Tech Review: The Daylight Computer

Like everyone else, my attention span is completely fucked.

I have gone to greater lengths than most to deal with this. I have a lifetime subscription to Freedom, which I use to block YouTube, Twitter and other distracting sites more-or-less permanently. I have a timed block to prevent myself from accessing email, and have no access to any non-work communication on my computer. For most days in the last five years, I’ve been banned from accessing my phone before noon.

While it’s immodest to say, the most common question I am asked when meeting my blog readers is “How is it possible you read so much?” This is the answer: I acknowledge that the whole concept of willpower is kind of fake, and I attempt to optimise my environment for the creation of high-quality intellectual and creative output. Whether I succeed is up to you, but I promisethat things would be a lot worse if I didn’t engage in aggressive attention management.

For these reasons and others, I’ve long wanted to own an extremely boring computer that I could only use for reading and writing. Last year, I thought that Silicon Valley had finally answered my prayers with the release of the Daylight Computer.

If you spend any time on tech Twitter, you’ve probably heard of this thing.

My one-sentence review is as follows: The Daylight is the best technology purchase of my entire life.

No other device I’ve ever bought has noticeably improved my focus, mood, and productivity the way this one has. I’ve had it since June 2025, and I’ve since integrated it into all my workflows.

However, the Daylight has many, many problems. It is an expensive beta product, aimed at extreme users. It is produced by a startup which is poorly managed and which has repeatedly missed all of its product deadlines with no explanation.

What follows will be the most excruciatingly detailed review of the Daylight Computer in existence. I encourage you to skip around between the sections that interest you. Writing this involved speaking to many people close to the company, reading and watching every existing review I could find, and reading every post on the Daylight subreddit. Obviously, I was not paid by Daylight or anybody else for this review. As with most of the niche-as-hell blog posts I publish, nobody asked for this.

In part one, I will give a general overview of the Daylight. In part two, I will explain how I personally use it. In part three, I will whinge about all the ways in which it could be better.

What is the Daylight?

When I refer to the ‘Daylight Computer’, I mean the DC-1, which is as yet the only device made by the Daylight Computing Company. The DC-1 is a fancy Android tablet with a black-and-white screen that makes it look like paper.

Is that it?

Yes, that is basically it. However, much of this review will implicitly be about just how much a device’s display changes what your brain wants to use it for.

The display

The Daylight is sometimes described as an ‘e-ink’ tablet, which is the display type used by Kindle, Boox, or reMarkable tablets. But this is not quite right: e-ink is a patented technology that can only be made by one company. Indeed, this is a big part of the reason why these tablets are still so expensive.

Daylight’s display technology is called LivePaper. It is a form of transflective LCD, which is able to reflect ambient light and transmit light from a backlight at the same time. This technology has existed for decades, but the Daylight’s key technological innovation was making this technology fast. The Daylight runs at 60 frames per second, and is extremely smooth. This is a stark contrast with e-ink, which runs at about four frames per second when scrolling or refreshing.

The Daylight’s display looks most like paper when the backlight is turned all the way down, and one of the device’s selling points is that you can work with it outdoors in the sunshine (hence the name!). LivePaper is less reflective than e-ink, so when the backlight is turned off, it’s noticeably darker than other reading tablets. That is why I almost always have the backlight switched on, usually to the lowest setting. Most Daylight users I spoke with were the same.

You need a lot of hertz for a device to feel like paper. The slowness of the Kindle might be a virtue for some. Bragging about how your computer is better because it runs faster is exactly the kind of philosophy we’re trying to get away from. But ultimately, I have a monkey brain that responds to incentives. My previous attempts to use e-ink tablets bounced off the wall, because the latency was so unpleasant to deal with. Daylight is the first company that has gotten this to really work for me. For that, I am willing to forgive almost any sin.

The Daylight’s display has 190 pixels per inch (DPI). That is in contrast with 300 DPI for the Kindle. Some people are bothered by the Daylight not having a higher resolution, but personally it hasn’t bothered me. The image feelscrisper than it really is, because you can zoom in so smoothly.

Zooming in to text is the “jaw-drop” moment that causes people to realise that the Daylight is a unique device. You can see this in real time in this video from Patrick McKenzie.

