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Comment by smokelegend | Hacker News Reader

4GB mem.....? Really 4GB? That's it?

Would it really have been that bad to at least offer a 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB Memory upgrade.

Just feels like a huge let down. I get it the price of electronics(i.e. memory) is more expensive, but this makes it look like a joke in comparison with other "phones".

And if it were marketed as a mini computer 4GB of ram isn't saying much. Hexacore processor, 128GB Emmc storage awesome but then I read 4GB of ram and it's like a smack in the face. If this is to be a "flagship" for years to come, I'm really disappointed they went with limited memory.

Would I pay $699 instead of $399 for more memory... yeah I would

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That is the limit for the rk3399 SoC. I'm surprised they did not wait for the rk3588, or just use a Mediatek Dimensity SoC.

If you are based in Europe, you may be interested in the Fairphone 4, which has 6 or 8 GB of RAM.

MediaTek is horribly hostile to free software and would be a terrible fit in something like this. MediaTek is the reason the Gemini PDA couldn't do what the PinePhone is doing despite making some similar claims.

As for not waiting for a newer Rockchip part, it sounds like they are making it clear this is not a second generation PinePhone, just a more powerful version of what we already had. There will likely be a proper second generation with more major changes later on.

I'd be interested to learn more about Mediatek's hostility. I only mention them because I did not see any red flags on their SoC specifications.

MediaTek puts the responsibility of releasing the downstream kernel tree source code on the Android OEMs.

And some of those don’t comply with that.

(but otherwise, they are upstreaming support for their SoCs nowadays anyway)

Pine64 has other CPUs they can work with, but they are not well supported yet. I wouldn't be surprised to see another phone rev with a much better CPU in the future once the Quarts-64 line starts working well. Right now the people who can do that work already have plenty of hardware to work with, while people who can do phone work really want a somewhat faster CPU now.

My iPhone 12 (4 GB RAM) is usually faster than my Windows PC (16 GB, Ryzen 2600).

is that a joke? they run completely different things

iOS has always handles memory much better than other competitors. Even simple apps I develop for iOS use lesser RAM than the same thing on Android.

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