I’ll believe it when there are pine products in my hand. Love them as a company, but wish they had more products that ya know, you could actually purchase.
Their Pinecil soldering iron is an awesome piece of kit. I just bought the v2 the other day to replace my v1. It's honestly head to head with the Hakko irons in the lab in terms of power and temperature control, and the v2 has support for the USB PD 3.1 28v profile which lets it hit 128w on a beta firmware with the Apple 140w charger. Pretty nuts for an iron barely bigger than a Pilot G2.
I think Raspberry Pi and everyone else more than caught up with Pine64 on hardware logistics problems.
One of the biggest benefits of the Pico is it has PIO cores so you can still bitbang data like Arduino with tight timings while running everything else on a modern ARM core. Without this, I do not see this Pine board meeting the same needs.
We don't know whether it has this or not, at the time.
I'm sure it can, at least, run the 32-bit core close to real-time while the big core manages the rest of the machine.
When the software support is actually existent, it will be a competitor.
Really want more GPIO than just 26 pins (and without "expanders").