PINE64 December Update | Hacker News Reader

PINE64 December Update

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248 pointsConfiks116 comments

Am I crazy, or has pine64 actually managed to build a sustainable ARM Linux company? There have been a hundred of these projects over the years. I feel like they tend to launch with a lot of fanfare, and eventually lose steam and die.

But pine64 seems to have started humbly and slowly be building momentum.

Their margins have to be tiny though, judging by the impressive build quality of my $150 PinePhone.

Yes, sounds like a miracle, but I'd say this is not something exceptional for a seasoned electronics company, which 99% of previous contenders weren't.

Building hype, and getting people's moneys is an an easy thing.

But I say it is completely impossible for newcomers to the industry to succeed commercially in anything, but a one off project carried at a very slow pace.

I've met countless people people coming from the other side of the Pacific to Shenzhen to do manufacturing, thinking that they knew what they are doing solely because they did few years of PCB design, EE, or worked a year in a small EMS in America.

All of them were up for a very rude awakening. The scope of knowledge one gets from "few years EE" in America would count for just few percents of expertise needed to run manufacturing commercially.

Just one thing that I think sinks half of them: near zero supply chain expertise. I'd say you absolutely cannot do any manufacturing in serious commercial volumes without at least 10 engineers hired just to do supply chain management full time.

If you are small manufacturer, or OEM, hunting for parts, and components, studying, and testing them, spamming Alibaba, and spending time on the phone with suppliers would be easily taking more than a half of your engineering manpower.

> ...near zero supply chain expertise. I'd say you absolutely cannot do any manufacturing in serious commercial volumes without at least 10 engineers hired just to do supply chain management full time.

As a small manufacturer with less than 10 engineers total (though in industrial automation, not B2C electronics), how do "real" electronics manufacturers do supy chain management?

We did a "small" run of a little machine that went from our usual quantity 1-3 units to quantity 100, and the strain it put on engineering was intense. Usually we just sent purchasing a BOM, this was something else. You have to be an engineer to comprehend the specs and requirements that engineering sends to you, you have to be in finance/management to understand tradeoffs of quality, savings in volume, and time, and you have to do grunt-work just to keep track of it all and keep communication and relationships active. The result was that design engineers were spending a ton of time on supply chain management long after the design had ended; do bigger shops have engineers who spend all day on the phone asking "where's my stuff" or surfing Alibaba?

> do bigger shops have engineers who spend all day on the phone asking "where's my stuff" or surfing Alibaba?

Yes, lots, and lots of them.

Can testify of working in an engineering team of 50 people, with close to half of engineering manpower spent on SCM.

> As a small manufacturer with less than 10 engineers total (though in industrial automation, not B2C electronics), how do "real" electronics manufacturers do supy chain management?

It actually becomes easier the bigger you get because you can simply buy more parts right away, in bigger batches, keep bigger inventories, and get higher part availability because suppliers themselves will be chasing after you with hopes of selling more parts.

But for everybody else, it's tough life, and 50%+ of engineering resource spend, no trick around it.

I think all of biggest ones like Foxconn, Flextronics, and Pigatron have their own proprietary IT systems for supply chain. Instead of running after suppliers, they force them themselve to enter their parts data into their system, and do test, and validation on their own too.

> I'd say you absolutely cannot do any manufacturing in serious commercial volumes without at least 10 engineers hired just to do supply chain management full time.

This is why the sole EE at your hardware startup practices Digi-Key oriented design. If a part isn't available regularly and in reasonable quantities on Digi-Key, it doesn't go into the product. Your margins will be lower than ideal, but you can usually build in batches of ~1000 this way without getting totally sunk.

Of course, if you're even moderately successful, you'll eventually find Chinese clones selling for half price, so you'd better have some other competitive advantage if you plan on taking this route.

The big difference between Pine64 and the other (phone) projects that have come and gone over the years is that Pine64 really seems to have the manufacturing (including sourcing and logistics) side down. The other projects came across as seeming to think of all the 'physical stuff' as a distraction that they'd just outsource, when in fact it's the most important part. They also don't seem to have any 'year of the Linux on X' delusions: they are in the 10's of thousands of units on PinePhone and they're fine with that.

I've been happy enough with my Pinephone (just don't call it a daily driver!) that I'm seriously considering picking up their next gen Pinebook Pro whenever that gets announced/released.