The bright colours of the modern technological world are simply too distracting and addictive. Much of the time, my laptop is in greyscale. For many years, I also had my phone always monochrome. This ended last year; after Apple decided to make the UX of iOS way worse for no reason, the contrast of the black-and-white display became so low that I was getting bad eye strain from using it.

One of the alleged reasons why the Daylight prevents eye strain is that the screen doesn’t flicker. If you’re not aware, older LCD displays used to be lit up by a constant backlight. Modern screens are constantly flickering through a technology called pulse width modulation. Supposedly, the human eye cannot possibly detect the speed of the flicker on any recent MacBook, but some people report that the flickering of an iPhone’s OLED gives them headaches and fatigue.

I don’t know if it’s because of the flickering, but my phone consistently gives me eye strain, while reading small font on other similarly-distant screens does not. For me, the Daylight would be worth it for its benefits to my eyesight alone.

Another way in which the device is easy on your eyes is that there is a drop-down menu in which you can easily adjust the level of red light (“redshift”) on the screen. The Daylight Company claims that, when you have the device in its ‘warmest’ possible setting, it emits zero blue light, which this YouTuber verified with a light spectrometer.

The Daylight’s maximum brightness is 50 nits when emitting blue light and 26 nits in the warmest setting. I wasn’t previously aware ‘nits’ was a unit of measurement; it represents a candela per square metre.

The physical device

According to my measurements, the Daylight’s screen is 6.1 inches wide and 8.2 inches tall. The device as a whole is 7.25 inches wide, 0.4 inches thick, and almost 10 inches tall. It is available in any colour you like, so long as it’s white.

The device weighs 580 grams. This is definitely heavy by the standards of a tablet, and I sometimes accidentally drop it on my face.

Some people have nitpicked about the bezel size compared to the reMarkable, but all of these dimensions seem fine to me. The bigger issue is that the edges are made out of surprisingly low-quality plastic. I imagine I’m above average in how often my devices get battered by being stuffed into bags and so on, and after over a year, my Daylight has certainly seen better days.

I take battery life estimates with a grain of salt, but as a daily user, I charge the Daylight less than once a week using USB-C. Because I’m not checking the toolbar, the device generally dies unexpectedly on me. After being plugged back in, it restarts almost immediately, which is very nice.

The operating system

The Daylight runs on Android 13, which was released in 2022. It can do anything any other Android tablet can. The Daylight is supposed to have its own operating system called Sol:OS. When you open the default ‘Reader’ app, it says that Sol:OS Beta will be released early 2025. Early 2025 came and went a long time ago, and Sol:OS still does not exist. As far as I can tell, no one outside the company knows what it is. Presumably, it will be a modified version of (a more recent?) release of Android.

While the Daylight, in principle, can send you notifications, I haven’t received a single one in all my time using it.

What the Daylight (intentionally) lacks

The Daylight Computer has no GPS module. While the decision not to let the device have mobile data or a SIM card is entirely understandable, I find the lack of GPS a shame. It often happens that I’ll leave my phone at home when I study at the library with the Daylight, but I’ll want to navigate to a restaurant or other location in the evening. I’ve now gotten lost quite a few times by loading Google Maps navigation, and then not having my location update once I’m outside.

The Daylight also has no camera. This is also a defensible decision, but I have mixed thoughts about it. A common way that I get sucked into distraction by my phone is when I reach for it to take a photograph, and then see that I have notifications from WhatsApp or another app. The lesson I’m inclined to draw here is that the “convenience” of centralising so many functions into a single physical device has been a disaster for human psychology.

The cost

The DC-1 will set you back $729. Like all American prices, that is before tax. Including VAT and shipping to Ireland, I paid €894 for it in total.

I have heard a lot of grumblings about how expensive the Daylight is, but this is not out of line for the top end of the e-ink market. The reMarkable Paper Pro costs $630 before tax. The manufacturing of Android tablets has been ruthlessly optimised, but displays that look like paper are currently still expensive to produce.

