Pine64 Unleashes $200 Rockchip-Powered Pinebook Pro Linux Laptop | Hacker News Reader

Pine64 Unleashes $200 Rockchip-Powered Pinebook Pro Linux Laptop

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150 pointsjrepinc78 comments

It should be noted that this is currently only available for a pre-order basis, and only for people who joined their forums before July 1, 2019. As far as I know there is no timeline for general public availability.

The first pre-order batch is only a run of 100 devices, and these were reserved within the first 2 minutes of their pre-order window. The next batch will be 1000 devices, but they haven't announced with those will be released (right now estimated to be in reservation holders hands w/in 8-10 weeks)[0]. Hopefully they'll get an ANSI keyboard figured out sometime in the next few months (but based on the forum posts, I don't think this is a high priority for them at the moment).

Take home message -- this is really a pre-production machine at the moment. It might be better to wait for later revisions.

[0]https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7752&pid=48104#p...

Direct links:

https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/

https://store.pine64.org/?product=14-pinebook-pro-linux-lapt...

Anyone know what the status is for mainline linux support for the rockchip used in this? Last I checked things like USB3 didn't work in mainline and am wondering if things have improved.

>Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.

I get that it's a $200 laptop, and it's open source which is commendable, but... this disclaimer does not instill much confidence.

The wider quote makes a lot of sense:

> The company goes on to say the Pinebook Pro (and its low price) are being provided "as a community service to PINE64, Linux and BSD communities." Pine64 adds, "If you think that a minor dissatisfaction, such as a dead pixel, will prompt you to file a PayPal dispute then please do not purchase the Pinebook Pro."

This isn't some big commercial operation...

Yes and I can appreciate that. But I don't think I've seen that kind of warning on something with a screen in over a decade.

It does look like they sell replacement screens directly on their site, but that looks like it's for the 'regular' 14" model. Not sure on their compatibility with the 14" 'pro'

I do not believe that screen would be compatible. If you look through their store, certain parts are specifically labeled as for Pro/not compatible with the original Pinebook. Posts in their forums imply that they will be supplying parts in their store that will be the higher quality Pro parts, including an ANSI keyboard.

The warning about dead pixels did scare me a bit at first, but I wound up taking the plunge anyway based on the price and other reports of Pinebook screens being fine. The free (for early adopters/forum users) upgrade to 128GB eMMC will offset the cost of swapping to an ANSI keyboard.

Lenovo stuck pixel policy is that 1-2 dead pixels is not a defect: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht004254

This is just bad reporting by "hot hard ware".

Every laptop manufacturer says this. It's the single reason I stopped buying anything from shops. When you go back to the shop and try and explain you don't care what the description/contract/website said - you want a display with no dead/hot pixels, they just shrug. When you buy it online (in the EU) you have a couple of weeks where you can just return it for no reason for a full refund.

The Distance Selling (as it's called in the UK, may vary where you are) regulations were designed to replicate the experience and protection you have purchasing in person, not to provide something stronger.

It's just easier to 'argue' with an automated form (you don't need to!) than with a person.

I couldn't tell you what they were designed for, but they were absolutely stronger in practice, as I have seen friends turned away from shops (yes, I'm in the UK) due to dead pixels, and the exact same shop would be entirely powerless to prevent you returning exactly the same laptop if bought online. It's not about easier - it's just different.

By the way, I didn't refer to the regulations as the Distance Selling Act as that no longer exists - it's been replaced with the Consumer Contracts Regulations.

The great thing about it is, the 2 weeks only start when you receive the item. And you can return for any reason. So I'd say the following: if the device contains _annoying_ dead pixels which you are unable to fix, return it. Simple. If they don't bother you, or you can't notice them (likely means they don't bother you) then stick with it. That's the rule of thumb I use with regards to screens. I only had once (in what was it 2003?) that I had to return a 2nd hand monitor from Germany to Netherlands with too many dead/stuck/whatever pixels. And I don't care that they find it possibly annoying. I'm not swimming in easy money...

Just for comparison, years ago those Korean companies selling A- quality IPS panels from LG (rejected stock from Apple displays, mostly, that didn't make it in) would give a similar disclaimer. Given even panels of that grade could have them (and I had seen user photos of such dead pixels, although not on all units) this doesn't seem out of the ordinary given the price point.

One wonders if they're able to get cheaper screens that have failed someone else's quality requirements?

No that's a pretty standard well-standard, if you go to lenovo/dell/etc. they generally will say 1-3 dead pixels is within normal conditions.

These guys are selling this at a loss (or near loss), they're trying to be upfront to lower the number of returns - and more importantly chargebacks and disputes.

Huh. I've only had one stuck pixel in my life and I was able to fix it by poking it with a pencil eraser. Guess I've been lucky. 3 in one screen is a lot.

Depends on how many pixels there are in total. I have two blue pixels on my 4K 28" display… if I'm able to see them, that means I'm sitting too close :D

It's not that dead pixels are common, instead that it's hard to guarantee none will occur at n% across a population of screens.

wait, you can just poke them away?

