4 ms·

Well, that's exactly my point when I speak of compromises. If you want to be nude and pure then you go for the A72/A53, well aware that you're selling hardware

Well, that's exactly my point when I speak of compromises. If you want to be nude and pure then you go for the A72/A53, well aware that you're selling hardware that is almost a decade old and can't be used as a daily driver today. Otherwise, as unpleasant as it can be, you have to make a deal with Broadcom/Qualcomm, or get some other vendors to license their ARM chipset to you. The latter doesn't seem like the end of the world to me TBH. Of course I'd love an ideal world where open architectures like RISC V have taken over and are actually usable, but until we get there usability remains more important than purity - unless you're RMS of course - even if it involves a small "deal with the devil". I believe that most of the geeks out there love open-source products not much because they work daily with kernels and drivers (if that's the case then the argument for a pure open hardware without hex bloats makes sense), but because of the flexibility that they offer. Because they can install anything that they want on them and aren't prone to abandonware/planned deprecation like many products powered by Google or Apple. But if you don't give them products that they can use as main daily drivers, you'll rarely get enough momentum outside of the small tinker-and-show-off circles.

beagle3 6y ago
> you're selling hardware that is almost a decade old and can't be used as a daily driver today. My iPhone 6S is more than 5 years old, and is perfectly usable as a daily driver (and my SO's iPhone 6 is too - it's 6 years old, only runs iOS 12, but still gets security updates and is perfectly usable). It's fine if on the freedom/performance/up-to-dateness tradeoff, you're not pine64's customer. Many people are.
- comex 6y ago
  If you’re talking about 5-year-old Apple products, the first Apple Watch is also 5 years old and runs at 520 MHz with 512 MB of RAM. I expect it too is usable. But that’s quite a bit different from 64 MHz and 64 KB of RAM.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I wouldn’t be too sure of that. It was slow out of the gate and got progressively worse as time went on; it’s entirely possible that a much slower device might feel more responsive.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  That's a kind of a… difficult comparison. The 6S was right when Apple shifted from chips that were highly competitive to chips that were ridiculously overpowered. If you're making a point about 5-year-old hardware being still useful today, I think you need to reference typical 5-year-old hardware. The 6S was weird (albeit in a good way).
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    iPhone 5s on iOS 12 was a fairly decent phone.

beagle3 6y ago

> you're selling hardware that is almost a decade old and can't be used as a daily driver today. My iPhone 6S is more than 5 years old, and is perfectly usable as a daily driver (and my SO's iPhone 6 is too - it's 6 years old, only runs iOS 12, but still gets security updates and is perfectly usable). It's fine if on the freedom/performance/up-to-dateness tradeoff, you're not pine64's customer. Many people are.

comex 6y ago
If you’re talking about 5-year-old Apple products, the first Apple Watch is also 5 years old and runs at 520 MHz with 512 MB of RAM. I expect it too is usable. But that’s quite a bit different from 64 MHz and 64 KB of RAM.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I wouldn’t be too sure of that. It was slow out of the gate and got progressively worse as time went on; it’s entirely possible that a much slower device might feel more responsive.
Eric_WVGG 6y ago
That's a kind of a… difficult comparison. The 6S was right when Apple shifted from chips that were highly competitive to chips that were ridiculously overpowered. If you're making a point about 5-year-old hardware being still useful today, I think you need to reference typical 5-year-old hardware. The 6S was weird (albeit in a good way).
- saagarjha 6y ago
  iPhone 5s on iOS 12 was a fairly decent phone.