How I Use the Daylight

Reading documents

Anything that I want to read as a PDF, I put in a big Google Drive folder. On Drive’s native PDF viewer, you have to scroll the book vertically as if it’s a giant image, rather than tapping the sides. I use Daylight’s Reader app, which also only has vertical scroll, but at least remembers where you are in the document if you close it and then come back later.

If you read a PDF on the Kindle app, it does allow you to scroll horizontally, but still without the page-flip animation of a Kindle book. More importantly, you can’t mark up the margins with the stylus.

There is a Daylight app for iOS and Android that allows you to send files directly to your device, but I haven’t needed it so far.

Colour is rarely essential to understand the content of what I read. Of course, sometimes I’ll be reading a paper and won’t be able to follow unless I can read a colour-coded graph. For me, my comprehension is still a lot better if I wait until that happens and then consult a computer when it does, rather than trying to read the entire paper on a computer.

If reading and annotating PDFs is all you want to do, then just buying a used iPad and deleting anything distracting from it would work better than the Daylight. A few years ago, I bought a Kindle Fire, which I attempted to use for this purpose. I found the software so slow and irritating that I never used it, except to avoid the content blockers I have on my phone and computer. So, ironically, the Kindle became 100% dedicated to distracting and useless activities.

When I’m reading papers, I will annotate in the margins and mark important passages. Unfortunately, any annotations you make to a PDF on Daylight’s reader are only stored locally. There doesn’t seem to be any export option that saves the document with your markups on it.

I also read a lot of blogs on the Daylight. Now, of course, I could read blogs on my computer, but I find it difficult to do this without going down a massive internet rabbit hole and checking my email. I save webpages to read later using Instapaper.

Taking notes

After reading, my second biggest use case for the Daylight is to take notes. Again, I tried various apps for this, but using anything other than the default Notebook app proved to be too high friction. For something entirely text-based, I select lined notebooks; for maths, I use dotted ones.

Glassnote is the first app created specifically for the Daylight, and I am told it is much better than the default notebook. The idea is that you will be able to press a button on the side of the device, and then annotate whatever is on the screen. I joined the waiting list for the beta, but Glassnote’s website has since disappeared.

Power users may want to use an app like Nebo to convert handwriting into text, and then upload the notebooks to Claude or another AI tool to help you with ideation and planning. I still haven’t done this, because taking notes is not currently a software-shaped problem in my life.

Reading books

My current setup is that, if I want to read an EPUB, I send it to my Kindle account from my laptop, and then read it on the Kindle app on the Daylight. A pro tip, which is not advertised online, is that the Desktop Send to Kindle app allows for a greater file size (up to 50MB) than emailing the EPUB to the address associated with your account. Before I knew this, I was bodging various solutions to read large books, including splitting them into multiple files.

I prefer paperback books, but when I can’t find one, or if it’s too expensive, I’ll read on the Daylight instead. I take lots of shorthand notes on said books using the Kindle app, which prove useful when I want to write something about that book.

I also own a Kindle, but my use of it has declined almost to zero since I acquired the Daylight. I’m starting to think this was a mistake, and that for typical books without demanding formatting, it’s better to use the original Kindle. On the Daylight, I’m worried that I’m too quick to jump to an LLM or web browsing as soon as I encounter something challenging.

Although it sounds ridiculous, I’ve actually considered getting two Daylights: one for LLMs, notebooks, two-factor authentication, and podcasts, and another strictly for reading. I can’t endorse getting a second one in its current form, but I think I’ll pre-order when and if the DC-2 becomes available.

The YouTuber Grayson Tate put the Daylight in a head-to-head with the Kindle Paperwhite and an experimental pair of e-ink glasses (!) called the Sol Reader. I agree with his conclusion that, if all you’re going to do is read books with it, the Daylight is not for you.

Writing

There are a lot of minor writing tasks for which the Daylight has now become standard for me. I’ve found it especially helpful for dumping notes into a Google Doc, in a context where I’m not necessarily trying to edit and publish something as a dedicated activity. But so far, my revealed preference has been against engaging in longer writing tasks with it.

The Bluetooth keyboard I’m using has a nifty feature: you can pair it with up to three devices and switch between them using a single button. I alternate using it with the Daylight and my laptop. I’ve also been using the Daylight with a mouse, connected with a USB-C adapter I bought on Amazon.