It depends on what's actually wrong, but in some cases, yes. Sometimes it's possible to unstick a pixel by just displaying the right sequence of colors; poking the screen is essentially a more brute-force variation of that.

And I’d bet that won’t work anymore with screens that are behind a sheet of glass

This is pretty standard language for most warranties. Apple used to make the same claim, although I'm not sure if they still do.

That takes me back. It was so depressing if you got a couple of red ones in the middle of the screen. I didn’t have it with Apple screens, it was some other vendor and I think they all did it.

I'm pretty sure they can't disclaim that kind of thing, certainly not if you're charging Apple prices. If you live in a country with actual consumer protection laws of course.

I'm telling you, this is simply standard. As I also said, I don't know if Apple has more recently changed their policy, or sourced different screens.

Here's a quote from Asus:

"Since LCD panel is made up of millions of micro electronic pixels, if one pixel no longer functions normally, it will become a bright or dark dot. By ISO 13406-2 standards, ASUS conforms to the acceptance level between 3 to 5 defective bright/dark pixels. In order to deliver ultimate vision experience to ASUS customer, if your panel is less than or equal to the above number of dots, then, it is considered as an acceptable LCD monitor.In addition, the Premium Range of ASUS LCDs offers a unique Zero Bright Dot (ZBD) warranty.Please refer to ASUS LCD Monitor Bright/Dark Dot Warranty Table below."

Your LCD display is possibly subject to replacement if it meets the criteria outlined in Table 1:

[excerpt from Table 1]

Threshold for warranty replacement

Bright = 1 or more [pixels]

Dark = 6 or more [pixels]

And here's an older (2010) article which describes the policies of many manufacturers, including Apple.

https://www.tested.com/tech/1337-we-uncover-the-dead-pixel-p...

I don't dispute that they're saying it. You can't disclaim basic legal minimums though.

I have an 11" Pinebook, can't see any dead pixels on it.

I also have the 11" pine book and I do not have any dead pixels as well.

Confidence costs money.

Definitely don't buy it if you're looking for confidence :P

then don't buy it and don't cry on a webforum about it? I'm not sure why everyone needs to treat everything like its being sold at Herrods

Looks like the perfect burner laptop for those that feel the need for that when visiting certain countries. Especially with

>PCIe x4 to m.2 NVMe SSD Slot (requires optional adapter)

An encrypted NVMe could in theory be mailed...

> An encrypted NVMe could in theory be mailed...

Wouldn't this apply to any sneakernet medium? You can mail microsd cards, harddrives if you wanted, etc.

Really want to pull the trigger on this, the Privacy Switches to disable camera, mic, wifi at the firmware level appealed to me. If you search around you'll find a video the creator made demo'ing skipless 1080p/4k video playback. However, it's probably prudent to wait for some of the initial bugs to get ironed out first.

They also claim to be making no profit off of these.

Wish they would let you donate an additional amount if its not making a profit. I want to see them build more things. I kept wanting the former model but they never got back to me on it. I put my email several times.

Pretty decent specs for the price, but unfortunately it appears that they've stuck with the same bizarre keyboard layout as the older iterations of the Pinebook- take a look at where they map out the slashes and double-quote! The layout of the physical keys would make it tricky to remap them to something more familiar.

That keyboard is an ISO standard. Their recent blog articles have indicated they will be offering an ANSI layout[1] once they find appropriate hardware.

1:https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-p...

ISO looks like a Macbook keyboard. Haven't seen a laptop like the ANSI one before in a long time.

What country are you in? My macbook keyboard definitely doesn't look like the ISO one (the ISO one is the one with the L shaped return key).

Oh apologies I mean ANSI then. The caption on the picture in the above article says "ANSI and ISO Keyboard Variants" which I assumed was left ANSI/right ISO, but it's reversed I guess.

https://www.pine64.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PInebookPr...

What the hell? I use @ and " all day! I'd love to hear the reasoning behind swapping the two

It looks like the UK layout to me. I remember the @ being in a weird place. I'll probably just change the sw layout to US. I already do the same with German keyboards.

It isn't a UK layout.

It isn't? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards

It even has the Alt Gr. I wish they'd just show the actual keyboard top-down instead of these weird angles. Even the one picture where they compare the ANSI and ISO layouts is a picture of two notebooks from a side angle ... like why? https://www.pine64.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PInebookPr...

Pre-production, but their blog has a top-down shot of the ISO keyboard: https://www.pine64.org/2019/05/06/may-2019-news/

There we go, thanks.

Other than Delete instead of Right-Ctrl, it looks like a UK layout to me: https://www.pine64.org/2019/05/06/may-2019-news/

German keyboards are the weirdest - why switch Z and Y? YYYY? :-)

It's rather uncommon to run into a "y" in German, so why give it such a central position on the keyboard? "Z" is more common, if only because German has a "tz" digraph.

Es ist eher ungewöhnlich, im Deutschen auf ein "y" zu stoßen, also warum sollte man ihm eine solche zentrale Position auf der Tastatur geben? "Z" ist üblicher, und wenn es nur wegen des "tz" Digraphen ist.

