I still don't understand how there isn't a market for a work _laptop_ with a display like this?
- Longer battery life
- easy on the eyes for long sessions reading/writing
- Allows me to actually work outside!!!
There is a huge market of people out there (Thinking about the typical ThinkPad users) that don't give 2 craps about color accuracy. We literally just want to read and write.
Anyone envolved in Product Management that can give some insights?
Is it too expensive?
Are there not enough users?
Are vendors scared of the lackluster of the device when compared with shinny reflective displays?
No one is going to sell a device that costs significantly more than any other for the same power to provide what 99% of users would consider a sub par/ unusable display.
Like seriously can you imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to watch any media, play any games and has the refresh rate / perceived performance of a 15 year old tablet.
This stuff isn't ready to be a 'main' display yet.
> imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to - watch any kind of media - looks 'laggy'
Imagine thinking that the consumer market is only for media consumers. There is a whole market of enterprise products out there, and there is certainly a use case for a _work_ laptop which needs no multimedia support.
I wouldn't argue that someone buying this machine would only use only this machine. But I know I am not alone in saying that this would be my daily driver when focus is required.
> There is a whole market of enterprise products out there, and there is certainly a use case for a _work_ laptop which needs no multimedia support.
You think in 2021, when I'd argue the majority of folks that own a laptop are working remote, there's huge demand for a laptop that can't display a video feed from a zoom or WebEx meeting? That sounds extremely unlikely to me. I'd wager the demand for such a device would measure in the thousands and would never be cheap enough to sell more than a couple hundred.
You'd be far, far better off just making a Bluetooth keyboard case (like the old clamcase or brydge cases) for a boox and calling it good. You'd have an ssh terminal and basic office apps as supported by Android.
Actually, those displays do. They may work fairly well for the purpose. When I tested those capabilities years ago, the chief issue was with ghosting; the second with choosing either high definition with strong artefacts or fast, cleaner low definition; the third was with having algorithms that minimize dot switching (which is energy costly). But there is a possibility that newer refresh algorithms fixed most of that.
Even at the state of a few years ago, to just see talking heads and presentations the video capabilities of EPD were already more than adequate. It makes little sense energy wise (wrong instrument), but it is doable. Those who want the EPD properties for production may see little loss in the lower video quality - provided the issues I listed above have been mitigated, foremostly the ghosting.
I'm as much of a fan of the potentials of this technology as anyone, but it really look like it's terrible to use as a main display even for non-multimedia applications.
I.e. try setting your mouse or keyboard to have even 50-100ms of lag, a lot of people would find that very distracting to use even for just using a terminal Emacs/Vim & for writing plain-text.
There's a reason these things are being marketed as "secondary displays", which makes perfect sense.
In terms of cost I really don't see why anyone would want to do it differently anyway. A 20" LCD is dirt-cheap these days, so if you're already spending 5x or 10x that on the same size of E-Ink display why not get both?
While the 20ms latency on the Remarkable 2 is very impressive, let's please not say that users "cannot perceive the difference". At best the latency "does not bother" users. There are whole swaths of professions for which 20ms is a huge amount (professional gamers, musicians, etc), and even personally (And I generally view my lag perception as quite poor) the 20ms on the remarkable was noticeable enough that it did not feel as nice as having a good pen on paper.
Apple pushed an update in iOS 13 which brings the latency on the Pencil down to 9ms.
Which I remember vividly because it's when latency on the Pencil subjectively "went away" for me. Especially for tight loops in cursive, on iOS 12 the line would 'catch up' with the stylus, but at 9ms I don't perceive that.
Edit: crosshatching is an even better example of a technique which feels completely different at 9ms rather than 20ms.
In addition to the videoconferencing others have brought up, pretty much every Fortune 500 out there has extensive training requirements for their laptop-using employees - that content is a mix of video and slideshows. Those corps are the biggest purchasers of "work" laptops.
For the uninitiated, the training I'm referring to covers everything from sexual harassment to infosec to insider trading to "why you don't really need unions".
The only time I’ve “needed” to watch video at work has been for cheesy, anti-harassment training showing pre-recorded situations that are obviously illegal.
The other cases are videoconferencing, where someone is basically showing a fairly static powerpoint, sprint planning board, or other, text-heavy content.
Basically every enterprise of a reasonable size is going to require their users to consume multimedia content of some sort - web calls, training materials etc.
If the crux is that even you, clearly a passionate eink advocate, wouldn't be able to use it as a sole device then that essentially makes the market tiny. In fact, a secondary eink display sounds like exactly what you need.
