By C.A. McLaren
A few years ago, my algorithm started serving me ad after ad for the Freewrite Traveler, a “distraction-free writing tool.” In slick product shots, hands typed away on its clicky-clacky keyboard; words appeared without delay. “Say goodbye to writer’s block!”
For context: am writer, often distracted. When I read that copy for the first time (and second, and third), I was probably scrolling Facebook instead of finishing an article. So, of course, I clicked.
The Freewrite Traveler has an eInk screen, a browser-free interface, and an attractive, snap-shut cover. It is also $549.
I bought a $50 AlphaSmart 3000–a similar device from two decades prior–on eBay instead.
Both the AlphaSmart 3000 and the Freewrite Traveler are, essentially, word processing machines: single purpose devices that allow the user to type, save, and export their writing. They do essentially the same thing, but one came out in 2000, the other 20 years later. The difference between them is, mostly, time.
The first Freewrite Travelers shipped in 2020, the result of a much-hyped crowdfunding campaign that rallied troops to fund a weapon in the “war for our attention.” The AlphaSmart 3000 came out in 2000 to a different sort of fanfare. The headline of one characteristic review: “An Expensive and Fragile Laptop, or an Economical and Indestructible Smart Keyboard?”
At a time when personal computers were increasingly common but prohibitively expensive, simple word processors like the AlphaSmart 3000 extended access to a basic but key function. For $199 (roughly a tenth of the price of a laptop) you could type up your work for later transfer to a computer or printer. The AlphaSmart spread: through newsrooms, classrooms, business class airplane cabins. Thousands of people wrote millions of words on these machines.
How many are still floating around, ready to be reanimated?
The AlphaSmart 3000 has a curved body, like a baby toy in a duller color; transparent casing revealing the AA batteries within; an approximately four-by-one-inch display; a keyboard with unfamiliar commands (I had no idea what the “Send” key would do until I pressed it); ports in unfamiliar shapes.
It is loud and tactile and a little sticky – because every Alphasmart is used, or at least old. The words appear and disappear quickly, because it is the nature of the thing that it can only display a few lines at a time. You’d have to work your way up and down with up-and-down keys to see the work: like ribbons, like a loom.
When it is time to call a draft finished – when you reach your piece’s natural limit or the machine’s limit of 12.5 pages, whichever comes first – you can transfer it to a computer. This, I think, is my favorite part. The words appear on-screen in a slow, steady flow, as if they were water kinking through the cable and flowing onto the monitor. Or as if a ghost were typing.
I used it to write a bit of a novel, a few essays. I also used it to write the search engine optimized articles that paid my bills. There was something profoundly strange about drafting an 800-word listicle about 5G internet for an internet service provider’s blog on a 20-year-old machine.
AlphaSmart has long since stopped producing writing devices. Astrohaus, the team behind Freewrite, is one of the companies that has taken up the mantle. A non-exhaustive list of products in the Freewrite line-up:
- The Smart Typewriter, an electronic typewriter with an aluminum body, $699.
- The aforementioned Traveler, $549.
- The Alpha, an AlphaSmart lookalike, $349. (If you attempt to navigate to AlphaSmart.com, you will be directed to getfreewrite.com/products/alpha.)
- The Wordrunner, a chunky keyboard with a timer and wordcounter, $459. (As I write this, it’s on sale for $379 – a bargain, eh?)
Why would you buy what Freewrite is selling? It’s true that its products do more than any AlphaSmart ever did. The Freewrite Alpha can store 1 million words to the AlphaSmart 3000’s 200,000 characters. It syncs with your cloud service of choice. There are regular firmware updates.
But writers abandoning contemporary word processing software aren’t taking up devices with the latest features, often invasively packaged with AI. And Freewrite is not really selling what its products do. It’s selling what they don’t do. They don’t allow you to take a break to play Wordle, or have your document open in one window and a YouTube video open in another. All you can really do with them is write.
Freewrite is selling, in other words, a vision of writing without the internet. Consider this advertisement for the Freewrite Valentine typewriter:
In a world filled with digital distractions, we're bringing back the timeless art of writing from the heart. It's a return to writing the way it used to be, just you and your thoughts with no barriers in between. No dinging notifications telling you you're missing something, feeding your FOMO. No squiggly lines telling you you suck at spelling and correcting your grammar. And no app telling you a computer could write it better. When was the last time you wrote just to feel the magic of creating something that didn't exist before you thought it? (“Will You Be Our Freewrite Valentine?”, Freewrite, 2025)
Once, the word processing machine was a budget bridge to the bulkier, more expensive personal computer. Today, it’s a RETVRN to writing in an imagined past.
