Would love for Pine64 to thrive.
I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.
I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.
What I like about Pine64 is that they go for low price points. Most of their products seems to be priced in line with low- or mid-end proprietary alternatives. Yes you can still complain about the hardware you get for what you pay but IMO for this kind of stuff, it's better to have an accessible price point and limited hardware than to charge a premium price for mid-range hardware that is still limited by experimental software support.
Sometimes I wish they would charge a little more and use that extra $$$ to pay someone to make the things work. there are too many rough edges that a full time developer would just fix, but nobody in the community gets "a round touit". These are things I could fix, but after my day job and getting my kids to everything I don't have energy left to focus.
Huh, maybe I should contact them, since I am freelancing now….
Everyone I know who is vaguely-serious about soldering has their own favorite brand/method/voodoo, so they're not interested in the soldering irons even if we do a direct comparison and the Pinecil performs better. (There's no accounting for taste, I guess.)
But the PinePower box is different. I've helped them sell a few of those to various geeky friends. They do what they're supposed to do, handle all of the various fast-charging standards that small portable widgets tend to use, and they do it in a usefully-informative way.
So it's wonderful for charging stuff and can easily earn a permanent place in a household, and a person can very clearly see if a given charging cable is being difficult for whatever reason that it is without goofing around with extra parts like USB power analyzers.
I hope they stick around. They seem to be one of the good ones.