When the refresh is more capable it'll be more of an option, and I cannot wait for that to be the case. But it's just not feasible to sell a laptop with an eink display as yet.
This sounds more like a usecase for the Pixel Qi screens, transflective LCDs which are sunlight-readable but with normal refresh rates and which have a full-color backlit mode. Still not sure why the tech never took off...
No manager would consider signing off on devices that don't make their PowerPoint deck look great. Without the corporate or consumer market you're going to struggle to find revenue.
What if they made the display modular, so that you could swap it with a regular display for when you want to do gaming and other stuff like that?
I personally would buy an e-ink laptop, but then again I'm very much into e-ink, I have a Kindle and ReMarkable 2, years ago I also bought DPT-S1 but I returned it because it was too expensive.
Also colour e-ink displays have been getting better and better too! So I'm sure that in time, it'll be amazing!
Issues? Yes. HDMI does not allow for the touchscreen, and you may want that. And the hardware system must optimize battery life, which can be awful on the HDMI connection.
What you really want is an optimized data connection and screen mirroring to the tablet.
Or, an EPD tablet with the ability to use more than Android...
Mind you, Android can be pretty effective on the tablet for some tasks. But when you will want to use a complete Office Automation suite, instead of the more toyish mobile alternatives...
What I finally did, this June, was: I coded my own word processor for Android.
A dual boot system (Android vs Linux Desktop) would be the best solution.
I used to run a full Debian chroot on Android. It was very handy except that if you ran it on an unrooted Android device you couldn't be a user with full root capabilities. But gcc, make, tar, gzip, and git worked well enough to compile working stacks for other languages (the first software I built on it was Perl from source) as a regular user. Thousands of packages available and the ability to build from source, right on my phone in my pocket. They had other distros for it, too. Unfortunately that project - GNURoot - seems abandoned. Possibly fortunately a new one is from the same maintainers. I think I never used X on it. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.ula&hl=en...
There's another called Debian noroot (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu...) that appears fairly up to date but I haven't tried it. It's well rated but said to be slow. It includes XFCE and apparently starts it by default. It uses PRoot.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=studio.com.tec... is yet another, and also uses PRoot. I have concerns about their page saying they have closed-source modded versions of F/OSS operating system distros though, and that they'll only provide source to developers who register with them. That's kind of unneighborly if they're customizing BSD or Apache licensed portions of a distro and illegal if they're doing it with GPL or LGPL portions.
I'm idly curious about the word processor you put together. You're not saying "text editor", which suggests some level of interesting/novel functionality.
Exactly: full fledged Word Processor, optimized for the contextual technology of a ~13'' EPD display (so, for example, no scrolling, corner-to-corner (but the margins) use of the display in two columns landscape - for use with a slotted BT keyboard). Native Java for Android (no need for NDK). Rich text and full paragraph justification, spacing and indenting - from scratch: text is rendered and placed on the bitmap of the screen canvas bit by bit whenever necessary upon editing. Functions through touchscreen and keyboard shortcuts. I structured a markup (using both paragraph styles and ad-hoc "direct formatting" - bold, italics etc.) which allows for simplicity and comfort in file manipulation, but the translation to .fodt (or .xml in general) is almost trivial (there are libraries around to manage typical formats: I have checked but not implemented as for personal use I do not really need the feature). Battery wise, I managed to remain very conservative: sometimes even 2%/hour (~100mA, equivalent to many days of work) of consumption (fortunately, also the use of BT keyboards consume very little).
It was started this June (2021), and I have used it for many hundred of hours with good productivity. I have not published it (yet) as I would want to polish the code first. It was quite rewarding to get it done (the best tailored product is the one you develop for yourself) - but still with a sensation of quite absurd oddity, since I had been using full-fledged word processors in the early nineties, and "there I was", almost thirty years later, with tablets much more powerful than the desktops of yore, coding a word processor because all was available for Android was unfit for use if compared to desktop tools, and I was just losing time waiting for "the product"... It's not "normal".
I hadn't thought of the concept of writing into a multiple-column layout before. That's really really neat. It keeps the individual runs of text short (faster for proofreading, I've heard), scrolls less, and lets you keep more context on the screen.
I'm definitely very interested in this when it comes out, I don't currently have a tablet-size device but that probably won't be the case for too long and I can see myself giving this a go. A single-column option for phones (in landscape mode) might be practical.