It’s easy to root against Freewrite. It sells something that existed 25 years ago for the same price as a mid-range modern laptop. The branding, the design, the too-cute product names referencing dead white men: it all gives the sense that somebody is selling you something that can’t be bought, and at a premium, too.
In 2000, $199 was a good deal for a useful bridge between analog daily life and emerging personal computing technology. In 2026, the word processor is a technological appendix: more notable for what it can’t do than what it can do, for what writing on it is not like rather than what it is. Every dollar you spend on it is a luxury. Freewrite’s most expensive offering, the Hemingwrite, is a glorified typewriter with a $1,099 price tag–the price of ten AlphaSmarts at the current market rate.
Of course, that ignores the fact that Freewrite is a small company batting against tech Goliaths. It doesn’t own its own factories, and can’t manufacture its own materials. To survive, it worms its way into our minds through the same gladiatorial arena for our attention as all the other companies pumping money into well-targeted advertising on Instagram. As I write this, Astrohaus is hiring a Content Creator for the Freewrite brand to create short-form video for social media.
Maybe what we resent is not so much the price itself as the way the world has changed around it. When the Alphasmart launched in 2000, it cost $199, roughly $372 in today’s money; the Freewrite Alpha costs $349. And though I spent under $50 on my AlphaSmart in 2021, prices in the secondhand market are creeping closer to $100. It’s not unbelievable that the price will keep climbing as the analog revival continues and the AlphaSmarts, definitionally, become more scarce.
Because the AlphaSmarts, sturdy as they are, will not last forever. Their circuitry will corrode, their thermal paste will dry. If we want “distraction-free writing tools,” these awkward, frictionful bridges between the digital and analog worlds, someone will have to make them.
Astrohaus’ Freewrite line is not the only neo-word processing device on the market. There is also the Pomera, Zerowriter, and BYOK. BYOK – or Bring Your Own Keyboard – in particular, is gaining momentum among the coalition of analog geeks and distracted writers who form the market for this product niche. It has a small, simple display; it only connects to the internet to export your writing. It has no keyboard, requiring you to connect your own (hence the name). At $199, it is more affordable than the cheapest Freewrite product. [Editorial disclosure: Typebar Magazine’s editor backed the BYOK on Kickstarter.]
As more people tire of high-screen-time-days that turn into high-screen-time lives, more companies are cropping up to sell them a solution. Meanwhile, the vintage versions of the technologies they replaced still exist – for now. Do you spend too much time on your smartphone? You can buy an old Nokia for $25 or a new Lightphone for $700. Do you miss mixtapes? You can dig your mom’s cassette player out of storage or buy a We Are Rewind version for $200.
I didn’t buy the Freewrite Traveler, but a friend did. He wrote the outline of a very interesting novel on it before sliding it into its soft felt case and leaving it there for approximately five years. He let me turn it on for the first time in a long time to write this essay.
It has a glossy case that opens and shuts, keeping the keys cleaner than my felty AlphaSmart’s. The screen begins with an encouragement: an illustration of Shakespeare exhorts me to set my story free. Then, the pleasingly matte eInk screen. The delay between my fingers hitting letters and their appearance, line by line. (They say they’ve fixed this in the latest firmware update but I see no evidence of this; not sure I’d want it to be fixed, if it could be.) The perpetual syncing – no ghostly cable transmission required.
The truth is, I liked it. I preferred it to my AlphaSmart. If I could, I probably would pay a very silly price to start, and not finish, a novel on it. The other truth, at the risk of stating the obvious, is that no device can make you write.
That’s not to say that a device can’t change the way you write, or how it feels when you do it. Letters are littered with writers complaining about – or rejoicing in – their chosen method of putting words on pages. “It is partly because of rheumatism and partly because of illegibility & partly because of a (false) idea of ‘time’ that I type. I don’t really burble on nearly as much when I write with a pen,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in 1972. Virginia Woolf, in 1928, took the opposite view: “I cannot write on a typewriter; I make enemies whenever I do.” Technology changes, but writerly anxieties stay much the same. If a modern writer feels $500 more free with a Freewrite, why shouldn’t they pay the price?
These days, I write with pen and paper, mostly, before typing my work up on my laptop. I leave a lot of things unfinished; I get distracted all the time.
C. A. McLaren is a writer with work in The Atlantic, Gastronomica, and elsewhere. Her newsletter, hanging up, covers life with a dumbphone.