Two sentences saying the same in both languages. English: 3 "y" and 0 "z" outside quotes. German: 0 "y" and 2 "z" outside quotes.

Ah, das ist Richtich - ich habe nicht "y" sehen viele Gange/Hären in Deutsche texten ...

Alle Germanischer Sprachen verstehe ich am bisschen :-P

omg that was very, very bad... sorry for butchering the language but it was fun :-D :-D

Now, if you'd have finished your message 'ZZZZ?', that would have been funny. :P

I am very interested in this kind of product.

I wonder if there are any competitor in this market, especially European competitor.

I hope they fix the weight distribution. I watched a video about the original Pinebook and the laptop tilted back when the screen went past 120deg or so. I imagine it's because the internals are so small and clumped together at the back, but it seems so annoying to have to hold it down while typing.

I'll likely buy one once they get an ANSI layout. I've been meaning to pick up a RockPro64 for a NAS, but I decided the RAM wasn't quite enough to run ZFS well, but I won't be needing that much RAM for a casual laptop.

I was about to buy one as a spare, linux-only laptop, I was hoping they'd have 16GB-32GB RAM options (for a price of course), but they don't even have 8GB let alone 16/32... they seem to be stuck with 4GB!?

That's not going to be much good for browsing modern Javascript heavy websites and doing anything else at the same time let alone having a VM or a few apps running in the background.

I'm all for cheap laptops for kids to learn on, basic word processing and things but - this is going to struggle.

I’ve been following the forums and more RAM is often requested. The Pine64 folks have stated that the SoC only supports 4GB RAM. I do wonder, though, about the utility of pairing the rather modest compute capabilities of the SoC with a large amount of RAM.

Disk cache. That's been the great benefit I've had from the excessive amount of RAM I have in my laptop.

You won't be running a VM on a doc like this, but 4GB is plenty for most everyday tasks. My laptop running Windows has 4GB RAM, and it runs common web tasks just fine, and I use it regularly for:

- Slack - video meetings - Netflix - Google docs

Honestly, I think you'll be more limited by CPU performance than memory, unless you try to run a VM or something.

I don't know about you, but this is exactly the type of backup laptop I'm looking for. It probably won't be my main laptop for work, but it's plenty for most casual uses. Basically it's replace my Chromebook as a more capable, hackable alternative.

Chromebooks usually have 4GB of memory, and many have less. For me, at least, it was a bit of sticker shock, but it’s been fine in practice.

It’s true that you won’t want to spin up full VMs, but this is a dual-Core ARM anyway. For comparison, I frequently use chromebook-chrome, Debian-container Linux apps (usually terminal and emacs), and Android Outlook simultaneously on my chromebook without trouble. That device has a comparatively beefy intel cpu, though.

I’ve found using Firefox with multi-process disabled reduces memory use to about 300 MB. Mozilla announced they will move the option to disable multi-process from config to somewhere else though.

I bought a pinebook late last year. It's so terrible that I consider it e-waste. I hope this new version is at least usable for folks.

Why not sell or donate it if you have no use for it?

$20 + S&H if you want it.

IDK if I'd feel right donating it to anyone. Its that bad.

This seems pretty cool. All I'm missing is an estimate of the possible battery life.

Can’t wait to read some reviews on this thing, sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.

I would be interested in seeing some glam shots of this product. Especially interesting design details, if there are any. Confidence in build quality feels important for portable devices.

I handled the prototype at FOSDEM this year. This may or may not have been the final case, but it felt as solid as a macbook air; it had no discernable flex even while holding it by a corner (better than my T460!). It did feel disconcertingly light, but I suspect that many people may find that a feature.

That said, their table was always very crowded, so I didn't spend as much time as I'd have liked examining it. I still bought one though

30 day warranty! Be nice to have an optional extra to increase that.

Have they done any work on the software side? My experience has been that has been terrible.

The battery sounds small, since it's only 2 or 3x that of my phone. Other than that, what incredible specs for only $200!

It's a SBC so its power draw isn't that high. The question of course is mainly what the power requirements of the screen is.

10Ah * 3.7V = 37Wh

I am pretty sure you mean "Ah" (i.e. current * time, i.e. charge, not "A/h", which is rate of change of current or second derivative of charge). Similarly it is "Wh" (i.e. energy, i.e. "power * time", not "W/h" which is the second derivative of energy).

Thanks

This is not unusual for a laptop, although on the lower side.

What's the power draw?

ignoring the issue of units, that's overly optimistic for batteries. the voltage drops as charge is depleted.

Indeed it varies between 4.2V and 3.1V, but the value op chose (3.7V) is not an unreasonable average number. But 3.5V probably is a better guesstimate. See https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/6/7/4/7/9/5112a224ce395fb479...

I haven’t heard the three dead pixels are ok excuse since 2002, it takes me back.

I'm almost tempted, been eyeing a chromebook for low power lightweight work.

I might be a little old fashion, but I'd rather have the motherboard in an ATX form factor, with a few PCIe slots.

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