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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

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justinclift·

Hmmm, if you're ok with say 0.1 of an M1, then maybe one of the Pinebook laptops would be useful to consider?

https://pine64.com/product-category/pinebook-pro/

They're only about US$200, so depending on your budget it might be a useful experiment. :)

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How do they compare to Raspberry Pi 4B? Similar performance is Okay for many uses, somewhat faster CPU (so heavy websites like YouTube wouldn't feel like a turn-based game) would be excellent.

It's really slow. YouTube works but browsing is really slow overall. I installed Manjaro with KDE on mine and quickly changed to i3 because the trackpad isn't that good so moving windows around wasn't really fun. When I got the graphics drivers to work, Alacritty ran pretty good and I used it for coding. I wouldn't recommend it for any serious work.

Then I just wonder why can't they or somebody else build a similar laptop around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module then...

I just googled that and found out there is such a thing branded WaveShare, seeming pretty good, but it's discontinued. That's sad, I would be buying it straight away but I couldn't even find a used thing on eBay.

"YouTube works" is ambiguous because YouTube is two distinct things: video playback and the actual website UI. E.g. YouTube video plays Ok on Raspberry Pi (I believe this can be attributed to hardware codecs) but the rest of the elements of a YouTube page work painfully slow and YouTube is not alone in this, there are other websites (including ones lacking any multimedia content) which work really slow as well. I haven't seen any which would be completely unusable though, it's just really annoying to use some.

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