🌞📝 Daylight just launched —
one of the most important visions for personal computing alive today
This is a follow-up to the Potential update I sent you two days ago; telling the story of what happened in the last 18 months. Daylight is the company that had acquired Potential.
In a world where big tech thinks the future of computing is in your face...how about we put it back into your hands? Instead going into the metaverse, how about we go outside and get some sun?
I was fortunate to be on the early team sketching out the vision for a distraction-free OS for deep work and reading. I also created the initial "Daylight" brand concept, inspired by our deepest kind of attention.
This is my philosophy behind the brand —and why this company matters so much.
First, let's talk about why Daylight has a chance of succeeding.
It's the first paper-like display as fast as your iPad. This means we get to play with a magical piece of paper.
For the first time, we get to enjoy the calming effects of a blue-light free screen while using actual software. No more refresh flickering. You can zoom, pan, scroll, do all the things you love doing on a tablet — without the psychological pain that comes with the slow refresh rate of E-Ink.
This makes a huge difference — especially when you're working with it professionally. For example, if you read PDFs all day — as a researcher, lawyer, or investor — the best reading experience you can currently buy is either an iPad Pro (comes with eye strain + distractions) or a Remarkable/Kindle Scribe (come with annoyingly slow E-Ink + inferior software).
By combining the benefits of both, Daylight provides a massive improvement over anything you can currently buy. Yes, the pre-order version comes at a hefty $899 — but if you're an elite professional pained by distraction and eye strain, it's 100% worth it.
With this initial go-to-market audience, Daylight has the chance to bring a focused, distraction-free, psychologically safe device to market — and with it a custom operating system, purposefully designed for deep knowledge work.
This is extremely rare. Can you name any significant OS that's been brought to market in recent years? Probably not.
This means Daylight gets to build a new OS, on a purpose-built device for elite knowledge work — a huge advantage over Apple and Google, who are captured by the lowest common denominator of shipping to a billion mainstream customers at once.
Think for a second about how insane that is — computers are these profoundly powerful tools, extensions for the mind, these big companies are sitting on billions of cash, and almost none of it gets invested into making computers more humane, more ergonomic, more calm and focused — into making them better extensions of your mind, better tools for thinking, learning, and creating.
This needs to change.
If we are to preserve the light of consciousness and build a more abundant world, we need devices that help us think clearly — computers that help us do our best work and push the frontiers of human knowledge.
With that, let's talk about Daylight...
In his book Stand out of our Light, James Williams defines three different types of attention:
The daylight stands out as our deepest and most profound type of attention. It's the basis of our wisdom and self-determination, of self-awareness, of all the deeply attentional capacities that makes us human.
It's those capacities that are being undermined by limbic capitalism, by the constant assault on our attention — and by the fragmentation of our minds that is *built into* the operating systems we're using every day.
That's what I believe this brand is about: To reflect your brilliance back to the world, instead of diminishing it with endless stimulation and blue light.
Education means to "lead out of the dark" —
I imagine a future where we get to spend more time in the sun, and touch grass more often. Where it's normal to spend more time reading than scrolling.
Where we give psychologically safe devices to our kids, to nourish their curiosity — where we've realized how insane it was that we ever handed them something else.
A future where computers are on your team :)
You can check out this post on Twitter and pre-order at daylightcomputer.com
Yooo, excited to get one in my hands.
Would be great to see some demos of how the OS differs from regular Android and how the built-in apps work!