4 ms·

I totally get releasing products like this to a 'developer audience' when its not fully working / complete but charging that much for it in that state... What

I totally get releasing products like this to a 'developer audience' when its not fully working / complete but charging that much for it in that state... What a joke. You can get a remarkable 2 for less than the cost of this device when "Most of the device’s functionality, including the e-paper display, do not work at this time".

sporedro 5y ago
Ya I’m a little confused, why is this thing $400 for something that doesn’t even work? Is the target audience developers who want to develop drivers and stuff for this? If so shouldn’t it be as cheap as possible? I don’t see the point in trying to make money at this stage when your target is people interested in a non functional product.
- metabagel 5y ago
  “at this stage” There is no indication they will ever leave this stage. I believe they generally sell at cost, even for working products. The purpose is to advance the technology, not to make a profit. But, the manufacturing and NRE costs need to be paid somehow.
  - officeplant 5y ago
    People seem to get really upset when its pointed out that they (Allwinner & Rockchip) are just profiting off of Pine64's community developing linux support for their SoCs. They seem to miss the point that the community wants products like these to tinker with and don't mind doing some legwork to get things functional. It's not ideal, but its better than nothing.
- natpalmer1776 5y ago
  I believe Pine64 is making profits off of people buying developer devices that have little-to-no actual functionality as a means of funding the development of the products in question. To then follow that up with allowing most of the multi-million dollar development to be done by hobbyists who have purchased your non-functional hardware and you have a recipe for... something.
  - metabagel 5y ago
    https://pine64.com/about-us/ https://pine64.com/about-us/ “ The main purpose of Pine Store creation is servicing PINE64 community. Most of the profit generated from Pine Store uses for production cash flow, new product engineering fee, sponsor community event expense, maintain server cost, and also supporting other open source communities.”
- foxfluff 5y ago
  How do you know they're making money? Producing electronics at small quantities is expensive. Prototypes are expensive. Economies of scale is everything when it comes to producing cost-effective electronics.
- arthur6667 5y ago
  It is about funding further development. The first risc-v development boards costed >600$ for essentially something like a raspberry pi. These people try to make these products in the open and without huge funding so it can actually reamin open.
- officeplant 5y ago
  >Is the target audience developers who want to develop drivers and stuff for this? Correct that's the way Pine64 works. Really it's the way the vast majority of niche ARM powered dev boards work. It is often stated on the product pages for people that don't seem to understand this. Their devices are often sold for very little margins above cost as they are mainly to drive developers to the platform. (as development on these devices benefits the SoC manufacturers) If you want something more consumer friendly come back in two+ years when some of the kinks have been worked out.
metabagel 5y ago
You’re comparing a closed source commercial product with an open source community driven project.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  Remarkable tablet has a closed soure eink display driver in userspace. Rockchip has a closed source eink display driver in kernel space. At least remarkable isn't violating the GPL.
boudin 5y ago
You're just not the target audience, they make it clear that it's a device in its early stage of development. The goal is clearly to build a community that will help building an open-source ecosystem around this kind of device.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  The kernel drivers should already be open source. Just not upstreamed because rockchip doesn't develop upstream first, they only do it later and partially. Nobody has attempted to reverse engineer the boot blobs. Hard to do. My question is: why rockchip? Why not focus on amlogic or mediatek? What does rockchip offer the open source community that other vendors don't?
  - officeplant 5y ago
    The move from Allwinner to Rockchip was mirrored by many of the other Pi competitors in what seems to be mostly a need for more performant SoCs. Given a lot of this market is driven by fabless Shenzhen based companies it probably comes down to the right mix of drivers/production/price. Although given Mediatek has been moving up a lot in the world and powering some really nice budget devices (Lenovo Chromebook/Chrome Tablets come to mind) I really hope for some sort of mediatek SBC to materialize as ARM adoption grows. For now chromebooks remain one of the only ways for me to get linux (via crostini) ARM devices with any sort of performance vs slowly tinkering around on a Pinebook Pro.
- jandrese 5y ago
  It seems insane that they're trying to build a community of support, but then have little to no documentation for so much of the hardware. If your product depends on the community for success maybe you should try to help that community succeed?
intricatedetail 5y ago
Remarkable does not offer encryption, so it is mostly an expensive paperweight unless you don't care about your data.
- officeplant 5y ago
  One might say a remarkable paperweight.
agentultra 5y ago
As a developer I'm a little confused. Are they skirting around having to pay developers to build the software for their device? I'm supposed to pay $400 USD for a development kit that comes with no tooling or support and... what? Do I get to release software for the platform under the Pine brand? Will Pine buy my drivers and software back? Will there be an ecosystem where I get a share of profits for the work? If this is hobbyist kit it's very pricey.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Your outrage seems misplaced. People are excited to have an open platform to play with, that is not trapped in some form of digital garden. Many people contribute to mainline and to distros because they believe in those projects, no-one expects that these projects co-finance their hardware. People will spend a lot more money than 400$ in other things, this is how they choose to spend both their money and time.
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    I don't feel trapped by kobo/nxp: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Kobo_Clara_HD_(kobo-clara) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Kobo_Clara_HD_(kobo-clara...
  - agentultra 5y ago
    Sorry, not outraged just genuinely confused what the draw is here for folks and what Pine's plans are for the "open source community." Will they eventually release a consumer version that packages up all of the software other folks have written on their own dime? Or do they only release these as developer kits?
    - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      > Will they eventually release a consumer version that packages up all of the software other folks have written on their own dime? That has been the Pine M.O. for their product line. The PineBook was a 'developer' release about 4 years ago. Now it is sold commercially as a full fledge ARM laptop. The PineTime has now reached a stable hardware but still under SW development and the PineNote is I think the first HW revision that they are shipping.
zeta0134 5y ago
On the flip side, for those of us who enjoy this sort of hardware hackery, this is a reasonable price for this collection of parts all conveniently wired up and ready for the fun part.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  I can appreciate that, as I have paid for similar 'hacker focused' projects e.g. playdate. It just seems very expensive to me considering how lacking it is even in terms of basic drivers but I suppose if people who are into this stuff think it's fairly priced then it's all good! Replies to me certainly seem to confirm that!
troyvit 5y ago
I dunno. After reading HN's more recent take on the remarkable 2 and its move towards a subscription model[0] I can see a use case. Also, comparing stats[1] they are different devices[2]. The PineNote has a more powerful CPU, 128G of storage vs the Remarkable 2's 8G, and a bigger battery. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29304365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29304365 [1]https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/ https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/ [2]https://remarkable.com/#Specifications https://remarkable.com/#Specifications So you get more hardware and freedom for the $. I think also that price point, coupled with the warnings, forces people to think hard before they make the jump to try it out.
tln 5y ago
PineNote Developer Edition is $399 with stylus included. Remarkable 2 is $399 without a stylus. The only way Remarkable 2 is "cheaper" is with an $8/mo subscription-- $299 + $8/mo.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rbanffy 5y ago
Have you ever bought any evaluation boards from any chip manufacturer? I never did, but clients of mine paid for some and I can tell you they aren’t cheap either - quite the contrary. This is ridiculously cheap for early access developer hardware.

