Why is the reMarkable 2 Pen so Expensive?

I have the reMarkable 2 Pen and Tablet, and I absolutely love them. 

I bring the tablet with me to every meeting, and it’s such a great way of removing scraps of paper from my desk. It helps me keep track of the notes of any meeting or any conversation I’ve had in one central location.

When I say I take it into every meeting, I should say, I used to take it into every meeting.

That’s because recently, I discovered what I consider to be a pretty big flaw with the reMarkable 2 Pen – the reMarkable 2 Tablet is really a non-functioning e-reader without the Pen.

While the tablet itself might seem affordable, it actually gets a lot more expensive if you add the price of the pen.

I have the fancy pen with the eraser on the end, and my biggest issue with the unit is its price, followed very closely by what I think is a design flaw in the reMarkable 2 Pen.

To give some context here, I have a lot of digital pens. I have a Wacom tablet pen and Xencelabs tablet pen. I also have both the Gen 1 and Gen 2 Apple Pencils, and I have dropped those repeatedly over the years with no negative outcome.

I’ve had my reMarkable 2 pen and tablet for about a year and a half, and they really do go everywhere with me in the office. But strangely enough, I’ve never actually dropped the pen very often until recently when I did drop it and it fell on its nib and broke. Design flaw.

You see, the way the pen is designed is that the nibs insert into the end of the reMarkable 2 Pen, and there’s a cone shape support that the nib slots into. Unfortunately, this cone shape support is made from a rather thin plastic material.

If you drop the pen at the wrong angle, then it seems relatively easy to break this plastic support. Once the support has been broken, there seems to be nothing that will save it.

What happens is that the pen nibs become unstable when they don’t have any support. Then they’d literally just start folding over and become useless for writing with on the tablet. 

I’ve tried putting all sorts of other things around the base of the nib, including using a 3D pen to print plastic supports around it, but it’s all come to naught. 

Unfortunately, the reMarkable 2 pen just doesn’t want any more support. So I figured not a biggie. I’ve had it for a year and a half, and it’s done me well.

I figured I’ll just run off and buy a new one. And so off to the site I go only to discover that the basic market is $79.

But now that I’m used to having the convenience of an eraser at the end, I need to stump up $129 for a plastic pen that has no powered mechanical parts and a nib that breaks when you drop it on the ground.

It’s not in my nature to start looking for warranty support, but I’ve done that and it looks like there are not a lot of options available for me to get this replaced as a warranty or product fault. So, I’m left with three choices.

One, stump up the 129 bucks and buy a new pen. Two, buy a third-party pen and hope that it works nearly as well.

Or three, give up on the reMarkable 2 completely and go out and buy a Kindle or Kobo, which offers e-reading and writing. I’m not convinced that the Kindle or the Kobo will give me the same experience that the reMarkable does.

The tablet surface and pen combined work really well. This is why I’m reluctant to give up such an amazing piece of hardware because of a small flaw.

I guess there is still a fourth option of continuing to try and create some ad hoc solution to hold the nibs straight, but it’s a bit of a micro process. I’m also not sure if I have the time or engineering skills to perfect something.

So I might have to just jump on Ali Express and look for some third-party ones, and then price up the difference between the original reMarkable and a third-party pen to see how far I get.

I guess this is a bit of a gripe, but I expect that there are others out there who have experienced the same.

So I’d be really interested to hear from you in the comments if this is something you’ve suffered with your reMarkable 2 Pen, and if you’ve found some magic solution to fix it.

Please do comment below as I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading, Mark.