I do completely agree that Android feels structurally broken (for want of a better way to put it) in terms of application support - it honestly feels like someone figured out how to bolt WebKit onto a feature phone and add capacitive touch and eye candy, while (somehow???) maintaining the same "smol device" fundamentals of "toy" and "not full PC". IMHO the PC experience isn't really one single cohesive vision, but rather the emergent result of years of many thousands of little independently-evolved self-sustaining threads and ideas (particularly in UX design) intersecting and bouncing off each other in a sort of cohesive balance that resulted in (comparative) miracles like Windows XP. Microsoft et al didn't invent the fundamentals of the ideology and language that emerged; rather, they just figured out how to capitalize on the net result and realized that if they knee-capped it too heavily they'd kill the thing they were trying to benefit off of.
From a distance it kinda looks like Apple/Google are trying to (re)invent everything - conventions, expectations, design language, (tens of?) thousands of tiny details, etc - from first principles, without giving sufficient consideration to whether their fussing about accidentally edits and rewrites the technological aspects of the goal narrative. I think advertising and the exponential over-valuation of user data are to blame for the current insanity - and sadly so, since it's obvious that won't change soon. I think the fundamental incentive to refine and optimize for technical experience/competence has become diluted by All The Ad Revenue™ from the current status quo, producing the current ecosystem, app store offerings, app quality level, fragmentation, etc. Basically everything seems to be working as intended, or in other words I don't mean that "current status quo is fundamentally bad and evil" (for want of a better way to put it), I rather mean that between ad revenue, internal politicking, Google/Apple/Microsoft competition, antitrust regulations, overall public perception of how invasive ads/tracking is, etc etc, the system as a whole has basically reached a steady state that simply doesn't have room for pure technical excellence, which I don't think will change until the ad bubble collapses. I'm tentatively hopeful that might actually happen in my lifetime, although as a counterpoint, hopefully it doesn't take so long the world ends up in a WALL•E-style dystopia with everything paperclip-maximized around ads instead of garbage. Haha.
However, this all provides a unique opportunity for anyone prepared to make the effort to make apps that are actually interesting: can I interest you in a "Buy" button? :P
You mentioned cleaning up the source code - and while I certainly won't dissuade you from open-sourcing something like this :D (it would be a genuine net improvement, and you could list on F-Droid as well), I'm reminded of the "source code is <license> on GitHub, but ready-to-go APK in Play Store is $.$$" model, which I think could work quite well for this sort of thing. There are a lot of small, focused apps out there that have loyal followings.
Maybe you could do an "early beta" sort of thing to cue users to understand the first versions are free but you plan to change that at some point. (The Play Store management dashboards probably make it straightforward to grandfather everyone who started with the beta into free updates for life or something like that.)
I was wondering if you can freely customize the system (install software like a normal Linux Desktop OS) and checked, and I found a curious detail ( https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote ):
> NPU (Neural Processing Unit) Capabilities: * Neural network acceleration engine with processing performance of up to 0.8 TOPS; * Supports integer 8 and integer 16 convolution operations; * Supports the following deep learning frameworks: TensorFlow, TF-lite, Pytorch, Caffe, ONNX, MXNet, Keras, Darknet
So... An eInk laptop wouldn't be for media. It'd be a different product with different pros/cons. Easier on the eyes. Better in sunlight. Easier on battery. Quite usable for reading, emails, code and any "mostly text" use.
To the OP's original point "why doesn't this just exist..." IMO, it could, but it would need to be a different product class. Just sticking the monitor onto a windows machine isn't good enough. It needs its apps/etc. The market is probably much smaller than the phone/tablet and laptop/desktop markets. Perhaps potential vendors don't think it's big enough to support the necessary OS, apps & such.
Amazon sees the same potential - and risk - and has been quietly iterating for over a decade in the segment.
If you want to go seriously explore it as a product, I’d start with a deep dive study there and develop a few theories how you think you could be different enough to blow it wide open.
> Like seriously can you imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to watch any media, play any games and has the refresh rate / perceived performance of a 15 year old tablet.
In a word: yes. But I was 10 or 11 years old before we had a color TV.
Yeah, a lot of negative comments, from people coming up with all sorts of multimedia use cases, when there is clearly a market gap and plenty of people that want work houses without multimedia capability.
I doubt an lcd display in a laptop costs a vendor more than $10. So that would make it a 16 million dollar company. If a E-Ink display costs $100, it would still only be a 160 million dollar company...
a good display is several hundred dollars.
Market valuation does not equal to annual sales.
A niche notebook like this can be sold at higher premium.
The idea would be to offer notebook not the display.
Try reducing your screen's refresh rate to mimic that of an eInk display. Interacting with the machine becomes a horrible chore. Every input feels laggy and sluggish. It's hard to control the pointer. Even at 30Hz it becomes very difficult to focus on the actual tasks because the computer doesn't seem to respond to your commands.
