Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

The "killer app" of the Pine formula is that it reliably gets brand-new hackable devices into the hands of the community at an affordable price point. A PinePhone is $150 + a whole lot of shipping and import taxes, but many alternatives are:

- more expensive - the SHIFT6mq is 600 EUR, the Librem 5 starts (!) from EUR 1600 (!!!), the Fairphone 4 starts at 580 EUR. No way in fucking hell is anyone going to be buying these unless they are already in a well-paying tech job - which is automatically exclusionary towards all tech-curious teenagers worldwide, and working adults from lower-paid countries. Do we seriously want open(-ish) tech to be a toy only for the rich? I sure as hell don't.

- unreliable in production - open hardware is often (more often than not?) a limited-edition item. If you are there to order from the initial batch (or if you're lucky, the second batch), great - you can buy it. But discover it a few months/years too late, and the product is so unobtainable from the secondary market that it might as well have never existed.

- difficult to purchase across territories - USA-based (or alternatively, European-based) hackers get to enjoy having an open product, whereas the rest of the world merely gets to lick the shopfront window from across the ocean.

- less hackable - Can you flash an open firmware on any given Android phone? Anyone's guess. Can you do so for any random Pine product? Most likely, yes, even if it contains blobs. User freedom-wise, blobby but otherwise unrestricted firmware is heck of a lot better than any restricted firmware.

- not brand-new - hardware ages both in terms of specs (less powerful than the mainstream non-open alternatives - this is IMO part of what killed OpenMoko so badly), and in terms of actual hardware PCBs, batteries, screens etc aging slowly until it can no longer reliably operate/operate within spec.

I will be the first to criticise the fact that Pine seems to be increasingly leaning on the community to produce working software/firmware for their products, but I will also be the first to commend them for their ability to deliver open(-ish) hardware to more than just the globally well-off with cash to burn on their ideals (something that not all of us can do).

The points above are indeed valid, but for example there is a line to be drawn between PinePhones and their secondary products.

Also, near the end it does explain/justify the need for a compromise in "libreness", as essentially anyone would agree on given the extraordinary price of "pure libre" hardware.

The main point in my opinion is not pushing for radical hardware, but rather accommodating the needs of developers and end users in a "libre-ish" lineup.

The alternative is just using one of the discarded phones most people already have in their drawer somewhere with postmarketOS. If you're in luck it's one of the well supported chipsets

Do the phones in most people's junk drawers have unlockable bootloaders?

yes or buy one on ebay for a fraction of the price of some libre maker flavor of the month soon to be ewaste

Many second hand phones go for <100$ and are unlockable.

It's word by word the story of how I got my first such phone. I told my colleagues that I'm looking for an old Galaxy phone, and one of them had one lying around.

> I will be the first to criticise the fact that Pine seems to be increasingly leaning on the community to produce working software/firmware for their products

Isn't this a double standard? Linux is most commonly used on PCs and i do not think that PC/mainboard manufacturers are big into producing Linux (or other) OS/software for their products, they left it on wider ecosystem.

Pine64 just use the same approach that use PC/mainboard manufacturers, instead of 'consumer appliance' approach that use phone manufacturers.

PC/Mainboard manufacturers absolutely do create drivers and utility applications for their products, for Windows and Mac. The OS provides the rest of the functionality.

The issue with Pine64 economics is that such an OS doesn't exist yet, at least on their phones. What good are drivers if there's no dialer app available, for instance?

There exist several OSes with support for Allwinner A64 SoC used in Pinephone. Linux certainly has support for Pinephone. Dialer apps also exist.

Are any of these usable as a daily driver, and at least 90% as reliable as mainstream phones when it comes to placing/receiving calls, ringing, and notifying about new SMS messages?

Don't know whether there was an update to the fine article, but the article currently seems to mostly refute your points.

> Pine formula is that it reliably gets brand-new hackable devices into the hands of the community at an affordable price point

I guess this depends on the definition of hackable, but the revelation that I got from the article is that Pine actually doesn't operate that way, they just sell the cheapest hardware they can instead of "hackable" hardware.

IME The hardware is quite hackable. Schematics are usually available. SoC documentation is available, often times some kind of code is available, Pine64 listens to feedback, pine64 wiki has quite a lot of information, etc, etc. Some of these accessories to the main product surely feel like they started as someone hacking something together and writing about it on the forum, and Pine64 deciding to make it into an product. I guess fingerprint reader backcover for pinephone seems like it came about this way.

Author here. Can confirm that PINE64 is still way more hackable than COTS alternatives

(Also, the article wasn't updated, apart from a couple of dead link fixes)

Pointing to two tier-2/3 products as proof that they began shifting away from open/hackable hardware is misleading - it's far more likely that they are simply exploring, or made a product design misstep.

They have dozens of products at this point, and their SBCs, phones and laptops are the products people are most likely to care about. The amount of people who would object to less-than-open headphones or whatever is low, because the amount of interest is lower in the first place.

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