I Can’t Decide if Smart Typewriters Are Dumb or Brilliant

As someone who writes for a living—between 5,000 and 10,000 words every day—I’m always looking for ways to become more productive and efficient. Which is why I ran across a class of device I never thought I’d see—smart typewriters.

These expensive and limited devices command eye-bleeding prices, and promise quite a lot for your money, but it just seems like another productivity gimmick to me.

What Exactly Is a Smart Typewriter?

Smart typewriters are devices with basic displays, that can only be used to write. There’s nothing to distract you, and the overall experience is pretty much like a normal typewriter, except there’s no paper, and they also differ from classic digital word processors in that these devices are connected to the cloud. So your writing is safely stored somewhere other than your dinky little keyboard device.

In 2023, my colleague Tyler Hayes reviewed the Freewrite Alpha, and honestly didn’t like it very much. Partly due to how cheap and nasty it was. Except, despite being the budget member of the family, this device was anything but cheap, at $350.

This is baffling to me, because my mind says these devices should be dirt cheap, which really makes me skeptical about their supposed benefits. Still, I want to give the idea a fair shake—and if someone wants to send me one to try, I’d be happy to, but not at these prices!

The Case for Brilliant

So there are a few positives I can see coming from these devices, and the first one has to do with the key promise—distraction-free writing. The only thing you can do with one of these smart typewriters is write. You can’t even really distract yourself with a lot of editing or formatting either.

Some models also make use of e-ink screens, or some other low-brightness simple displays. So if you don’t like having your eyes blasted by LEDs, it might be one alternative.

Presumably, they’re also better to type on, being designed for no other task than writing, and because they do so little, battery life should be pretty long.

The Case for Dumb

Why do these devices cost so much money? Why would I pay as much for one of these as a MacBook Air? These are very hard questions to get sensible answers to. I suspect part of the price issue is simply because creating niche, small-run electronic devices just makes the per-unit cost higher.

Which wouldn’t be such a big deal if this was a specialized device with a full-blown word processor, but the actual word-processing capabilities of a smart typewriter are so limited, that someone’s going to have to edit and format that text on a traditional computer no matter what. So, at best, these devices are really only nominally useful for the actual writing part of the process.

In other words, whatever you’re gaining from the device in terms of making you write more, or at all, might be devoured by your new clunky workflow.

The Nostalgia Factor

I think these smart typewriters are less about helping you focus on writing, and more about letting you pretend to be an old-timey “serious” writer on an analog typewriter, but without all the hassle with ink, paper, and losing your work because you don’t have a cloud backup solution.

Not too long ago, there was a bit of a typewriter revival, which is just another example of us being nostalgic for retro technology, but most people probably realized that for actual productive writing a vintage typewriter is awful. If you want to write one good page a day while puffing on your pipe, then I guess it’s fine, but devices like the Freewrites or Hemingwrite version (the name gives the motivation away!) basically try to give you the typewriter experience with some of the inconveniences removed.

The Alternatives

Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on one of these niche writing tools, you can just use the laptop you already have combined with one of the many distraction-free writing apps (like Focuswriter) that are already out there. A simple computer like a Chromebook could be your dedicated writing device, with no apps or games, or other things on it.

Where They Actually Make Sense

I’ll be honest, the type of writing I do for a living would never work with one of these devices, but I guess there’s a certain subset of writers for whom it would be a good solution.

Basically, if you’re writing something that doesn’t require internet access for research, like a novel, then having a simple, distraction-free writing gadget you can lock yourself in a room with might actually work for you. However, this is clearly a case of treating the symptoms and not the disease itself, if you ask me.

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If you have problems with distraction, productivity, or focus, then removing distractions is only addressing one part of the issue. A bigger question may be why you’re so easily distracted or lack motivation, and I don’t think there’s a typewriter for that.