Using AI

For some strange reason, ChatGPT does not work on the Daylight. That is a bit annoying, but I still use Claude extensively on it.

The ability to limitlessly query LLMs without getting distracted is just wonderful. Every weekend, I leave my phone at home and go to the office, where I work through textbooks and papers while using the Daylight to make flashcards and ask Claude questions. I honestly feel like a kid again: I just want to keep digging deeper into all the topics that I’m excited about.

Owing to the small screen, I don’t use the Daylight for Claude Code or any other AI tools more complicated than a chatbot.

Studying flashcards

All of my friends know that I’m an advocate of spaced repetition and active recall. One of the nicest use cases of the Daylight has been to card more pieces of information without getting sucked into using my phone or computer.

I would like to do my daily spaced repetition reviews on the Daylight, but, unfortunately, the Android app for RemNote (similar to Anki) is quite slow. There is something extremely satisfying about how fast you can get at blazing through the cards on the desktop app.

Split-screen and annotation

It took me a long time to realise that the Daylight has a split-screen feature; the button to enable it is almost entirely obscured by the bottom toolbar for button-based navigation.

The following image encapsulates why I don’t use the split-screen feature often:

Suppose I’m reading a paper (top) and I want to write a bit about it in a blog post on a Google Doc (bottom). No matter how far you zoom in to the paper on top, the vertical black bars on either side remain the same size. Trying to read when you can’t even see a whole line of text at once is a disaster. I can imagine this approach working for note-taking about specifically horizontal media, especially lecture slides. But I haven’t personally come across such cases yet.

Music and podcasts

The most I deliberated about any decision related to the Daylight was whether to install capabilities for listening to music and podcasts. I was worried that this would ruin my strong mental association between the Daylight and serious work. Spotify continues to be enshittified and keeps adding more peripheral features like videos. Eventually, I caved, and I now use Spotify for music and Pocket Casts for podcasts on the Daylight.

I do find genuine value in podcasts, and I love music. But my comprehension and retention for both were greatly diminished by the fact that I was listening to them on such a distracting device (namely, my phone). I know that many people are not really listening, so much as filling the silence with muzak.

As such, for several months now, I haven’t had any music or podcast apps installed on my phone.

Exercising

I’ve been pretty happy with my physical health progress recently, especially around weightlifting. I can squat, bench, and deadlift much heavier weights than I used to be able to, without feeling mentally tired afterwards. One of the key reasons for the good progress has been that I stopped bringing my phone to the gym.

When working out, I now listen to music and/or podcasts on the Daylight, which I keep in a small tote bag. I also use it to track workouts. I probably look like an idiot, periodically taking out an iPad-sized device to ask Claude for lifting advice, or to change playlists. But I also think that, when it comes to exercising, conquering your fear of looking like an idiot is half the battle.

Sadly, many gyms now make it mandatory for you to bring your phone to enter, as my gym started doing a few months ago.

Alarm clocks

In the introduction, I mentioned my rule of never using my phone before noon. The most common way that this system would be broken is when I was travelling and didn’t have space to bring an alarm clock. For me, a physical alarm clock is something I can’t live without. I went through five alarm clocks before I found one I really like; I currently use this one. The main issue is that it’s too bulky to carry around with me on every trip. It may sound trivial, but the Daylight has saved me focus and sanity on trips where I was no longer confronted with attention-grabbing messages from my phone as soon as I woke up.

Multi-factor authentication

Currently, my biggest struggle in trying to have a healthy relationship with my phone is the proliferation of services requiring two-factor (or more) authentication. With the AI hacking apocalypse that is upon us, I can only assume this will get more common and onerous with time. Up until last year, I would routinely go many days at a time without turning on my phone. Now, I can rarely go 24 hours without needing my phone to verify my identity in some form or another.

For this reason, I have migrated as much multi-factor authentication to the Daylight as I can. Sadly, on many such apps, you are only allowed to be signed in on one device. I understand the need for these cybersecurity requirements, but digital minimalists are in such a minority that zero attention seems to be paid to them in setting organisational 2FA policies.