sporedro 5y ago

Ya I’m a little confused, why is this thing $400 for something that doesn’t even work? Is the target audience developers who want to develop drivers and stuff for this? If so shouldn’t it be as cheap as possible? I don’t see the point in trying to make money at this stage when your target is people interested in a non functional product.

metabagel 5y ago
“at this stage” There is no indication they will ever leave this stage. I believe they generally sell at cost, even for working products. The purpose is to advance the technology, not to make a profit. But, the manufacturing and NRE costs need to be paid somehow.
- officeplant 5y ago
  People seem to get really upset when its pointed out that they (Allwinner & Rockchip) are just profiting off of Pine64's community developing linux support for their SoCs. They seem to miss the point that the community wants products like these to tinker with and don't mind doing some legwork to get things functional. It's not ideal, but its better than nothing.
natpalmer1776 5y ago
I believe Pine64 is making profits off of people buying developer devices that have little-to-no actual functionality as a means of funding the development of the products in question. To then follow that up with allowing most of the multi-million dollar development to be done by hobbyists who have purchased your non-functional hardware and you have a recipe for... something.
- metabagel 5y ago
  https://pine64.com/about-us/ https://pine64.com/about-us/ “ The main purpose of Pine Store creation is servicing PINE64 community. Most of the profit generated from Pine Store uses for production cash flow, new product engineering fee, sponsor community event expense, maintain server cost, and also supporting other open source communities.”
foxfluff 5y ago
How do you know they're making money? Producing electronics at small quantities is expensive. Prototypes are expensive. Economies of scale is everything when it comes to producing cost-effective electronics.
arthur6667 5y ago
It is about funding further development. The first risc-v development boards costed >600$ for essentially something like a raspberry pi. These people try to make these products in the open and without huge funding so it can actually reamin open.
officeplant 5y ago
>Is the target audience developers who want to develop drivers and stuff for this? Correct that's the way Pine64 works. Really it's the way the vast majority of niche ARM powered dev boards work. It is often stated on the product pages for people that don't seem to understand this. Their devices are often sold for very little margins above cost as they are mainly to drive developers to the platform. (as development on these devices benefits the SoC manufacturers) If you want something more consumer friendly come back in two+ years when some of the kinks have been worked out.

metabagel 5y ago

You’re comparing a closed source commercial product with an open source community driven project.

