I’ve long been struggling to describe why e-ink is so much fun for me, but I
think I’ve finally realized what it is: e-ink is just so so so retropunk.
An e-ink device is a hacker’s dream – or at least, this hacker’s dream. They
are a return to the magical feeling of computers of the 80s and 90s. It’s a
world where Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X never existed and we
don’t have to suffer with abstractions on top of abstractions. It’s DOS for
the 2020s. It’s graphing calculators for grown-ups.
Features
The e-ink devices I favor are low powered ARM devices running linux without a
display server or gigabytes of RAM. Let’s break down why that’s so awesome:
- e-ink: The display is visible in the light of day :-D
- Low Powered: They can last for weeks on a single charge
- ARM is a simple architecture with a low instruction count and even lower cost
- Linux: as much as I like it, Android is a complicated mess
- Apps are simple: they talk to the kernel to read input and draw directly to the framebuffer
- Low RAM and slow CPUs: There’s no room to build complicated stacks of software, which means no window managers, no browsers and definitely no electron apps
As similar as they are to the computers of the early 90s, they are different in
some tangible ways:
- The resolution is much higher than an old computer – The PPI is between 200 – 300
- All devices supports touch events, some even support a pen stylus
- They are super portable, weighing between 200 – 400 grams, with displays ranging from 6” to 10”
The Software
Since the devices are niche, the software ecosystem is way more homebrew
(as in the Homebrew Computing
Club): people write and
share their apps and the community is tight knit. The people who use eink
devices are enthusiasts: they’ve given up the joys of color displays to work on
these under-powered devices that are devoid of app stores, tracking pixels, pay
to play features and constant distractions. There’s no email on these devices,
there’s no chat or social networks, there’s only simple applications.
Don’t be fooled though: the device constraint