Another example of a trivial action that means it’s de facto mandatory to bring your phone with you everywhere is displaying tickets. One of my favourite places to use the Daylight is airports, where I use the Ryanair app for boarding passes, since they no longer allow printed boarding passes for “environmental” reasons. This does involve getting the gate staff to scan your gigantic pretentious Kindle instead of a phone. But if you’re not willing to pay any socialcost to protect your attention, you’re unserious.

There are a thousand other examples of minor tasks where using my computer or phone for them is an invitation to get sucked back into unrelated work and personal projects. The fraction of days on which I meditate using my meditation app, for example, went from about 25% to 50% after I got the Daylight. That number is still far from 100%; one of the secondary effects of having highly non-distracting technology is to expose which of your inadequacies are revealed preference rather than the consequence of inattention.

Problems with the Daylight

The company is badly managed

Ironically for a company positioning itself as a way to be more productive and achieve your deeper goals, the Daylight Computing Company is poorly managed and the CEO is distracted. In some of the comment sections underneath Daylight’s social media posts, he makes silly replies to comments. As mentioned, there has been essentially no official communication from the company about its many missed deadlines.

I pre-ordered the Daylight Computer in November 2024, and it was estimated to reach me by February 2025 at the latest. It didn’t arrive until mid-June 2025. Even then, I needed to pick it up at a distribution centre in a remote industrial park in Dublin.

Part of the delay was caused by Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs. I assume that such terrible shipping chaos won’t happen again. But the whole saga was so poorly managed that I can’t fail to mention it in a review.

Here were two more examples of general sloppiness:

First, when I ordered the Daylight, it was as part of an ‘early bird’ package for subscribers to their newsletter, in which I paid a $100 refundable deposit so that I could pre-order before the general public. After I ordered the DC-1, they forgot to refund the $100. Daylight seems to have lost track of its accounts, to the extent of not even noticing what happened to the refunds. If it were not for me, by chance, replying to a general promotional email, in which I asked out of curiosity, $100 of my money (and everyone else’s?) would have disappeared into the aether.

Second, obviously some countries have higher VAT or sales tax than others. You’re not supposed to be able to avoid tax by buying goods from countries where it’s lower; you have to declare when it’s imported, and then pay the appropriate VAT. Administratively, the way this generally works is that the tax is collected by the courier that brings it to your country, rather than the seller.

I mention this because at least one person who works for the Daylight Company has a foggy notion of how this works. Originally, I was charged the Irish tax rate by Daylight. The following January, they refunded me. The May after that, I had to manually pay the tax to FedEx in order to release my package from the depot. I’m certain this was an honest mistake, but it was also something of a farce.

Many distracting apps are installed by default

Based on how the product is marketed, several people expressed surprise to me that the Daylight doesn’t have a custom operating system that blocks access to Twitter, YouTube, web browsing, or other sources of distraction.

The Daylight would be a much better product if, when you configured it, it gave you an option for how minimal you want your setup to be, and blocked everything you exclude.

Having said that, I can’t overstate how important the display is to the type of mental associations my brain forms. I simply have no desire to check Twitter or watch videos when using the Daylight. All of the activities I use it for I endorse spending my time on. Dwarkesh Patel made a similar observation. But not everyone will be the same as Dwarkesh and me. There is nothing to stop you doomscrolling.

By default, the Daylight Computer comes with lots of distracting apps installed (Gmail, Spotify, New York Times minigames!). I was disappointed by this, and immediately uninstalled most of them.

In one of their promotional videos, the company puts a spin on how including minigames on the Daylight is actually in the user’s interest. That same video approvingly shows a woman watching TikTok on the Daylight. This is honestly offensive. If someone is going to spend hundreds of dollars on a new device to help fight digital distraction, and then use it to watch the same vertical short-form video nonsense, then what exactly was the point?

Some of the distraction is due to the style of the Android launcher that was chosen, called Niagara. This creates the look and feel of the home screen, and is just like any other Android launcher. You may want to switch to the Olauncher or another more minimal setup.

There is no shortage of third-party apps aimed at reducing digital distraction. What’s puzzling is that the Daylight Company didn’t make any of this part of the design.

