I still hope to see a non-x86 version. The less bloat the better.
It's more DiY but for some that is a huge boon. Used one in person and its quite bulky and heavy but feels pretty solid and comfortable enough to use. The mechanical keyboard and trackball option are unique and welcome additions. I liked it so much I ordered a pocket reform though I intend to run 9front on it.
I mean, it “works” as in it is a functioning computer, but it’s not really useful as a daily driver machine. Mine is very touchy and build quality-wise, it’s not great.
It is great for what you pay, don’t get me wrong. And I’m sure some people could use it daily, but between the battery life and sluggish performance, it’s not really in the same conversation as the Framework model here.
I think for me the real issue I have is that with the Pinebook Pro (and Linux on ARM in general), you’re limited to a specific set of “blessed” Linux distributions. There is still a lot of custom code that goes into these, so it’s not at the point of being able to just download your favorite distro and running it. It’s getting better, but there are so many variations of chips that it’s hard to get things running smoothly. The flexibility of the OS and ARM CPUs really makes it difficult without a major OEM/vendor taking charge.
Their modus operandi is to take reference circuits, splatter on a few peripherals to IO lines, make a case, and call it a day.
Happen to have 2 USB-C ports (ala pinephone pro)? Hope you which one to use cause the other one will fry stuff.
You have a pine SBC? Says it will boot on their micro memory chips instead of mSD? Nah you still need a mSD to pass to the chip.
And they'll wash their hands of any support requests, and blame the open source community for support.
Save yourself the pain, suffering, and lost money. Do not buy Pine anything.
"As a new open source platform, Pinebook development is an ongoing process and represents a great opportunity to get involved with computing on a different level, to customize and personalize the portable computer experience, to understand what is going on beneath the surface. If you are looking for a device in a convenient laptop form-factor that you wish to tinker with, then it is safe to say the Pinebook is the right device for you. We do no wish to discourage anyone from getting the Pinebook, but it is not a daily driver, so if you are looking to replace your current work or school laptop it may be wise to look elsewhere."
They have been extremely upfront about this from day 1. Your expectations are not realistic or in alignment with what Pinebook themselves has said about their devices.
For the more desktopy thingies: chrome has no arm64 build.
Ventana Veyron, TBA before end of year, and Tenstorrent's Ascalon, TBA 2024, competitive with Zen5.
I don't think the market forces are driving towards a RISC-V laptop chip (TH1520 is the only one that has mentioned notebook, but it's a very low-end Cortex-A72-class processor).
Hopefully this will improve eventually.
AIUI it is an actual chiplet, which you're then supposed to combine with your own. They expect something physical people can buy next year, but I do not doubt there's a fair amount of extra work for it to be put into a laptop.
The IP is not only one design, either, but it is parametrized so that many presets can be built. They have several steps from small (2 wide) to large (8 wide).
Ultimately, what I meant to highlight is that the best RISC-V microarchitectures are about caught up with AMD/Apple/Intel, if not better. This is possible because of how much better RISC-V is. Else we could never have got to this point so quickly.
Actual products follow IPs. There'll be these next year from what we know, but there is also Rivos, MIPS and SiFive working on their very high performance microarchitectures we know much less about, and possibly more we don't even know about at all.
RISC-V laptops will happen.
RISC-V is inevitable.
ARM-powered Windows devices have been terrible, and the only good Chromebooks I've seen are x86.