CameronNemo 5y ago
Remarkable tablet has a closed soure eink display driver in userspace. Rockchip has a closed source eink display driver in kernel space. At least remarkable isn't violating the GPL.

boudin 5y ago

You're just not the target audience, they make it clear that it's a device in its early stage of development. The goal is clearly to build a community that will help building an open-source ecosystem around this kind of device.

CameronNemo 5y ago
The kernel drivers should already be open source. Just not upstreamed because rockchip doesn't develop upstream first, they only do it later and partially. Nobody has attempted to reverse engineer the boot blobs. Hard to do. My question is: why rockchip? Why not focus on amlogic or mediatek? What does rockchip offer the open source community that other vendors don't?
- officeplant 5y ago
  The move from Allwinner to Rockchip was mirrored by many of the other Pi competitors in what seems to be mostly a need for more performant SoCs. Given a lot of this market is driven by fabless Shenzhen based companies it probably comes down to the right mix of drivers/production/price. Although given Mediatek has been moving up a lot in the world and powering some really nice budget devices (Lenovo Chromebook/Chrome Tablets come to mind) I really hope for some sort of mediatek SBC to materialize as ARM adoption grows. For now chromebooks remain one of the only ways for me to get linux (via crostini) ARM devices with any sort of performance vs slowly tinkering around on a Pinebook Pro.
jandrese 5y ago
It seems insane that they're trying to build a community of support, but then have little to no documentation for so much of the hardware. If your product depends on the community for success maybe you should try to help that community succeed?

intricatedetail 5y ago

Remarkable does not offer encryption, so it is mostly an expensive paperweight unless you don't care about your data.

officeplant 5y ago
One might say a remarkable paperweight.

agentultra 5y ago

As a developer I'm a little confused. Are they skirting around having to pay developers to build the software for their device? I'm supposed to pay $400 USD for a development kit that comes with no tooling or support and... what? Do I get to release software for the platform under the Pine brand? Will Pine buy my drivers and software back? Will there be an ecosystem where I get a share of profits for the work? If this is hobbyist kit it's very pricey.

DoingIsLearning 5y ago
Your outrage seems misplaced. People are excited to have an open platform to play with, that is not trapped in some form of digital garden. Many people contribute to mainline and to distros because they believe in those projects, no-one expects that these projects co-finance their hardware. People will spend a lot more money than 400$ in other things, this is how they choose to spend both their money and time.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  I don't feel trapped by kobo/nxp: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Kobo_Clara_HD_(kobo-clara) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Kobo_Clara_HD_(kobo-clara...
- agentultra 5y ago
  Sorry, not outraged just genuinely confused what the draw is here for folks and what Pine's plans are for the "open source community." Will they eventually release a consumer version that packages up all of the software other folks have written on their own dime? Or do they only release these as developer kits?
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    > Will they eventually release a consumer version that packages up all of the software other folks have written on their own dime? That has been the Pine M.O. for their product line. The PineBook was a 'developer' release about 4 years ago. Now it is sold commercially as a full fledge ARM laptop. The PineTime has now reached a stable hardware but still under SW development and the PineNote is I think the first HW revision that they are shipping.

zeta0134 5y ago

On the flip side, for those of us who enjoy this sort of hardware hackery, this is a reasonable price for this collection of parts all conveniently wired up and ready for the fun part.

breakfastduck 5y ago
I can appreciate that, as I have paid for similar 'hacker focused' projects e.g. playdate. It just seems very expensive to me considering how lacking it is even in terms of basic drivers but I suppose if people who are into this stuff think it's fairly priced then it's all good! Replies to me certainly seem to confirm that!

troyvit 5y ago

I dunno. After reading HN's more recent take on the remarkable 2 and its move towards a subscription model[0] I can see a use case. Also, comparing stats[1] they are different devices[2]. The PineNote has a more powerful CPU, 128G of storage vs the Remarkable 2's 8G, and a bigger battery. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29304365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29304365 [1]https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/ https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/ [2]https://remarkable.com/#Specifications https://remarkable.com/#Specifications So you get more hardware and freedom for the $. I think also that price point, coupled with the warnings, forces people to think hard before they make the jump to try it out.

tln 5y ago

PineNote Developer Edition is $399 with stylus included. Remarkable 2 is $399 without a stylus. The only way Remarkable 2 is "cheaper" is with an $8/mo subscription-- $299 + $8/mo.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rbanffy 5y ago

Have you ever bought any evaluation boards from any chip manufacturer? I never did, but clients of mine paid for some and I can tell you they aren’t cheap either - quite the contrary. This is ridiculously cheap for early access developer hardware.