro that it would be indispensable for me. I was also convinced that it would be pointless for most others.

As someone in academia, reading and writing are essential tasks for me on a daily basis. These are the two things for which a reMarkable works brilliantly. I had, weeks earlier, discussed with a friend who is not in academics about the reMarkable and its possible use cases for him; and I am quite convinced now that it would not be as useful for him as it is for me. Of course it would help the same way any tool would generally help, but only so long as we do not pretend it is solving any pressing problems. For such individuals, the reMarkable is more of a device that is nice to have than necessary or even useful. But at its price point, the reMarkable has no excuse being just nice to have lying around.

It is not, for example, like an iPad that you might want to leave around the house to pick up at some point and watch a film or flip through a magazine. Unless extensive reading is something you do daily, you probably do not need anything more than your iPad or mobile phone. The benefits of an e-ink notebook for such users is unnoticeable. It may be useful if you do write on any sort of notebook or loose sheets in your day job, whatever that job may be. But programmers and designers are better off with an iPad which is more conducive to their handwritten or hand-designed material jumping across apps while it takes shape.

The reMarkable has no support for any apps outside its ecosystem. It only supports syncing softwares and that too only a select few (Google Drive, One Drive and Dropbox as of this writing).

But if you happen to fall into just that sweet spot where you write enough, and peruse and annotate written works enough, the reMarkable Paper Pro is well worth it. Perhaps that explains the vague marketing bordering on fantasy: the company needs more sales from people on the fringes of its niche user base. Nevertheless, shallow words in an ad copy can be done away with; keep it simple like the rest of this wonderful e-ink notebook and we just might have the perfect device of its kind available today. For me, this has quickly become a reliable favourite and stands among my more heavily used devices day-to-day. This is one remarkable piece of tech that is not about to become our master.