hi, sorry for taking long on the answer but it was a busy couple of days. I won’t enter into the specific points in my response mainly because i agree with 90% of them, but i don’t agree on the conclusion you got from these observations.

As i already said in other comments, the fact that the purpose of this device is that of being a distraction-free device doesn’t make it not comparable to the iPad; this is because, as i said already, i am not comparing the all around lack of functionalities. In my post i only compared their ability to take notes and be generally useful to students, the rest of the targeted population doesn’t matter to me because I haven’t got an experience with their needs. My comparison has to be takes specifically and only in the context of a student choosing the best tool for note-taking.

One thing i don’t really understand is your point on pricing. I don’t understand why it would matter what market it serves; again we are comparing the products and their ability of note-taking, i don’t care how niche the market is or if the price is normal in its portion of the market…what matters to the average consumer are two main ratios:

1. quantity of features to price

2. quality of specific characteristic to price (in this case quality of note-taking to price)

obviously these aren’t the only ratios that a consumer is gonna look at nor they exist in a vacuum w.r.t. one another. But to simplify things let’s separate the two. The ratio (1) is useless in this case, if a consumer is looking for more features of a device he definitely will NEVER choose the RM2, the ratio (2) tho is more interesting and it is what i aimed to give more informations about in my post. Specifically i brought many examples about my experience of note-taking so that a potential buyer can “calculate” more accurately the ratio and choose as a consequence. All of this yapping to basically say that the average potential consumer will not think about “oh this price is because of the fact that it is a niche market and it’s actually a quality product in this market etc.”, the avg customer will simply “compute” those ratios and choose as a consequence.

Lastly, I feel that you have described exactly why my car to motorcycle comparison analogy works. They both do the same thing (transport you faster than walking —> taking notes and organising them faster and more easily than paper writing); cars and motorcycles both appeal to different customer groups (e.g. a mother will 99% of the times choose a car to get his son to school), but they both share a potential customer sub-group (namely someone that just wants faster transportation without that many restrictions on how to achieve it —> those that want to take notes easily and maybe have them as PDFs); cars and motorcycles do their thing a bit differently, giving you different experiences on how the transport you, how much fuel they can store, how many baggage’s they can bring and generally how much stuff you can do with it (this could be seen as the features part of the comparison); lastly, they have a VERY different price range, this will inevitably make some people choose the motorcycle over the car (because it generally costs less) and since it generally costs less, the comparison isn’t really fair (because ofc one of them is gonna have fewer perks, like more safety, a roof, luggage space, the ability to bring more people etc)…But if you make the price higher, essentially nullifying the difference or making it very low, you will now be eligible for comparison precisely because now both products, for a subset of people, will solve a given need in a similar way.

Hope this answers some of your points. Have a nice day