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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely incredible for the $120 price point. If they release a PineTab Pro in the future with 4 (or dare I say 8GB) of ram, I'd be all over it. At that point, I could really start to be productive. 2GB is a bit limiting for the modern web unfortunately, but there is a ton of potential here. I'm considering buying one to use as my main machine for this next year at Uni. Taking notes in VS Code/Vim would be fine, but I could see some of my course load being hindered by the ram.

As a portable SSH machine, a kid's first computer, or a nice portable machine with a screen for hobby projects, I think this will be fantastic.

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I bought a Chuwi Surbook Mini for $300 two years ago and am running Linux on it: https://www.chuwi.com/product/buy/Chuwi-SurBook-mini.html

It works reasonably well. I have touch screen driver support (even managed to get it working with Wayland, once, though that was too slow for the Atom processor), the keyboard is good, and the speed is o.k. The major downside is that the touchpad on the keyboard is terrible. They also went with a custom connector, not the Surface Go one, so you're stuck with a subpar touchpad. Since Linux is not always very touch friendly, it is a bit tricky to use (when no external mouse is available).

Edit: It also has one USB-C and two USB-A and a SD Slot, which is quite handy for a device of such a size

Having only 4 GiB of non-expandable RAM is really my only complaint with the PineBook Pro. I bought one anyways though. The only other complaint would be not being upfront about the video encoder and decoder not being ready, but the decoder looks like it'll work when kernel 5.8 releases. Still though, it's hard to find a $200 laptop with a 1080p IPS display regardless, it being open source just makes it so much cooler in so many ways.

I just wish it was easier to try out git kernels (ones with the prototype patches for video decode) on ARM devices. Having to deal with hacking up device tree files is a bit daunting. It's a good learning experience nonetheless.

It's nice to be able to collect random patches for things and apply them to your kernel and pretty much being good to go on x86. With ARM you have to ensure you instantiated the driver in the device tree file which gets stuck in the boot partition along with the kernel .

I have to say though - this is not a windows or macos machine. Each of those operating systems run an enormous number of background processes (many not in your best interests)

Meanwhile with linux your memory needs are generally modest.

Till you want to run some electron apps

My life on Linux seems to be focused on avoiding electron at all costs.

As a angular developer... I apologize for the pollution I create, and also strongly encourage you to have more than 4gb of ram.

Can relate. My work laptop was enough for every task I could throw at it...

Until I had to work with Angular apps. Then I suddenly needed twice the cores, twice the RAM. I was honestly surprised.

Looking at the resulting code, I also have no trouble believing this cost is also brought on to users of Angular apps.

For a framework which (IMO) brings so little, the overhead seems surprisingly large.

Depends on the apps. Electron itself is ~80-100MiB

That's part of the problem. Even a hyper optimized Electron app will consume a non trivial amount of RAM. The other factor is that Electron is accessible to people who don't have experience with developing desktop applications. They make some mistakes with a big impact on the user experience. Additionally, the NPM community isn't exactly known for producing few large profile high quality libraries. Instead you just cobble something together by using thousands of small packages with little to no accountability.

Ah, the good old "you're/they're using it wrong" excuse.

In case where the pine64 team is reading: +1

8GB RAM, 128GB MMC, USB-C for up to 300$ and it will be the perfect Microsoft Surface Go's contender I'm waiting for!

Unfortunately that looks unlikely to happen for at least a couple more years because they would have to use a whole new chipset and PCB

> 128GB MMC

Why MMC when there is NVMe?

eMMC should be cheaper. But I'm also prefer NVMe for computer.

> 2GB is a bit limiting for the modern web unfortunately

This saddens me...

Yea that's kind of insane isn't it?

I wish there was a lite version of the Web with enforced resource constraints

There is - you can just install NoScript to block all scripts and stop video autoplay in Firefox setting. Presto - a slim web. (Sites that need JS often have a slim alternative - there are superfast "lite" or "mobile" sites for GMail, Reddit, Facebook and many more.)

Is there something less aggressive? Firefox already stops auto play based on a permission. If you explicitly click on a video then it allows you to start the video within the mouse event.

There are lots of reasonable use cases for JavaScript. Think of something purely event driven like sorting a table by clicking on columns or an input field with autocomplete where you see a preview of results as you type.

I think the web in and of itself isn't the problem. I haven't checked but I don't think any JS framework asks for gigabytes of memory. The problem is browsers prioritizing speed over everything else.

I would jump at buying an 8gb model.

More RAM and USB-C and will 100% purchase

For me it would be a higher res screen, I'm find anything less than 1920x1080 at 10.1" jarring because of my astigmatism it gives me headaches.

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