Agreed! I really like how they’re not trying to act like their products are going to revolutionize computing and destroy Apple — they’re just “we made some cool devices for hobbyists that are totally open, have fun”

Plus they’re frank that their affordable price is community orientated, and if you’re looking for a polished experience or would chargeback due to “a couple dead pixels”, please reconsider your purchase.

From what I have read, their margins are non existent. They are not aiming to turn a profit right now.

Looking at crunchbase, they've only raised funds using a kickstarter once. It seems like they're making enough to pay salaries and keep the show going. I know some of their products are not priced for profit, but the company as a whole seems to be doing well and growing. It doesn't seem like the typical overhyped SV company that only survives on VC money.

Who is funding them in this case, and why?

The consumers? Not turning a profit doesn't mean they don't get enough to pay their own wages and maybe even grow slowly.

Apple pwned them, though.

Considering Apple doesn't sell any devices running Linux, I don't see how they could've possibly beaten PINE64 in building a sustainable ARM Linux company.

The new Macbooks can run arm64 Linux.

In theory yes, in practice, only under virtualization (though I'm one of https://www.patreon.com/marcan sponsors so maybe one day this will change).

However this is a moot point as Apple doesn't sell what Pine does - Linux device. Apple sell Apple devices. If they incidentally runs Linux is irrelevant to Apple.

Yes and my toaster can run NetBSD - but who knows if it'll actually cook my bread. Who knows if the new Macbooks will even support WiFi with Linux.

They will.

They can't boot Linux. For a while. In fact, Apple is making it extra hard by not supplying the documentation to make it easier.

I don't think Apple competes in the $200 laptop segment right now.

I don’t think Apple competes much in the $200 anything segment.

Airpods... end of list.

Some of the chargers, probably.

Few developers are in the $200 laptop segment

Which is kind of a shame - most of what I do on my corporate 8-core MBP could be comfortably done on a much lighter specced machine.

The only time I see the fans spinning up is when running Zoom. And updating IntelliJ.

Depends pretty much on which country we are talking about.

And which stack.

Unless I am doing something very wrong (and sometimes I do), most of my Python development flows fit very comfortably on a 4GB Celeron laptop (that's currently with my 8yo daughter).

If they can't perform decently on this, I need to fix it.

4GB is a lot of memory. A lot.

The ones that matter. United States, Canada, UK, Sweden, Japan, Australia, etc.

I live in Ireland and I really enjoy that small Celeron I mentioned in the other message - the one my daughter is using. It's small, the battery lasts for at least 5 hours, completely silent, and, while it certainly isn't as fast as my Mac or the Dell (or the Xeon under my desk), it's fast enough for my tests to run while I think about the next steps. And it did cost me about $200. It's an expendable computer.

I assume a Pinebook Pro is a much nicer experience.

By your own admission, you own 3 high-end laptops and one low-end one (which you don't even use). Enough said.

They won't matter for long if they only target internal markets.

While not mentioned in the blog post: A huge thanks to the Mobian folks for making a really good mobile OS on top of Debian with only a few packages in a custom repo while still using the standard Debian repo for the rest.

As for the PinePhone keyboard: It would be nice to have a ThinkPad-like TrackPoint to not rely on the touch screen and also for external monitors that don't have touch support.

As a user of Mobian, just wanted to give everyone a friendly reminder that the project has a LiberaPay page at https://liberapay.com/mobian/donate, through which you might be able to help encourage/enable the developers to keep up the great work :)

(Not a dev for that project, just a happy user)

I am a subscriber. The Mobian community is very engaging, and worthy of the support.

Hear hear. I moved from Ubuntu mobile and ( while there are still issues ), it is a world of difference. If you are reading this. Thank you.

It has I2C connectivity. Any i2c joystick/trackpoint should work.

Splice in TCA8424, or SK5210, and that's it.

I think the touchscreen is fine on a screen that small. It would be cool to be able to use the touchscreen as a touchpad when using an external monitor though. Obviously that's doable purely in software.

If you're on X11 I think that's a configuration change.