How many software developers and authors are there? Time was when 100,000 units a year was enough to make a highly successful company.
When did we decide that only trillion dollar companies were worth considering? At that point we lose economies of scale and get into rent seeking. We'd all be much better off with a hundred $xxB companies than one or two $xT companies.
How many developers and authors have a workflow that doesn't include a GUI with a pointer?
I for one would not like to go back to terminal-only. There's a lot to be gained from decent graphical interfaces, and having them smooth makes working on them more pleasing, which reduces my stress and allows me to be more productive.
LCDs of the 1990s had ghosting, and this was solved with pointer trails and other accessibility features, like disabling animations. People should be able to make the choice of outdoor visibility versus update smoothness.
Outdoor visibility can be solved with a brighter screen.
I have worked under bright summer sunlight on my Air whose screen is 400 nits. It was not comfortable but it was workable. The M1(Max|Pro) laptops are "up to 1000 nits sustained (full-screen) brightness, 1600 nits peak brightness". Surely that would work well enough outside, although I haven't tried it.
No amount of trickery like pointer trails will make up for the fact that the pointer lags behind the input by a very noticeable amount. It's like trying to play a musical instrument with 200ms latency. You'll get distracted and lose your tempo and timing. Or at least I would, and I suspect the vast majority of computer users, pro or otherwise, would as well. This should again answer the original question:
> how there isn't a market for a work _laptop_ with a display like this?
Outdoor visibility can be solved with a brighter screen.
To an extent, but eye strain is reduced quite a bit when surfaces are front-lit by the environment rather than back-lit by a uniform light.
No amount of trickery like pointer trails will make up for the fact that the pointer lags behind the input by a very noticeable amount.
As I understand it, small parts of an e-ink screen can be updated very quickly, but sacrificing grayscale accuracy and glitchiness. Either way, I'd 100% buy an e-ink laptop with specs comparable to current developer laptops, so how many people does it take to make a market for that?
Fair points, and I'd love to find that out. Perhaps start lobbying with one of the existing laptop manufacturers? They might do some market research to understand if there is an actual market for it.
> I'd 100% buy an e-ink laptop
> how many people does it take to make a market for that?
I honestly have no idea but my guess is, more than one. Probably _a lot_ more. Not only the company would need to sell the first batch but they'd have to keep improving on it, selling more and getting them replaced constantly, otherwise it would become vapourware after the first (few) iterations. If the first iteration is not great, at least some users will hold off and think twice about getting the second. If it's not good enough for a lot of the users, I suspect it would go totally bust after the second iteration.
It's not just the cost of the hardware either, they would likely need to solve drivers, and if it's going to be a dev laptop, they'd at least need to support both Linux and Windows. This is no small feat.
Sure, they could try to offload drivers and software to the display manufacturer, but now you'd have to prove to them that there's a market worth pursuing as well.
Hard sell, but a laptop with a reversible 2-1 screen, one side OLED, and one e-ink, would probably be a winner.
Or something like the framework laptop, but with a plugable/ unplaggable screen, and you switch as needed.
I would buy one. Espacially on travel, where the prospect of working outside in nature, and having a one week battery life would be fantastic for work.
At the same time, there have been so many convertible tablet/laptop systems that either have the pivot at the bottom center of the screen or less commonly a screen that turns over between two arms on the sides that it's hard to believe someone couldn't do the same with a two-sided screen enclosure.
I've read previously on HN that there's one company with a stranglehold on the e-ink patent and so the prices are artificially high for the screens. This probably would make a e-ink laptop or tablet more expensive than it should be.
But yes, I agree. I've wanted an e-ink laptop for working outside for years.
We saw the same trajectory with high refresh rate displays. Back in the CRT days, you could set your display to 200+Hz on some monitors, 85Hz was common, and 72Hz was the minimum. At the same time, you had devices with reflective LCDs that worked outside.
Then LCD monitors came along, and suddenly we went from 1600x1200@75Hz to 1280x1024@60Hz. Anyone who complained was placed in nutjob territory -- "you can't see more than 24fps", "human reaction time is over 100ms", "you're holding it wrong", etc. Then, finally, high refresh rates became common, because they are objectively and subjectively superior.
Eink will go through a similar process of nerd shaming as the patents expire and new competitors emerge, but eventually outdoor capable displays will also become a normal, acceptable option.
> Eink will go through a similar process of nerd shaming as the patents expire and new competitors emerge, but eventually outdoor capable displays will also become a normal, acceptable option.