Indeed, this marketing is so confusing that you could argue that Daylight has misunderstood its target demographic. Rather than the niche of “anti-tech tech workers”, it should be mass-marketed to parents as a less addictive way to introduce their children to technology.

…and, as if by magic, while I was writing this post, Daylight engaged in a marketing pivot and announced the new “Daylight Kids” bundle. The idea of being able to give my hypothetical future kids a monochrome tablet where they can read blogs and query LLMs, but where video is uncompelling, is quite appealing.

The orange buttons don’t do anything

The Daylight has two orange side buttons that, so far, don’t do anything. When held vertically, one is on the top-left, and the other is about a third of the way up the right side.

It seems the hardware was added before the software update allowing these buttons to be configured. The website now claims that the orange buttons are configurable, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do so. I suspect this was another overly optimistic timeline that was missed by the company. To my knowledge, no major software updates have shipped since the launch of the DC-1.

This is a shame, because the Daylight would really benefit from a physical back button. I would probably configure the other button for note-taking with Glassnote.

I keep losing the stylus

The Daylight comes with a custom stylus, based on electromagnetic resonance (EMR) technology. That means that the Daylight can use other popular tablet styluses, such as the ones made by Wacom.

There is no place to clip the default stylus to the Daylight, and it does not connect magnetically. This is a recipe for it getting lost. I lost the proprietary stylus pretty quickly, and am now on my second LAMY stylus. It is clunkier and less pleasant, but harder to lose.

One of the nice features of the default stylus I miss is that it has a “rubber” (eraser to Americans) on the end for undoing writing.

Nibs on digital styluses are only supposed to last a month, according to the company’s FAQ. I still have not replaced the nib, nor do I know how to do so.

There is no case

The Daylight doesn’t have a case yet. The only relevant resource they have here is a page that links to an Amazon page for what they regard as the best third-party case. However, the URL is only for the American site, and Amazon’s SEO incentivises so much unreadable slop that I can’t figure out if the case can be bought in Ireland in the same size. I’m now using a fairly unpleasant “universal” case from my local Chinese fluorescently-lit electronics shop. I will probably switch to the bespoke Daylight case with a stylus holder if and when it is released.

I strongly recommend buying a case before using the Daylight. Even with a case, while I was writing this post, I scratched the screen enough to impair the reading experience. As far as I can tell, Daylight also doesn’t sell screen protectors.

The default apps are a bit rubbish

The Daylight Computing Company is definitely understood as a hardware rather than a software business. But they do provide a suite of default apps. None of them are very good.

To give one example: In the native EPUB reader, there is no dictionary feature. If I select a word I don’t understand, there is a ‘search’ button, but it just opens Google within the reader. The only way I have been able to figure out how to get back to the book is to swipe up and use the unreliable task manager feature to kill the instance of the EPUB reader, before opening it again. Coming across a word you want to check the definition of takes you completely out of the flow of reading.

Each of the default apps has its own examples of not-particularly-thoughtful design. Most of these complaints are relatively minor unless you are a 98th+ percentile power reader. But if that doesn’t describe you, I would be surprised if you’re still reading this review.

Sebastian Garren points out to me that the Notebook app is actually not made by Daylight. That is a surprising decision for what software to outsource; it represents a lot of the brand. Among other issues, it’s a huge pain to export notes from Notebook to any other device, and there is no option to keep them synced. All you can do is convert the files into PDFs and save them to your device, and then presumably upload them to Google Drive or another cloud.

I now have quite a lot of personally and professionally important stuff written in notebooks on my Daylight, with minimal backups. I guess that is my own fault, but this is not user-friendly design.

The app called ‘Reader’, in which I read PDFs, is somehow supposed to sync with another app called ‘Reader’ on the home screen, which has a fancier icon. Sebastian and I spent some time trying and failing to puzzle this out. Reader is very basic; I can’t search for text within it. The way that you quickly scroll through pages involves a sidebar that you can scrub through, but it gives you no visual representation of how far through the book you are.

Further, it has no ability to navigate to a specific page; it took about 30 seconds of scrolling recently for me to get to page 891 in a book. The way that you make and erase highlights is also unintuitive.

