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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

When you’re trying to make a mass-market hardware product at bare-bones pricing, you have to be ruthless about simplifying the hardware and cutting costs. A single SPI chip isn’t a huge investment in absolute terms, but it adds one more sourcing complication (in the middle of a chip shortage) and creates significantly more RMA complexity (for the reasons that the Pine64 organization accurately explained from their past experience) to cater to a relatively small number of users.

Contrast this with the Raspberry Pi organization, which has seen massive success by having an uncompromising stance on simplicity and focus, even if the ideological purity of the project isn’t up to certain people’s standards. Like it or not, it’s what made them successful while projects like Pine64 continue to be niche products that require a lot of work and research to use.

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I kind of doubt that adding an extra chip was the only way to preserve the ability to boot from microSD, given earlier hardware revisions did do it too - i.e. its something they decided to take away. (RPi btw nowadays can boot from multiple sources too ;))

And even then, it's only one of the complaints, and this isn't the only places I see backlash against pines treatment of the dev community - again for a company that relies on said community for a lot of software work across their products. My impression is that RPi foundation with Raspian relied a lot less on the community.

> When you’re trying to make a mass-market hardware product at bare-bones pricing, you have to be ruthless about simplifying the hardware and cutting costs.

But is that really what PINE64 should be trying to do? So far their support hasn't come from the "mass market". It's come from a niche market of open source hackers trying to build and support various Linux distros for mobile devices. Why does improving mass market appeal have to mean alienating your existing supporters?

You come up on your niche, and then when you have access to the broader market, you pivot to the group that will help you grow market power [1]. Similar dynamics exist in a lot of different ecosystems, and Pine seems to be responding to the challenges that have come with becoming big. It's sad that they won't be supporting OS hackers anymore, but they have to pivot if they want to bring onboard more customers (which seems to be the goal behind this decision).

[1] https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/rules-for-rulers

Can you really consider the "mass market" to be a key to power for Pine64 with their current lineup of products, though? The OS hackers seem to be Pine64's only key to power right now. And does supporting them really consume extra resources that could otherwise be better allocated?

> Can you really consider the "mass market" to be a key to power for Pine64

Not as long as they ship Manjaro as the default OS for their hardware. Rolling-release distributions are not fit for mass-market use.

My guess is that OS hackers could be considered as one niche, while hackers and builders who prefer not going through a custom Linux install/config for their project (i.e., a weather station or a mobile smart home dashboard) could be a larger one. Definitely not "mass market" or replacing Android levels, but at the same time a significantly larger portion of revenue for Pine64. The switch to Manjaro would provide them with a key backer that allows them to unlock this market. People have been discussing the software quality of Manjaro, so maybe it has a good foundation or connections?

Also: I've seen some hidden costs of supporting custom OS installs being discussed, i.e. procuring extra chips to allow open boot. This may have factored into Pine64's decision.

> while hackers and builders who prefer not going through a custom Linux install/config for their project

That's a false dichotomy, nobody is demanding that users be forced through "custom Linux install" (whatever that means). The problem is also not primarily that Pine64 have chosen a "flagship" distro, but how they and said distro behave towards the other options. I'm sure the quality of the flagship distro is massively improved by making life hard for the project that did useless things like making the camera in the phone work...

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