Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop

> CPU was compared to the PS3 and GPU was compared to the original Xbox, for reference.

Why is this a problem? This is "desktop" hardware against mobile hardware.

> It barely ran with the stock software

How so? It didn't perform well? It didn't boot at all?

> and was unable to play a 480p YouTube video fullscreen without noticeable frame drops

With which software? Did it support the A64's hardware decoder?

> They were also unable to get Windows running on it when they tried using a Raspberry Pi image

...Is expected that you're able to boot Raspberry Pi images on completely different devices?

> Pine64 themselves claim that the machine is not a daily driver.

I think you should have opened with that.

> I had been looking at the phone a few days before and was astonished at how outdated the hardware was, even for an open source device that is possibly upgradeable.

Open source hardware projects don't have the luxuries that multi-billion dollar behemoths like Samsung do. They don't have access to pre-production SoCs so they're handicapped from the start and they need to handle everything from design to parts sourcing to manufacture to distribution themselves, with a small team.

That means you're going to get "outdated" hardware. You don't buy open source for the latest shiny things, you buy it for other reasons.

Comparing it to my MacBook Pro... it's terrible.

It has some flaws, and it may be underpowered for things like YouTube, it works flawlessly as a small note taker that has an extremely long battery life and a decent screen/keyboard. It's also really nice for having a Linux machine around that most dongles/serial consoles just work with when you head into the datacenter to deal with a Cisco device that isn't playing nice.

For the price point, you get a lot. As an owner of a Pinebook, I am looking forward to the Pinebook Pro.

Of course, Google's ChromeOS level of polish is a far cry from most 'freely assembled' distros out there, but last time I checked, the ubuntu/debian images for the PBP were getting there in terms of working features and performance.

No one said this was a problem, the commenter was simply stating the comparison.

> How so? It didn't perform well? It didn't boot at all?

The commenter explained that in literally the second part of the sentence:

> > It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates/new software to get it running)

>With which software? Did it support the A64's hardware decoder?

Again, as stated by the commenter, it was using youtube in the distro that comes with the machine.

> ...Is expected that you're able to boot Raspberry Pi images on completely different devices?

It's not too far fetched, they're not very different at all, they're both quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit based SOCs with similar clock speeds, and the some of the Pine boards with more RAM can run Win10.

> Open source hardware projects don't have the luxuries that multi-billion dollar behemoths like Samsung do.

Pine64 is just a Chinese knockoff of the Raspberry Pi, and is more closed than RPi due to the AllWinner SOCs they use. They have more support and reliability issues too.

There's no need to be rude, but if you're going to be rude, you should at least be accurate.