reMarkable: The E-Ink Tablet That Traces Back to a 1970s Xerox Dream

The reMarkable 2 is the anti-iPad. It has no apps. No notifications. No color. No browser. No social feeds. It does exactly two things: let you read documents and write with a stylus that feels like pen on paper. In an attention economy where every device screams for your eyeballs, reMarkable whispers. Its e-ink screen uses no power when static. There's nothing to scroll. Nothing to tap beyond the page you're working on. Just a surface for thought.

This sounds like anti-technology. But it's actually the fulfillment of one of computing's oldest and most ambitious dreams, a dream that predates the personal computer itself.

In August 1972, Alan Kay, a young researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, published a paper titled 'A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages.' In it, he sketched a concept called the Dynabook. Xerox PARC was the legendary lab that would go on to invent the graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and object-oriented programming. But Kay's vision was different. He wasn't interested in a machine for engineers or accountants. He wanted a 'personal dynamic medium,' roughly the size of a notebook, that could amplify the way a child, or anyone, thinks and learns.

The Dynabook had specific design targets that sound startlingly modern: under two pounds, a flat display, a keyboard, wireless networking, all-day battery life, and a price point a family could afford. Kay borrowed the phrase 'bicycle for the mind' from a study that compared the locomotion efficiency of various animals; humans on bicycles beat every other species. A computer, he argued, should do for thought what the bicycle does for movement.

The Dynabook was never built. The hardware of 1972 could not deliver it. But Kay's paper shaped every portable computer that followed. The Apple Newton, Palm Pilot, iPad, Kindle, and Surface all descend from that sketch. And most of them drifted from the original intent. They became consumption devices, entertainment portals, notification delivery systems. The 'thinking tool' became a feed.

The e-ink technology reMarkable relies on has its own origin story. In 1997, researchers at the MIT Media Lab, led by Joseph Jacobson, figured out how to suspend millions of tiny charged particles inside microcapsules sandwiched between two electrodes. Apply a voltage, the particles flip, and the display shows black or white. Cut the power, the image stays. No backlight, no refresh, no battery drain while static. They spun out E Ink Corporation that same year.

Commercial products followed slowly. Sony launched the Librie, the first consumer e-ink reader, in Japan in 2004. Three years later, Amazon's Kindle made e-ink mainstream for reading. But nobody had built an e-ink device designed for writing, for the kind of active, generative thought Kay described. Paper still won for that.

That gap is where reMarkable, a Norwegian company founded by Magnus Wanberg in 2013, staked its claim. The first reMarkable launched in 2017. The reMarkable 2, in 2020, was thinner than a pencil at 4.7 millimeters and paired a high-resolution e-ink display with a custom stylus latency of roughly 21 milliseconds, close enough to pen-on-paper to feel right. Reviewers who normally pan single-purpose hardware admitted the trick worked.

Wanberg has explicitly cited the Dynabook as inspiration. reMarkable's design philosophy is an inversion of modern product management: remove everything that isn't thinking. No app store. No browser. No messaging. Wi-Fi exists only to sync documents. The home screen is a list of your notebooks and PDFs. That's it.

The market has rewarded the restraint. reMarkable raised from Spark Capital in 2021 at a reported valuation around $1 billion, and the company has sold well over a million tablets. Competitors, Kindle Scribe, Boox Note, Supernote, have crowded in, each pitching their own version of 'do less, on purpose.'

There's a broader pattern here. As screen fatigue grows and phones accumulate indistinguishable features, single-purpose devices that respect attention are becoming a product category of their own: the Light Phone for calls, the Freewrite for drafting, the reMarkable for longhand thinking. The idea is not new technology. It is old technology, reassembled around an old promise.

Sometimes the most futuristic thing a device can do is go back to the root, to 1972, to a sketch that imagined a machine not as a stream you drown in but as a notebook you carry.

(Sources: Alan Kay, 'A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,' Xerox PARC, 1972; MIT Media Lab E Ink research publications, 1997; E Ink Corporation company history; reMarkable company press materials and Wanberg interviews in Wired and TechCrunch, 2017-2021; Sony Librie product announcements, 2004; Amazon Kindle launch materials, 2007.)