Pine64 September Update: Hurdles and Successes | Hacker News Reader

Pine64 September Update: Hurdles and Successes

pine64.org

30 pointsGeorgeHahn7 comments

I'm very pleased with Pine64 and I think they're doing a tremendous job of pushing open hardware and doing it right, and I am a frequent buyer and occasional contributor to various pine-adjacent projects accordingly. But it really disappoints me that they aren't committed to free (as in freedom) platforms. I die a little bit every time I see them call you to join their Discord channel in these updates, or to follow them on Twitter, or post on their subreddit. Especially for a project in close collaboration with Linux distros, IRC and mailing lists are an important communication medium which is under-emphasized and under-utilized by Pine.

Pine seems to understand the value of free software within their phones, but why not without? It's very frustrating to know that a sizable fraction of their development discussions are being had on the other side of propriatary garden walls.

I agree, communication is important but it also matters how we communicate. I had the same gripe with ubuntuists about Telegrams' servers, sure they are pragmatic about open source but when you have equally good FOSS tools and then decide for some stupid reason not to use it tells you something about how much people care. My local LUG btw preaches Free Software and uses Slack, so there's always circles like that.

It's interesting how close PineNote is to Remarkable's product (maybe not given OEM whitelabeling). Given Remarkable's OS is a "purposely designed Linux-based operating system for low-latency digital paper displays" I wonder how long the Pine community will take to match software features?

Pine: 191.1 x 232.5 x 7.4 mm 438.0 g, 4/128 G, 4000 mAH

Rkbl: 187.0 x 246.0 x 4.7 mm 403.5 g, 1/008 G, 3000 mAh

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote

https://remarkable.com/

I saw some discussion that it also resembles a Bookeen Notea strongly.

I don’t know much about the world of OEM whitelabeling, so it’s all interesting.

Like a lot of pine64 products, it's reusing the case for an existing product. Producing case molds is one of the most expensive parts of production. Every product announcements there's people finding very similar looking devices, but then ignore that the boards in the products are fully pine64 custom.

I've also had the pinenote and the remarkable beside eachother and it's not the same case, the remarkable has the large edge at the bottom and is slightly thinner. The pen surface feels very similar though.

The differentientation will be the software. I watched a couple Remarkable demos and the software is reasonably slick. Will Pine and the Pine community be able to match it?

They may be people like me, where it's not about ignoring but rather that no one's ever told them how you reuse some sort of reference outsides yet put in very different insides, so they have no idea.

And I still don't know whether - speaking industry-wide - insides are generally quite different, or whether that varies greatly, and how a non-hardware-specialist might guess in a given instance.

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