Which patents? How will any company get past G = τ / γ ? You do realize that in the last 30 years of development in electrophoretics, the update time has remained around 700ms right? Those who do better like Clearink do it by sacrificing bistability.
Please see my comment history, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28740452#28746303 , for why I strongly doubt your claims. I don't see how your observations about LCD apply to electrophoresis, unless there's some new physics that you're describing.
It would be expensive and mouse cursors are not the most enjoyable with these things. You really have to crank the speed to use a mouse cursor without extreme frustration on eInk and that comes with a huge quality loss. I imagine most people need color for certain tasks even if it's not accurate like making a PowerPoint or something. For most people I think it would be more of a frustration than a help when running Windows.
Boox and others like Boyue do make Android eInk tablets which are pretty flexible. You don't need a mouse either which solves that problem. Very good for reading PDFs. Termux and a good text editor like Emacs or Vim can let you get some work done.
Touchscreen and keyboard commands. I use those systems this way and efficacy is high.
> You really have to crank the speed to use a mouse cursor ... and that comes with a huge quality loss
You must mean, "use the A2 mode". Not really, on the contrary: on GU (Grayscale Update) they mouse cursor will leave a trail that can be more helpful than an annoyance.
Yeah, I retried it directly connecting a mouse to my Note Air and it's better than I remember. I think before I tried a screen sharing app with it connected to a PC and maybe that's why I thought it was so bad.
The old OLPC laptop had a weird screen which kind of became a black and white e-ink screen when the brightness got turned all the way down, and was a quite normal colour screen otherwise. No clue how it was made though, and if there has been any further work in that direction.
I don't understand your post. First you state that you don't understand how there isn't a market for a laptop using this screen, then you underline that there is a huge market out there (somehow "typical ThinkPad users", who apparently don't care about color or anything else, and just want to read and write), and then you ask why these things don't sell much and if the problem is that the device is lackluster compared to a normal cheap LCD display.
Have you looked at these displays in use? They're slow, flickery, have low contrast, and cost absurd money. They're still desperately trying to crawl out of the "enthusiast / early adopter" stage. I really want one. Everyone really wants one. But nobody wants the overpriced rubbish the current generation is.
No colour. I want an e-ink with syntax highlighting. This is great and all, but even 16 base colours would go a long, long way. Oh also, would be nice if it were built into a MBP and I could switch between monitor types quickly, but I know that's a pipedream.
I'm currently using (on a color LCD) a syntax highlighting theme that uses about 4 shades of gray, plus typographic differentiation. It would look fine on an e-ink screen.
What you _can_ do, is buy the boox lumi, a 13 inch Android e-unk tablet. Then get a Bluetooth keyboard folio for it.
You now essentially have a 13 inch laptop chromebook.
The OLPC used a transflective LCD. Basically, the low power mode was a grayscale LCD with the backlight turned off. The background was a reflective surface that reflected enough light to give a, rather low contrast, image.
Yeah, this is the real answer to the "outside" use case.
Lots of fitness smartwatches have them, and they're awesome. Once you walk outside there's clearly a reduced color gamut, but other than that, everything else (fps, etc) remains the same, and the screen is perfectly usable.
Can't wait until other niche mobile devices come out with this tech (tablets, phones, laptops).
I really would love one of these for the 2D AutoCAD work I do which mostly involves electrical diagrams and 2D building layouts for fire / gas alarm systems. One of the main problems I see is the finite lifespan of an E-Ink display vs traditional monitors. Not to say the old 1440P TN displays I use at work will last forever, but I'm not sure an E-Ink display having to refresh constantly for 8 hours a day of work will hold up nearly as long.
A lot of counterpoints here, how about a half normal display, half e-ink? Left side of the monitor is LCD m, and the right side is e-ink. Might be a bit cramped for some use cases, might work for others. Or, how about a rollable, flexible OLED that can dynamically roll out and cover more and more of the e-ink display, so that you could roll out the OLED when needed, or tuck it in when you want full e-ink?
If you just want it for reading, you could buy a $200 laptop and use this as an external display. If you're not running hot you could leave your laptop closed inside a backpack or case while you used it. Still kind of fiddly but it sounds good to me.
- Longer battery life
- easy on the eyes for long sessions reading/writing
- Allows me to actually work outside!!!
There is a huge market of people out there (Thinking about the typical ThinkPad users) that don't give 2 craps about color accuracy. We literally just want to read and write.
Anyone envolved in Product Management that can give some insights?
Is it too expensive?
Are there not enough users?
Are vendors scared of the lackluster of the device when compared with shinny reflective displays?