Rewind Review

My Experience using Rewind

This is feedback I wrote for Rewind

Tl;dr - energy use & lacking use cases

A technically cool product that isn’t really that useful and a bit of an energy hog.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the technology is super impressive. But I struggle to find a use case for it - perhaps I’m not forgetful enough, but I have never once encountered a situation where I needed to find something I hadn’t already written down. Moreover, every editor I use nowadays saves my work in real-time so even crashes aren’t really a concern.

Last, and certainly not least, I’m on a laptop, and the energy impact is pretty significant. Rewind is regularly using ~10x the energy of anything else on my machine (see image below!):

More detail

After a pretty thoughtful response from the founders on some use cases I might consider, I went ahead and responded with some thoughts on each of them below:

Retrace your steps: If you’re wondering why the numbers for last week’s analysis don’t match up with today’s, just rewind your computer and figure out what you did differently.

I save / version anything important I do on my machine, so this is a non-starter

Track down what caused a bug: You can figure out what caused unexpected behavior in your software by going back in time and seeing what went wrong.

See above - plus, bugs usually come from behaviors we didn’t anticipate from end users, so rewinding my own personal machine wouldn’t help with that.

Never worry about spacing out in a meeting again: Ever get called on and need to reference something that was just being presented? Now you can rewind time and easily find the information you need.

I would just admit I missed it, I don’t think this use case makes any sense at all. If I were to do this, mid meeting, then I would miss whatever is currently happening while backtracking. If I did it after a meeting, I could kind of understand that use case, but meetings can also just be recorded.

Feel confident in closing down your tabs: Stop keeping hundreds of tabs open indefinitely just in case you need them later. With Rewind, you can easily get back to any closed tab at any point.

OneTab already solves this problem

Jog your memory: If you get interrupted or pulled away from you computer, you can use Rewind to jog your memory and get back into your state of flow.

I usually just leave myself a note if I feel like I will need to recall context

Stop worrying about crashes: Rewind is a safety net for all your information. If you accidentally close that article you were writing or your survey form crashes mid-sentence, you can easily get back to anything you’ve seen on your screen.

I back up my machine regularly, and my editors etc. all auto-save progress

So in a nutshell, no, none of those use cases resonate unfortunately.