The Bluetooth is buggy

Bluetooth is known for being an unreliable technology. In my experience, a big part of the reason why people pay a premium for AirPods over other earbuds and headphones is that the Bluetooth tends to just work on the first try, without any pairing or connection issues.

The Daylight is not like this. Connecting a device for the first time is fine, but when I leave the radius of connectivity and then come back inside it, the audio will consistently be choppy until I disconnect and reconnect the headphones. Sometimes it will only play in one ear; other times there will be an echo in one or both ears.

Whatever means by which Bluetooth headphones communicate their current battery percentage to the connected device is only partially implemented. The Daylight does not display a battery estimate when my AirPods are connected, but it does display an accurate one when I’m using these Sony headphones. For other headphones I’ve used, a battery reading displays, but it’s consistently inaccurate.

The backlight is grainy

Tyler Cowen was probably exaggerating when he said that the Daylight is “the best general reading device humans have ever invented.” It depends on what exactly he meant by “general”, but thescreen can definitely still be improved.

When the Daylight’s backlight is turned on, up close it looks like a small amount of oil has been uniformly smudged over the display. Here is a high-quality video to get a sense of what I mean.

Relatedly, the contrast is too low. When you read outside on a sunny day, the text of a book and the background screen just don’t look different enoughfrom each other. To deal with this, I would recommend nudging up the text size a notch or two from the default. I believe part of this is because of the company’s use of an iodine polariser, which creates a greenish tint that reminds me of an unlit Game Boy. Perhaps v2 will make use of a better polariser.

The current version of the device uses a twisted nematic LCD. This restricts the viewing angle: tilting your head makes the screen noticeably harder to see. This is one reason why the optical illusion of thinking that the screen is paper doesn’t quite land. DC-2 might make use of vertically-aligned LCDs, along with the better polariser.

Of course, the company knows this better than I do. I’m sure that if I talked to the staff, I would learn many things about the difficult trade-offs of running a hardware business. People I spoke to who interacted with the CEO came away impressed with his IRL thoughtfulness.

Conclusion: The Daylight Computer as metaphor for life

If you wanted to explain why so many of us are deeply unhappy with our relationship to technology, you might appeal to the psychology of addiction and human fallibility. But first, let me attempt an economic explanation that assumes rational utility-maximising consumers.

The more general a device is, the larger its “total addressable market”. Electronics supply chains are so intricate that a smartphone needs to have a large market in order to experience such amazing cost savings as we have seen in its production.

It could be the case that most people actively dislike mixing many distinct uses into the same device. But the supply chains for the general devices are so extraordinarily well-developed that a simpler product would actually cost more. You could call this the “paradox of mass production”: the iPhone is a technological marvel, but people are miserable using it because what they actually want is separate devices without so many notifications and context-switches.

I’m not sure if I actually believe the above, but it would be one way of arguing, Chicago-style, that our current problems with technology are temporary and would eventually be solved by the continued operation of the free market.

I have wondered whether the price point suggests that the Daylight, and other forms of aggressive attention management, are a new form of status signalling. At the Interact retreat, I was one of three people who brought a Daylight, which at the time might well have been more than the total number of such devices that existed in my home country. For a long while, you needed to be well-connected in Silicon Valley to get your hands on one. People who own Daylights still feel a bit like the Bene Gesserit class of the Bay Area.

Similarly, the fact that I can drop off the face of the earth and be uncontactable for a few days while I read obscure papers about the philosophy of physics is, in a way, a form of status signalling that I am sufficiently economically valuable and/or independently wealthy that I can afford to do that. The ultimate status play would be to have no smartphone at all.

Is bragging about and showing off your unnecessary technology that the majority of the population cannot afford cool again? Is this part of the heralded “vibe shift”? Am I part of the problem?

