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From early in the article: "Let me start by making one thing clear – the current Pine Store isn’t going away and the pricing in the Pine Store will remain unch

From early in the article: "Let me start by making one thing clear – the current Pine Store isn’t going away and the pricing in the Pine Store will remain unchanged." Then near the end: "The Pine Store, in its current form, isn’t going anytime soon and the current community-oriented price point will not change." I don't want to nitpick, but I believe some further clarification would be needed; those "in its current form" and "anytime soon" can make a world of difference. Don't get me wrong, I totally support the move, although I'm not sure bumping the price to $299 for a device that isn't 100% ready yet would be a good move, especially considering that most customers in retail shops wouldn't be so sensitive about privacy, openness, etc. compared to online purchasers. If I may offer an idea to recover some costs, why not making a backplane board for the PinePhone mainboard, with screws, flat cables to the mainboard and connectors to the external world? It could become both a development platform for the phone, and be used as a SBC for tinkering. Also all people who upgraded their phone to the 3GB/32GB version could make some use of their old mainboard. It could become a normal procedure: phone is upgraded, old mainboard becomes useable again, everything is reused and nothing is thrown away. The message sent would be so different from other phone manufacturers and their planned obsolescence.

blihp 6y ago
My take was that they were primarily referring more to the costs associated with handling the overwhelming tech support requests from less/non-technical users rather than what sounds like occasionally selling specific items at a loss. It's the difference between user 'A' getting their device, having a problem and realizing that they need to do some searches/ask in the forums/get in a chat room to resolve it (i.e. self-support by the user... what many Linux users have been used to forever on the desktop/server side) and user 'B' having the same problem but deciding to contact Pine64 saying 'make this work!' (i.e. full support from the seller) It's one thing to contact Pine64 if you've done your due diligence and determined you have a faulty device (or worse: found a design flaw.) It's something else entirely, and the thing they aren't set up to handle, to expect it to be a consumer ready/friendly solution.

blihp 6y ago

My take was that they were primarily referring more to the costs associated with handling the overwhelming tech support requests from less/non-technical users rather than what sounds like occasionally selling specific items at a loss. It's the difference between user 'A' getting their device, having a problem and realizing that they need to do some searches/ask in the forums/get in a chat room to resolve it (i.e. self-support by the user... what many Linux users have been used to forever on the desktop/server side) and user 'B' having the same problem but deciding to contact Pine64 saying 'make this work!' (i.e. full support from the seller) It's one thing to contact Pine64 if you've done your due diligence and determined you have a faulty device (or worse: found a design flaw.) It's something else entirely, and the thing they aren't set up to handle, to expect it to be a consumer ready/friendly solution.