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Pine64 Unleashes $200 Rockchip-Powered Pinebook Pro Linux Laptop
- jaytaylor 7y agoThe battery sounds small, since it's only 2 or 3x that of my phone. Other than that, what incredible specs for only $200!
- baybal2 7y ago10Ah * 3.7V = 37Wh
- krastanov 7y agoI am pretty sure you mean "Ah" (i.e. current * time, i.e. charge, not "A/h", which is rate of change of current or second derivative of charge). Similarly it is "Wh" (i.e. energy, i.e. "power * time", not "W/h" which is the second derivative of energy).
- baybal2 7y agoThanks
- sigstoat 7y agoignoring the issue of units, that's overly optimistic for batteries. the voltage drops as charge is depleted.
- krastanov 7y agoIndeed it varies between 4.2V and 3.1V, but the value op chose (3.7V) is not an unreasonable average number. But 3.5V probably is a better guesstimate. See https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/6/7/4/7/9/5112a224ce395fb479000003.png https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/6/7/4/7/9/5112a224ce395fb479...
- solarkraft 7y agoThis is not unusual for a laptop, although on the lower side. What's the power draw?
- noobermin 7y agoIt's a SBC so its power draw isn't that high. The question of course is mainly what the power requirements of the screen is.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoCan’t wait to read some reviews on this thing, sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y agoPretty decent specs for the price, but unfortunately it appears that they've stuck with the same bizarre keyboard layout as the older iterations of the Pinebook- take a look at where they map out the slashes and double-quote! The layout of the physical keys would make it tricky to remap them to something more familiar.
- HomeDeLaPot 7y agoWhat the hell? I use @ and " all day! I'd love to hear the reasoning behind swapping the two
- jplayer01 7y agoIt looks like the UK layout to me. I remember the @ being in a weird place. I'll probably just change the sw layout to US. I already do the same with German keyboards.
- jacobush 7y agoGerman keyboards are the weirdest - why switch Z and Y? YYYY? :-)
- pgeorgi 7y agoIt's rather uncommon to run into a "y" in German, so why give it such a central position on the keyboard? "Z" is more common, if only because German has a "tz" digraph. Es ist eher ungewöhnlich, im Deutschen auf ein "y" zu stoßen, also warum sollte man ihm eine solche zentrale Position auf der Tastatur geben? "Z" ist üblicher, und wenn es nur wegen des "tz" Digraphen ist. Two sentences saying the same in both languages. English: 3 "y" and 0 "z" outside quotes. German: 0 "y" and 2 "z" outside quotes.
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- neilv 7y agoDirect links: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ https://store.pine64.org/?product=14-pinebook-pro-linux-laptop https://store.pine64.org/?product=14-pinebook-pro-linux-lapt...
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoI'm almost tempted, been eyeing a chromebook for low power lightweight work.
- jplayer01 7y agoThis seems pretty cool. All I'm missing is an estimate of the possible battery life.
- aidenn0 7y agoAnyone know what the status is for mainline linux support for the rockchip used in this? Last I checked things like USB3 didn't work in mainline and am wondering if things have improved.
- redwards510 7y agoReally want to pull the trigger on this, the Privacy Switches to disable camera, mic, wifi at the firmware level appealed to me. If you search around you'll find a video the creator made demo'ing skipless 1080p/4k video playback. However, it's probably prudent to wait for some of the initial bugs to get ironed out first. They also claim to be making no profit off of these.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoWish they would let you donate an additional amount if its not making a profit. I want to see them build more things. I kept wanting the former model but they never got back to me on it. I put my email several times.
- 24gttghh 7y ago>Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect. I get that it's a $200 laptop, and it's open source which is commendable, but... this disclaimer does not instill much confidence.
- rjsw 7y agoI have an 11" Pinebook, can't see any dead pixels on it.
- Wheaties466 7y agoI also have the 11" pine book and I do not have any dead pixels as well.
- komali2 7y agoConfidence costs money. Definitely don't buy it if you're looking for confidence :P
- wlesieutre 7y agoOne wonders if they're able to get cheaper screens that have failed someone else's quality requirements?
- penagwin 7y agoNo that's a pretty standard well-standard, if you go to lenovo/dell/etc. they generally will say 1-3 dead pixels is within normal conditions. These guys are selling this at a loss (or near loss), they're trying to be upfront to lower the number of returns - and more importantly chargebacks and disputes.
- wlesieutre 7y agoHuh. I've only had one stuck pixel in my life and I was able to fix it by poking it with a pencil eraser. Guess I've been lucky. 3 in one screen is a lot.
