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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

That seems to be relatively recent though, originally US based. This is what Wikipedia says about the history:

> Pine64 initially operated as Pine Microsystems Inc. (Fremont, California), founded by TL Lim

> all devices for the Kickstarter campaign were manufactured and sold by Pine Microsystems Inc. based in Fremont, California.

> In January 2020, Pine Microsystems Inc. was dissolved while Pine Store Limited was incorporated on December 5, 2019 in Hong Kong. As of late 2020, the standard form contract of pine64.com binds all orders to the laws of Malaysia, while the products are shipped from warehouses in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine64

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In Hong Kong they can get away with their shoddy 1 month warranty. In USA or EU, not so much.

This means that they can also get away with charging very low prices for their products. PinePhone is the first Linux smartphone that I wanted to buy, simply because it's so cheap and I won't weep if it fails.

I also highly recommend their Pinecil soldering iron, as well as tabletop power supply. Amazing value for the money.

I have and use both the TS100 and the Pinecil. The Pinecil is a bit thicker than the TS100 and takes a few more seconds to heat up, but for the money it would be hard to justify buying a TS100 again.

I got the tabletop power supply. Its nice though itgot easily scratched on the OLED. But if it breaks now (its a few months old) it is bye bye money. Cause that 1 month warranty is for all their products, no matter the price. 400 EUR e-ink notebook and Pinephone Pro included.

At least you get a breakable version of a product, rather than stay locked out of the product category entirely due to the cost.

I get about 2 years warranty and 5 years security updates on my Fairphone, am allowed and able to run whatever OS on it which I want, and I can replace broken modules myself, or upgrade modules.

you'll weep if it fails in a month

Even if it had functioning warranty, it would cost me at least half of the original price to post the item to them for repairs (it's halfway across the world). That's not a win, really.

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