Pine64 August update: RISC and reward

If you like the PinePhone concept and want to help the cause but also would rather wait for a more powerful model and/or for the software to be more mature, you can still help them by purchasing one of their other products. I bought a Pinecil solder iron a couple years ago and couldn't be happier: it totally deserves to sit just in between my other two Wellers.

I'm excited to have an affordable decent RISC-V device.

I'm glad to see the audio on Pinephone Pro improving! That has been a weakness of the Pinephone Pro.

PineBuds looks like a cool product, but I don't see much value in it over off-the-shelf alternatives. What am I missing?

Is there any notable difference between this Star64 RISC-V board and the StarFive Visionfive 2 that is now in Kickstarter?

They both use the JH7110 SOC (quad SiFive FU740 cores, BXE-2-32 GPU) and look very similar, with the Star64 having a PCI slot, and the Visionfive 2 having an m.2 slot instead.

One thing I see is that in the Star64 “the onboard WiFi/BT module is RTL8852BU MIMO WiFi 6 with BT 5.2”, while the other does not seem to have any wireless connectivity onboard.