They plan on making a keyboard for the Pinephone which effectively gives you a ~$250 phone-sized linux computer with a cell phone modem. That's seriously cool

Oh and btw. for the price of an iPhone charger [0] you can literally buy 3 extra batteries plus charger ... [1]

[0] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MHXH3AM/A/magsafe-charger

[1] https://pine64.com/product-category/smartphone-spare-parts

I love that the battery is replaceable. Though I wish mobile devices included tiny backup batteries that give you ~1min to swap the battery without having to reboot the device. This would especially be useful for my gopro which I often use for long captures that I don't want to interrupt. But it would also be nice on my PinePhone.

They won't let you buy those batteries in non-US locations. The "suggested alternative" is to file down a Samsung battery.

As appalling as this is, I kind of love it. Pine stuff is for hackers 8-)

Those 65W Navitas based chargers are actually all exact copies of the reference design, and most are made by a single factory.

GaNFETs are there mostly for the marketing, and don't make any much more difference than few percents efficiency at such power level.

I'd have to look at the numbers, but a few percent points of efficiency can be a big difference in the power (and thus heat) dissipation of the device; going from 90% to 92% efficiency reduces the power dissipated in the device by 20%.

And it will be a very usable keyboard with additional power underneath.

Where and when can I get a decent laptop with a cell phone modem built in, so I can just use that for messaging apps, and only own a dumb phone.

I have an old ThinkPad X230 with a WWAN modem. Installed OpenBSD to it and it just works as a nice small travel laptop.

The model is from year 2013.

How do you use the WWAN? How could I install, say Whatsapp or Signal, on my laptop?

Signal has a desktop app; you might need to put the sim into an android/iOS device for initial setup.

You'd have to activate it with a cell provider that supports WWAN and then you can just use the desktop (or web) versions of WhatsApp or Signal.

The WhatsApp desktop app (or web version) actually communicates with your smart phone to do the actual sending/receiving/communications.

If you turn off your cell phone and attempt to use WhatsApp web it will fail.

Lenovo has offered WWAN options for ages, continuing what was already an established IBM ThinkPad option.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14726/samsung-announces-alway...

I have an HP EliteBook which has a built-in modem and a micro-SIM slot.

Have you run linux on it ? I'm running mint on mine, and can't get the sim/modem to work. Says there is a driver, won't install it. Have tried phone and tablet Sims. No joy with either.

They are so good, and so humble. Virtually every update talks about tons of issues, and yet they are best in class.

Indeed, they are many times ahead any previous take on open source hardware exactly because they are pragmatic, without big nebulous plans to attract the crowd, and money.

The later proves to be too easy, and actually doing something with the money raised is much harder that "go to the first ODM behind the corner"

Too many Kickstarter crowd people chose the "go to the first ODM behind the corner" route, and get burned over, and over, and over again.

An incredible project pushing for open hardware.

Very happy with my pinebook pro and rockpro. The pinebook pro has amazing build quality and usability for the price. When my oneplus dies hopefully there will be a pinephone 2!

There is already Pinephone 2 and it's called Librem 5 :)

The $799 Librem isn't in the same marketplace as the $200 Pinephone. I can't see Pine64 charging $799 for a very very long time.

It's easy to charge less when you do not develop any software and use software developed by Purism. This is not an entirely fair price in my view. $10 donation to developers per purchase does not cut it. Also, higher specs definitely must be more expensive.

True. I think the issue is that for a platform like this to survive it will need community developers. Idk how much purism software they use or what they lend from pureOS but Pine64 has distros and projects like kde throwing themselves behind the idea with their mobile variants and probably contributing upstream. They also all help advertise. This is great especially when in the early stages it generally isn't purchased to replace a main phone.

Pinephone's pricepoint allows for people to get it on the side to tinker with, develop for it, etc and people that get it at that price don't really care too much bout the occasional bit of lag or glitch.

Additionally something like a better camera on the librem to account for the price doesn't appeal to a lot of people if they have to wait for drivers for it.

I also think pine64 has more people working remotely from all over the place and is registered in hong kong or malaysia since recently whilst purism with lots of remote stuff going on also has staff in san francisco and pays more taxes there? Correct me if i'm wrong tho.

I bought a Pinebook Pro when they were last available and I was really pleasantly surprised at how good the build quality was and the display quality was excellent. Unfortunately they are not currently available - their LCD supplier bailed on them (according to the December news). Once they become available again I could easily imagine worse things to do with US$200.

Aah I was wondering what happened to the Pinebook Pro order option. I regret not getting in on the previous order as there's basically nothing comparable on the market from what I can find.

