The eMMC module is user swappable, so just get a larger one. You can also install an NVMe drive into it. I put /boot on the stock eMMC and root on the NVMe drive. You can do pure NVMe boot but I've been a bit too chicken about reflashing u-boot.
The ram does feel paltry in this day and age though. I wish you could use a sodimm module like the honeycomb uses.
The SoC in the Pinebook Pro can only address 4GB of RAM, it wouldn't make any difference to add a sodimm socket.
The RK3566 that is used in the latest Pine64 products like the Quartz64 and PineNote can address more, I would expect a laptop using this chip at some point.
I really don't think the RAM is the issue here. it's workable on Linux really. For me the biggest pain point is how sluggish Firefox is. And how there's a lot of stuff I can't install on it because they don't support ARM.
Look normally i would get mad at you, BUT since i made some pretty bad purchases in the past Openmoko, Loongson Laptop (was not a bad server, but horrible laptop), GPD3, i will never ever purchase a bad spec/newtec product ever again (i don't like creating electronic waste), for example i can buy a Samsung A12 for the price of a Pinephone, if i want something like a pinephone i buy a raspberrypi and a A12
How is buying a Samsung with its planned obsolescence not creating electronic waste? Most Pine products are supported by the mainstream kernel so will likely get software updates for their physical life.
I wait 2 years then i throw lineage os on it, last phone was a nexus 5. I bet your pinephone will not be usable for 7 years....2gb ram right? BTW can you receive sms already?
Sure! Though a more interesting test would be the total useful lifespan of either phone, Pine vs your Samsung. Oh, and I already have over a year and a half on mine :D
Do you think you can even get a replacement battery for your a12 in 3 years?
>Do you think you can even get a replacement battery for your a12 in 3 years?
Ah yes since the producer of phones needs to support them 5 years in franc (repair and updates), and hopefully 7 years (just security updates) in the future by eu law.
Completely irrelevant to the main discussion, but this got me wondering. Why is equating poverty to bad/meager/lacking considered distasteful? Wouldn't anybody in poverty agree that it's a pretty accurate comparison? Are there really any harmful stereotypes being perpetuated here? I can't think of any.
I would say at the very least that "low spec" is more accurate than "poverty spec." A financially comfortable hobbyist or developer might pick up a low spec device or three for testing or mucking about with. And someone who's really in poverty is probably not well-served by a poverty spec device that is poorly made and might break down in a couple of months or might be hampered to the extent of being no more than a toy. They might be much better off getting a decently specced used device.
To your larger question, the problem of why equating "poverty" with being bad is that as human beings we have the tendency of overgeneralizing negative characteristics, sometimes called the Horn Effect. A person is poor, and that's bad, and therefore the person themself is bad.
Poverty spec is an actual term that gets used and wasn't invented by the OP. Poverty spec generally refers to purchasing an expensive item, such as a high-end car, then choosing the lowest-cost, entry-level options. It doesn't normally mean just purchasing an inexpensive computer.
Poverty refers to the impoverished, which generally implies in need of assistance from others and has negative connotations entirely unrelated to what's being discussed here.
The laptop is targeting a specific price point, its specs are appropriate to that price point. There are plenty of reasons to want a low-cost linux laptop that have absolutely nothing to do with being poor.
Totally agree. I use a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB ram daily. CPU is only a bottleneck when compiling, but with just browser and terminal I regularly break 4GB ram usage.
That exists already - it's called the MacBook Air with M1, which has 256GB/512GB storage options and 8GB/16GB RAM options as you wished for. It's got Linux being brought-up for it by @marcan42 and already can boot from a mainline kernel (though hardware support is still coming along, but they've already nearly got an OpenGLES GPU driver less than a year after launch).
Also Apple went out of their way to make Linux and other OSs able to boot on it, so don't expect Apple to take away what they worked hard on.
What's novel about this Linux Laptop though is the low cost, $200. But you get what you pay for. And the M1 is, a year from now, probably going to have better (if not completely) upstream hardware support.
Please don't buy an M1 thinking it will be a good linux machine. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done. Get A Framework (frame.work) laptop or a Lenovo ThinkPad T series instead. Dell has some nice ones too but I haven't used any in a couple of years.
I respectfully disagree. @marcan42 is doing the development work and firmly believes that, once completed, the M1 machine will provide a superior experience to Intel machines.
Also, while there is a ways to go, a shocking amount is fully completed: I2C, UART, Power Management, GPIO, Display Controller, USB, Thunderbolt, NVMe storage, the works. Hector says he is just rewriting a few drivers from other folk, going to merge it upstream, and then really only the GPU is remaining.