Those questions are above my pay grade, but in the meantime, here are some miscellaneous other observations about the Daylight that didn’t fit into any of the other sections:

Some of you probably read this review and wondered whether, instead of buying a Daylight, the solution to all my problems is to replace my iPhone with a dumbphone. For reasons I discussed in the multi-factor authentication section, I would find this tough; my phone is also pretty pared-down as it is. For me, any device with instant messaging simply cannot avoid being distracting. Still, a close cousin of the Daylight that allows you to make phone calls and send text messages is the Light Phone.
There have been countless philanthropic and policy efforts to get more iPads and laptops into schools, and I’m highly doubtful that the net effect of these initiatives has been positive. But I would tentatively support an education programme that gave students the Daylight.
A Daylight-style second monitor for my computer would be incredible. I have heard it claimed that it’s possible to use a third-party app to wirelessly use the Daylight as a second monitor for Windows, but I haven’t been able to get it to work for Mac.
Another one of the reasons why I don’t use my Kindle much anymore is the phenomenon of ‘ghosting’, which is where faint remnants of the previous content will remain visible. Visually, one of the strongest assets of the Daylight is that it avoids ghosting.
Tyler, in his review of the Daylight, wrote, “I am also told that an AI function will make it possible to query reading passages at will, and easily, yet without leaving your reading window. This is not yet up and running on my demo version, but it will be a major advance.” I haven’t heard any more updates about this, but it would be a nice feature.

Ultimately, for most people, I still recommend waiting until a newer version of the Daylight is released, or until it has at least been given a major software update. I recommend the DC-1 even in its current form to people who are neurotic in exactly the same way as me. I hope this company learns from its mistakes and succeeds.

There is a cottage industry of people telling you about how much better your life would be if you spent less time on your phone and computer and more time reading. But unless you change your environment, you will be fighting an uphill battle against human psychology. Attention is your scarcest resource.

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In future, it may be worth penning something about how the preservation of one’s attention span is even more important “in the age of AI”. Models are now at PhD+ level in narrow intellectual domains; if it wasn’t true before that expertise is fake and smart generalists rule the world, it certainly is now. Agents can do just about anything for you, if you can focus on a single multi-step complicated task for hours or days at a time. But, be honest: can you?

In a sign that one’s corner of the internet is going mainstream, a few months ago the Daylight Computer was mentioned on the Joe Rogan Podcast. Joe’s comment was “I might check that out… I don’t want to carry around another fucking thing, though. All the bullshit I have to carry around, and that’s big”.

One of the distinctive features of e-ink is that the display can be maintained even without battery. Only changing displays uses power. That is why your Kindle can continue displaying a static screen indefinitely.

This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, because transflective LCD and e-ink are fundamentally different technologies. For example, the reMarkable is much more responsive to the stylus than what you might gather from an FPS number. My point is just tha the Daylight is a qualitively completely different experience in terms of the smoothness of its display.

This eventually got so bad that I switched my phone into absurdly large “old man font”.

One of Kindle’s most unforgivable design choices is that there is no way to disable the annoying warnings for having low battery. Each one must be manually dismissed, and they start popping up when the device is at 20%. Chaps, it’s not that big a deal if my e-reader runs out of juice.

The premium version also allows you to upload PDFs.

But the developer is still posting updates on Reddit.

Another reason for this is that the Kindle is incredibly finicky about connecting to WiFi networks. As far as I can tell, it has essentially no ability to connect to anything other than a password-protected home WiFi. The Daylight, on the other hand, does not have the accumulated years of sludge in the network and VPN settings as my laptop has, and so connects to e.g. airport WiFi much more easily.

The fact that the knowledge needed to debug this device is scattered across various Reddit threads is part of the problem.

Sometimes that toolbar stays open permanently, and sometimes it disappears after a few seconds of inactivity, and I haven’t been able to detect any pattern. It also sometimes contains an array of default app icons, and sometimes doesn’t, and I equally cannot figure out any relationship.

I was genuinely very upset when my university imposed a two-factor authentication system, meaning that, to access email, or book office hours, you had to carry your phone around with you all the time.

No, I won’t be linking any examples.

Patrick McKenzie said the Daylight looks like the moving newspapers from Harry Potter.

I mentioned Freedom in the introduction.

Also: If you get a Daylight, immediately navigate to the settings and switch from Android’s gesture-based to button-based navigation.

This is, erm, a different perspective from the one taken by Will O’Brien. I would guess these two meanings are strongly correlated.

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