I love everything about my Pinebook Pro except the trackpad, which suffers from lag. Not much, just enough to be really annoying.

Did you take off the protective cover? It's not very noticeable to the eye, but it greatly diminishes the trackpad response.

I had to stick tape to it to peel off the cover.

I did. I also applied the software patches I found when googling the problem, such as https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9094. It made the trackpad go from unusable to really annoying, which is progress.

Some people are looking into it: https://github.com/akirakyle/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater/t...

Weird; the experience of the mouse not stopping when your finger is removed is one I haven't had. I wonder if there's a difference in our devices?

Could be. Certainly the problem is not unique to mine. Maybe they eventually fixed it, or maybe it only shows up on some batches, and I've been unlucky.

I want to emphasize that this is my only complaint regarding the Pinebook Pro. Everything else is really good, actually much better than could be expected for the price.

I don't think they even have a real supplier bound by contract.

Anybody making less than 100k+ devices a year is much more likely just to buy from a small distributor who can only vouch for availability of inventory on hand.

Agreed. Very impressed by the hardware build quality of my PinePhone.

There's a good video version of this update: https://youtu.be/ULs5gOiLrfY

That mechanical keyboard is so cool haha

There's an untextured 3d model mockup of the upcoming official keyboard in the video at 13:48.

But yeah the DIY keyboard later in the video.. wow!

Hope more people from HN join the PINE64 Nutcracker channel on Telegram (there is also Matrix and Discuss channels connected with a bridge): https://t.me/joinchat/Kmi2S0nOsT240emHk-aO6g This is for opensourcing BL602: https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/10/24/bl602-bl604-risc-v-w...

Love to watch how the community solve problems:

1. Find some vendor Windows version for flashing BL602

2. Hack it to work for Mac

3. Reverse engineer the Serial traffic

4. Build Python version that reduce the size from 200MB to < 200kB

5. Others build Rust in parallel

6. Others getting JTAG to work, figuring out the address ranges

Focusing on building OpenSource community around the software I think is one of PINE64 great strengths.

Thanks for bringing my attention to this. A blob-free wifi and ble risc-v chip? Hell yeah!

One of the images in the article (https://www.pine64.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/HRock64.jp...) has a picture of the Rockchip board where a port is labeled 老化, which in Japanese and presumably Chinese too would mean something like "aging".

I have a Pinephone, and I can tell I've been really conditioned by Androids flow. Haven't quite figured out the UI yet, but I'm going to put KDE on it and see if my desktop muscle memory helps things. The hardware is a bit slow, but man is it fun to have Linux in my pocket:)

I'm hoping you can develop your own "ROM" for it, I wouldn't mind making everything like blocks to reduce GUI load if that's a thing. Like the Windows Phone UI, just my opinion. It's also on my wish list to do i3-wm on it so can get some ram back in desktop mode.

Yes, you can do it. Have a look at a minimalistic UI called SXMo: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9913.

omg that's literally it haha, at least the i3wm part wow. It's funny too seeing it you're like hmmm but if you had a simple button toggle to use it as a phone or dock... man that's great.

Thanks for that link, was watching this video demo of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfWKYZDtm1k

I do hope for all that effort you gain back something similar with the Ubuntu GUI and i3-wm(like 300mb of ram back)

I'm not into over-powered phones, but do like a good camera. Anyone have one of the pine phones?

I don't use the camera really, but here's some pictures from the camera app dev:

https://blog.brixit.nl/camera-on-the-pinephone/

https://blog.brixit.nl/pinephone-camera-part-2/

https://blog.brixit.nl/pinephone-camera-adventures-part-3/

https://blog.brixit.nl/pinephone-camera-pt4/

Yikes, those photos aren't so great. There's a decent amount of noise. I guess it's hard to compete at the level of some phone manufacturers. I do love the elegance of taking photos with commands:

$ camera.py still rear.raw -c rear -r 1080p1 --raw --pixfmt $ bayer2rgb -i rear.raw -w 1920 -v 1080 -b 8 -f BGGR -t -o rear.tiff $ darktable rear.tiff

Yeah the sensor really needs daylight to get acceptable picture quality, ideally a cloudy day because it doesn't have the latitude to deal with the highlight/shadows of direct sunlight. It might be possible to get slightly more from the sensor for static scenes using astrophotography techniques like stacking but in most cases that won't be practical.