- mbreese 7y agoIt should be noted that this is currently only available for a pre-order basis, and only for people who joined their forums before July 1, 2019. As far as I know there is no timeline for general public availability. The first pre-order batch is only a run of 100 devices, and these were reserved within the first 2 minutes of their pre-order window. The next batch will be 1000 devices, but they haven't announced with those will be released (right now estimated to be in reservation holders hands w/in 8-10 weeks)[0]. Hopefully they'll get an ANSI keyboard figured out sometime in the next few months (but based on the forum posts, I don't think this is a high priority for them at the moment). Take home message -- this is really a pre-production machine at the moment. It might be better to wait for later revisions. [0]https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7752&pid=48104#pid48104 https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7752&pid=48104#p...
- Havoc 7y agoLooks like the perfect burner laptop for those that feel the need for that when visiting certain countries. Especially with >PCIe x4 to m.2 NVMe SSD Slot (requires optional adapter) An encrypted NVMe could in theory be mailed...
- penagwin 7y ago> An encrypted NVMe could in theory be mailed... Wouldn't this apply to any sneakernet medium? You can mail microsd cards, harddrives if you wanted, etc.
- ganzuul 7y agoI would be interested in seeing some glam shots of this product. Especially interesting design details, if there are any. Confidence in build quality feels important for portable devices.
- thequux 7y agoI handled the prototype at FOSDEM this year. This may or may not have been the final case, but it felt as solid as a macbook air; it had no discernable flex even while holding it by a corner (better than my T460!). It did feel disconcertingly light, but I suspect that many people may find that a feature. That said, their table was always very crowded, so I didn't spend as much time as I'd have liked examining it. I still bought one though
- siscia 7y agoI am very interested in this kind of product. I wonder if there are any competitor in this market, especially European competitor.
- mrweasel 7y agoI might be a little old fashion, but I'd rather have the motherboard in an ATX form factor, with a few PCIe slots.
- mrmondo 7y agoI was about to buy one as a spare, linux-only laptop, I was hoping they'd have 16GB-32GB RAM options (for a price of course), but they don't even have 8GB let alone 16/32... they seem to be stuck with 4GB!? That's not going to be much good for browsing modern Javascript heavy websites and doing anything else at the same time let alone having a VM or a few apps running in the background. I'm all for cheap laptops for kids to learn on, basic word processing and things but - this is going to struggle.
- ryacko 7y agoI’ve found using Firefox with multi-process disabled reduces memory use to about 300 MB. Mozilla announced they will move the option to disable multi-process from config to somewhere else though.
- derstander 7y agoI’ve been following the forums and more RAM is often requested. The Pine64 folks have stated that the SoC only supports 4GB RAM. I do wonder, though, about the utility of pairing the rather modest compute capabilities of the SoC with a large amount of RAM.
- cptnapalm 7y agoDisk cache. That's been the great benefit I've had from the excessive amount of RAM I have in my laptop.
- beatgammit 7y agoYou won't be running a VM on a doc like this, but 4GB is plenty for most everyday tasks. My laptop running Windows has 4GB RAM, and it runs common web tasks just fine, and I use it regularly for: - Slack - video meetings - Netflix - Google docs Honestly, I think you'll be more limited by CPU performance than memory, unless you try to run a VM or something. I don't know about you, but this is exactly the type of backup laptop I'm looking for. It probably won't be my main laptop for work, but it's plenty for most casual uses. Basically it's replace my Chromebook as a more capable, hackable alternative.
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- Zenst 7y ago30 day warranty! Be nice to have an optional extra to increase that.
- grizzles 7y agoI bought a pinebook late last year. It's so terrible that I consider it e-waste. I hope this new version is at least usable for folks.
- aquabeagle 7y agoWhy not sell or donate it if you have no use for it?
- grizzles 7y ago$20 + S&H if you want it. IDK if I'd feel right donating it to anyone. Its that bad.
- beatgammit 7y agoI hope they fix the weight distribution. I watched a video about the original Pinebook and the laptop tilted back when the screen went past 120deg or so. I imagine it's because the internals are so small and clumped together at the back, but it seems so annoying to have to hold it down while typing. I'll likely buy one once they get an ANSI layout. I've been meaning to pick up a RockPro64 for a NAS, but I decided the RAM wasn't quite enough to run ZFS well, but I won't be needing that much RAM for a casual laptop.
- quickthrower2 7y agoI haven’t heard the three dead pixels are ok excuse since 2002, it takes me back.
- apple4ever 7y agoHave they done any work on the software side? My experience has been that has been terrible.