But in general, if you are not comfortable with embeddy things like writing data to SD cards and changing motherboard switches, then maybe Pinebooks are not for you. They are certainly less user friendly than conventional x86 machines in the boot department.
Honestly, it was probably physically built months ago. Shipping takes like a year.
> to install Manjaro Plasma as the default OS
This is custom SOC that Manjaro's community specifically built out support for, including PinePhone too. Other distros don't really do this, and PINE do give back to Manjaro for it.
> to put the switch inside
I have very serious difficulty trying to figure out what the problem is with putting a switch that controls eMMC next to the eMMC board. Which is a hardware board that is attached to the SOC, not an external or hotswappable drive. I don't think this is unreasonable?
> It's not about my comfort - I don't want to have to unscrew the brand new laptop on day 1!
The PINE store warns on nearly every single page in large red text that this is not for non-tinkerers. And explicitly tells you to not order if you want something right out of the box.
I understand that you want a laptop, but this is very much not a "laptop that I can just throw linux and use a browser" on. For that get a thinkpad or something.
Flip a switch to disable eMMC and boot from sd card, upgrade uboot, life continues.
(Not an owner, just a reader if your problem lies beyond this known issue you may want to be less terse seeking comment)
"Please do not order the Pinebook Pro if you’re seeking a substitute for your X86 laptop, or are just curious"
"These pre-orders are meant for enthusiasts familiar with the Arm architecture and interested in the PineBook Pro for this specific reason"
There are recovery methods, I would expect to be using a screwdriver on the first day with anything from the Pine store, tbh.
It seems Pinebook are using that as an excuse to ship low quality untested bricks.
Complaining about your dead pixels? You're obviously not a real enthusiast!
A real enthusiast would relish the fact that the unit is bricked after updating!
Pine64 has a "danger/warning" all over it. If you buy things which come with DIP switches they aren't there for decoration.
At the volumes made, and design cost, it's almost inevitable they will have a higher failure rate than Lenovo or Dell.
Not designing the uBoot update path to be fail-safe is pretty bad. But, if the cost is "use the DIP switches" maybe the problem is not being warned at the time?
Opening the case and pressing the reset button the board usually works to get it booting.
It's an extremely cheap laptop for hackers, so you should be prepared to hack on it.