For the record, thank you for the camera app! You do awesome work.

The Google Pixel camera app does stacking to decrease noise and improve dynamic range. They only apply it to areas of the image that haven't moved between frames. If I had a PinePhone and some extra time it would be fun to implement the HDR+ algorithm.

I would be really interested in something like that, but do you believe that the pinephone would be powerful enough for that?

The PinePhone camera is not good, blurry at high light, noisy at medium to low light levels. The Megapixels app is an attempt to create the best software possible for the PinePhone hardware, and looks less bad than the default camera used before.

The camera is acceptable but not great. TBH the main thing blocking me from getting one to use as a daily driver is lack of MMS support

What do you use MMS for?

I've never sent or received an MMS in my life.

I nearly wasn't able to change my phone number with Google because they send you an authentication code by MMS. (Why they feel the need to use MMS rather than SMS for a 6-digit code I couldn't possibly imagine).

Not used it for over a decade aside from that - in the dim and distant past it used to be the only way to send pictures, but they were so expensive most people never bothered.

The main use is for group conversations with family and friends. A close followup is for sending/receiving photos and videos from people who don't have an RCS capable device (or if it is RCS capable it doesn't play nicely with Tmobile)

It's very country specific. I know USA and France, this is a big thing.

whoah. that is kind of a big one, I agree.

Unfortunately, the issue with MMS is it is very country specific. With some of the other big ticket items, since it is universal, you have a lot of people working on it.

MMS seems to be a big issue in the USA and France (and maybe couple of others? I have just noted those two so far). On top of it, it is a very complex issue. I spend as much time getting it to work as I do to try to fight misconceptions about it to try and motivate folks to want to help.

Thankfully now it is more of an integration issue than it is a "does it even function" issue. But the integration issue is not trivial either.

Librem 5 has a better camera, but it's driver is not ready yet, https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

I see 4 phones here https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/?v=0446c16e2e6...

For someone with limited linux (I know basic commands etc, but never tinkered at the OS level), which model should I get?

The convergence package increases the internal flash (eMMC) storage from 16GB to 32GB, and the RAM from 2GB to 3GB. That leaves two hardware configurations, each available with Manjaro or KDE pre-loaded.

It looks like the Manjaro version may only be available in the EU, so that might simplify your decision.

The PinePhone is awesome--I love my Braveheart edition--but you should probably have a decent understanding of Linux and/or embedded systems (at least replacing an Android bootloader) in order to appreciate it at this point. If your goal is to learn then it certainly could be fun, although you might want to supplement with something a little more beginner friendly like a Raspberry Pi or a laptop/desktop you can boot from USB. Personally I would only advise someone to purchase a PinePhone now if they're totally comfortable replacing the OS, in which case the edition it ships with doesn't really matter (other than the branding).

Do you use it as your main phone? Or is it just for tinkering?

It is not that expensive, I wouldn’t be upset even if I somehow brick/break it

I am very much a linux guy/tinkerer, and it is very very close to being a main phone. What really hurts me to not do it is lack of MMS (YMMV). (I would say for the average person, it is not there yet).

If you bricked it, I would be impressed. They made it very easy to flash, and made it easy to boot from an SD card.

If you bricked it, I would be impressed

you're underestimating my capabilities... lol

On a serious note, thank you for answering. I think I'll get one

You can brick it if you try, but reinstalling an OS is also easy.

Not my main phone, no. There's definitely tinkering required, but it's become very usable compared to when I got it back in January.

If the cost was no concern for me, I'd buy a KDE convergence kit right now!

I'm so excited about this - I'm looking forward to picking up a pinephone after the next round of updates.

I'm looking forward to receiving my pine phone whenever it gets here(said Jan). My excuse to learn QT ha, also a taste of the docked computing experience.

I'm looking forward to more SBCs that can compete with the Raspberry Pi 4 8GB. Right now it has no competition whatsoever.

They are doing great things, looking forward to receiving my pinephone sometime next year!

Very impressive updates. So glad to see this project have wings.

I wonder who the keyboard supplier is.

All I want from Pine64 just now is to be able to order the soldering iron, Pinecil.

It went apparently instantly from "coming soon" to "out of stock" Anybody know what happened?

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