61–70 of 146 posts
Enjoyed the article. Thanks for write up. 4GB RAM sounds terrible even for browsing and basic tasks. I'm looking to switching to one of those devices in future, so far on trusted Thinkpad x230 (no FHD, $150 USD) for travel purposes. Can anyone comment on "no NPM yet that I know of though" ? Does node development work normally ?
Yes, it does.
Seeing all that empty internal space makes me wonder if they couldn't increase the device's appeal by fitting it with a bigger battery. 8-10 hours of charge time is good, but a $200 laptop that could go for (say) 20 or 30 hours on a charge would really turn heads. I suppose it's possible that would require some kind of custom battery, and this is just the most appropriate battery for this enclosure they could get off…
EDIT: As the commenter below pointed out, the limit is 100,000 mWh and not 10,000 mWh. I stand corrected.
> You can’t fault the Pine64; everything has to be built for ARM and that’s still a work in progress. I eagerly await the day Visual Studio Code is available for ARM. Thankfully this is changing rapidly, thanks in part to raspberry pi desktops. Most, if not all, popular server apps are already available in ARM. Desktop apps will take time.
This bodes well in terms of lower prices, better battery longevity, and incredible performance for the soon-coming ARM MacBooks.
An "annoying touchpad" is likely a dealbreaker for me. It's the holy grail for Linux to me and I feel like it's never been solved by anybody but Apple (w/o Linux). That being said, I could exist in the command line most of the time...
Apple's touchpads are nothing special, at least these days where you can easily get a high quality touchpad on pretty much anything but the cheapest laptops available. It's actually how macOS handles touchpads that makes them feel special. However, apparently Pinebook's one is actually pretty problematic and needs some firmware updates to work better.
Seeing all that empty internal space makes me wonder if they couldn't increase the device's appeal by fitting it with a bigger battery. 8-10 hours of charge time is good, but a $200 laptop that could go for (say) 20 or 30 hours on a charge would really turn heads. I suppose it's possible that would require some kind of custom battery, and this is just the most appropriate battery for this enclosure they could get off…
If I’m not mistaken, 10,000 mWh is the maximum that can be brought on an airliner. EDIT: As the commenter below pointed out, the limit is 100,000 mWh and not 10,000 mWh. I stand corrected.
[0] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
An "annoying touchpad" is likely a dealbreaker for me. It's the holy grail for Linux to me and I feel like it's never been solved by anybody but Apple (w/o Linux). That being said, I could exist in the command line most of the time...
Apple's touchpads are nothing special, at least these days where you can easily get a high quality touchpad on pretty much anything but the cheapest laptops available. It's actually how macOS handles touchpads that makes them feel special. However, apparently Pinebook's one is actually pretty problematic and needs some firmware updates to work better.
Whatever process Apple uses to finish the glass touchpad surface must be hard to replicate, because I haven't found anything comparable.
Some are bearable, but not as much of a joy to use (compared to other input devices).
This is a tad tangential but has anyone done extensive software development using an ARM device? I was able to get pretty far with a rooted Samsung tablet running Debian in a container (C++ development works great, you can install stuff like VSCode and Clang without too much trouble) but when it came to anything mobile, ironically it all fell apart because the Android toolchain isn't built for ARM64 (save the one in…
I've done some web development work on my raspberry pi 4. It's almost there, but even using vim, some things are still too slow (I do primarily front-end development). 4gb of RAM means I can't have a ton of things going on, but it's easily enough for back-end, webpack, editor, and a handful of tabs without much issue. Now, there are some CPU differences here. 3399 has 2 A72 cores at 2GHz and 4 A53 cores at 1.5GHz. Th…
