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Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

pine64.org

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Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#61

Post by dagw »

ashark wrote: post #54

ALMOST awesome. I'd like this but: 1) Keep it thin, however 2) cram all that extra space full of battery, damn the weight, and 3) make the case solid metal. Steel if you must. I want it to feel like a contiguous block of metal with no give (doesn't necessarily mean you have to make it impossible to open, but if that's what it takes, go for it), plus 4) some fast wired interface. Gigabit ethernet or (better) USB3. Oh,…

I know, the nice screen bumps the price up

Making the case out of solid metal rather than plastic is what will bump the price up. Making custom plastic cases is really cheap. Doing basically anything custom of of metal is much more expensive, doing a single pieces of metal with a complex shape doubly so.

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#62

Post by prophesi »

I've been using Pine products since their Kickstarter, and received my 11'' Pinebook about two weeks ago. I currently use it for quick, on-the-go dev work.

Mine is set so that it boots from the internal 16gb eMMC into Ubuntu Xenial w/ i3wm. Then, I can either extend the storage or have it boot into Android, or any other distro, if I have an SD card inserted.

The Android build is well-refined with very few issues; just like the Pine64 SoC, Android is best for media-related use. The linux builds were rough at first, but most of the major issues have been fixed already by the community devs. They're also working on getting Linux on the mainline kernel, and to get 3D acceleration working.

It'll be a huge step for ARM if this device works out.

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#63

Post by rlpb »

prophesi wrote: post #62

I've been using Pine products since their Kickstarter, and received my 11'' Pinebook about two weeks ago. I currently use it for quick, on-the-go dev work. Mine is set so that it boots from the internal 16gb eMMC into Ubuntu Xenial w/ i3wm. Then, I can either extend the storage or have it boot into Android, or any other distro, if I have an SD card inserted. The Android build is well-refined with very few issues; jus…

> They're also working on getting Linux on the mainline kernel...

This was my first question, and there's no answer in their FAQ. Thank you for answering it.

I used a Samsung ARM Chromebook as my main laptop for many years, running Ubuntu. I only stopped two weeks ago when the keyboard finally broke (it did very well for how much it cost).

The biggest problem I had was that driver support didn't appear in the mainline kernel for years. When it finally did all work, it regressed regularly. I gave up bisecting the regressions to keep my own laptop running; I seemed to be the only one doing it.

Now I won't touch any ARM hardware (or any hardware, for that matter) that apparently supports Linux unless everything I need is already in mainline. Otherwise, by the time it lands (if it lands), it seems to be that there won't be enough of a user community left to keep it from regressing.

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#64

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

Retric wrote: post #37
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten reasonable support on $100 2-in-1s, $100 appliances, and It being cheap isn't an excuse to ship a defective product.

A 100$ toaster is not a cheap in the way a 100$ laptop is. Basically, if your buying a 1,000$ laptop and they reserve 5% of the price for support that's 50$. If your buying a 100$ laptop don't expect the same 50$ be set aside unless your actually willing to spend 150$ on 100$ of components and 50$ of support.

Your comment is non-constructive: you assumed I meant a cheap appliance (eg, toaster) rather than one for which $100 would be cheap to moderate (eg, fridge or AC), you ignored that the first item on the list was literally a laptop, and similarly ignored the software one (where 5% of the cost is $0.25).

Plenty of companies manage to warranty and support cheap products -- this one failed to do so.

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#65

Post by jnsquire »

rvense wrote: post #41

Can I please have a $1000 ARM laptop? Or at least something that feels like a $1000 ARM laptop. Make it good enough and I'm not actually too fussed if it costs 500 or 1500.

Try a chromebook -- I'm typing this on a Acer Chromebook R13. Has a nice, bright, Full HD IPS touch screen, 4 GB of memory, and a 4-core ARM64 cpu (2 A72, 2 A53). I'm got a terminal window open running rust builds locally in an Ubuntu installation via crouton. I picked this one up refurb for $320.

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#66

Post by monocasa »

dagw wrote: post #48
zzalpha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t give this to your kid that’s heading off to college — or even high school — and expect them to manage. It’s also not really a replacement for a low-end Chromebook, the desktop is sufficiently sluggish that I’d be wary of recommending it as a cheap web browsing laptop for the sofa. Okay, well, that's not great. I guess... On the other hand, I must admit, I rather like it. It’s a lot better put together than…

Okay, now I'm confused If you're the sort of person who needs a laptop to do the sort of things most normal people use a laptop for then this probably isn't for you. If you're the sort of person who might consider taking a laptop apart and trying to make it do weird and wonderful things the creators had never thought of and realize there is a good chance you'll end up bricking it in the process (and thus don't want t…

Exactly. For instance at work (robotics) we tend to use little netbooks as data loggers. This would be awesome for that.

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#67

Post by monocasa »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #35
smacktoward wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment you are responding to is a joke. It is referring to recently discovered AMT security vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs. The joke is that it is asking how AMT can be added to an ARM CPU, when in reality nobody would actually want to do that. This has been another episode of the Hacker News Joke Explainer™

Tell that to the guys who developed TrustZone technology.

Trustzone isn't AMT; it's borderline orthogonal. Trustzone is just an extra address bit that's only set in higher privileged modes (the "secure" modes in ARM). Most boards like this boot into end user controlled code while in system monitor mode, or a mode that allows you access to it trivially.

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#68

Post by ashark »

dagw wrote: post #61
ashark wrote: post #54

ALMOST awesome. I'd like this but: 1) Keep it thin, however 2) cram all that extra space full of battery, damn the weight, and 3) make the case solid metal. Steel if you must. I want it to feel like a contiguous block of metal with no give (doesn't necessarily mean you have to make it impossible to open, but if that's what it takes, go for it), plus 4) some fast wired interface. Gigabit ethernet or (better) USB3. Oh,…

I know, the nice screen bumps the price up Making the case out of solid metal rather than plastic is what will bump the price up. Making custom plastic cases is really cheap. Doing basically anything custom of of metal is much more expensive, doing a single pieces of metal with a complex shape doubly so.

It's just got to feel like one solid piece of metal, not actually be solid. Like how iPhones give that glass-and-metal-slab vibe, or (to a lesser extent) MacBook Pros before they thinned the body out (back when they could fit an optical drive), not flexing like the newer ones do when you press lightly on them. I want it to feel like something that could sit in an auto garage seeing daily use and still work after 10 years, but not be giant (possible because the mainboard would be tiny and power-sipping). Sturdy in feel and in fact, though not giant and bulky, and with all-day-plus battery life is what I'm looking for, and I'd trade raw computing power for it. A shopworn socket set of a laptop.

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#69

Post by tiagoespinha »

prophesi wrote: post #62

I've been using Pine products since their Kickstarter, and received my 11'' Pinebook about two weeks ago. I currently use it for quick, on-the-go dev work. Mine is set so that it boots from the internal 16gb eMMC into Ubuntu Xenial w/ i3wm. Then, I can either extend the storage or have it boot into Android, or any other distro, if I have an SD card inserted. The Android build is well-refined with very few issues; jus…

What's your experience with i3 on it? Is it lightweight enough to be usable as an Internet device?

Re: Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop

#70

Post by rasz »

midgetjones wrote: post #28

And what exactly is wrong with a second-hand ThinkPad for the same money?

x230 for example? its too quick with 4x 2.6-3GHz cores (about 4-6 times faster than Pine). Too much ram and disk space, who needs 8-16GB of ram and 256GB of 600MB/s SSD anyway? USB 3.0? Did I mention non flickering not TN screen? all for ~$150
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