But he has a friend working on that and less than a year later and despite not being the primary focus, they're nearly at OpenGLES, which has shocked people for how fast the GPU drivers are coming together.
> Also Apple went out of their way to make Linux and other OSs able to boot on it, so don't expect Apple to take away what they worked hard on.
Do you have more details? I was under the impression Apple did nothing and haven't published any documentation, making a Linux port an exercise in reverse engineering every little bit. If Apple really wanted Linux to be able to run on M1s, they could have upstreamed patches / sponsored the development required. Instead people are volunteering their time to do that without any help (direct or just documentation or tooling), hoping Apple won't pull the rug from under them.
Sure - you can ask @marcan42, but it basically goes like this:
Apple could have just copied-and-pasted the iPhone boot process, and that would have been extremely easy to do because M1 Macs and iPhones and iPads all share the same system for booting (being all Apple Silicon chips), that is, iBoot. Apple could have just thrown in iBoot but with signature enforcement for macOS instead of iOS and called it a day. Nothing but macOS would boot, but would Apple really care?
However, Apple went out of their way to not do this, but extended iBoot with Boot Policies, also referred to as the LocalPolicy. Apple documents this themselves at:
With the LocalPolicy, every partition and OS install gets their own Security Policy, which is another area where Apple goes above-and-beyond other systems. On Windows computers and Android devices, a device would typically be marked as "Secure Boot Enabled" or "Secure Boot Disabled" (no signature enforcement), on a chip/system-wide level. With this Boot Policy system, every OS can have their own secure boot mode, meaning you could have a fully-secure MacOS install alongside a (unsecured) Linux install, no problem.
You might wonder, if every OS can just have their own secure boot settings, how come a thief couldn't just replace a secure boot MacOS partition with a Linux no-secure-boot partition. Apple managed to prevent this with an extremely complicated "ownership" system that prevents a third-party hacker or a thief from being able to clear those BootPolicies without the owner's permission, as documented at:
Again, if Apple only cared about letting macOS run, copying-and-pasting regular iBoot would have worked fine. Instead, they had to tack on Permissive Mode, code signing from the Secure Enclave (for custom kernels), "ownership," and Boot Policies. A lot of work to just pull out the rug, right?
As if just enabling it with all of these otherwise-unnecessary add-ons wasn't enough, there are other signs of Apple being more... permissive about things. For example, unlike almost every other ARM chip which makes a huge mess of things, Apple has implemented their drivers in a way that means the same driver can handle different chips with the same core designs without almost any rewrites. An example of this is that, imagine the high-performance Firestorm cores on the M1. Marcan can just write a driver for Firestorm, and it will just work on the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max without rewrites for each chip that contains it (other than updating the device tree outside the drivers). That's unheard of for other ARM chips and makes future maintenance a breeze.
And, yes, Apple didn't provide and still does not provide much public documentation about their chip, but there is an extra grace: MacOS, apparently, has the ability to run under a lightweight hypervisor with hardware passthrough with no flak or patching necessary on the M1 chip (amazing considering how few ARM chips have virtualization, let alone this well implemented?...
It would generate backlash if any laptop manufacturer started locking down laptops from competing OS like they lock down phones.
Overly-complicated and ever-changing boot procedures are a soft form of locking down. They strangle the competition with discouraging roadblocks that generate backlash only among people who know more than they can explain.
Keep an eye out for the new system module for MNT Reform which will feature LS1028A SoC [0] and is supposed to be ready mid-2021[1]. It will allow 8 or 16gb of RAM. As it's open-source hardware you can watch the progress here: https://source.mnt.re/reform/mnt-reform-layerscape-ls1028a-s...
RAM is not the bottleneck, increasing it doesn't do much with that hardware. I have the RPi4 with 8GB and have to try hard to go beyond 4GB usage.
I hope the RPi5 will make a similar jump in performance as the fourth generation. Right now desktop use is kind of slow, but still nice because a good passively cooled case keeps it around 50°C without any noise.
I also bought one in early 2020. No issues booting with mine. Based on some research, it looks like if you want video acceleration to 'just work' your best bet is running Armbian with these instructions:
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16516-rk3399-legacy-multimed...
I've had a good experience with the latest versions of Manjaro and video acceleration, but I've also had the same boot issues since I bought mine (around May 2020). Right now it sits unused and neglected because I can't trust it to boot when I need it to, and it still suffers from the power draw bug during sleep so I can't just close it and come back to it a day or two later; unlike most laptops with properly configured power management, it will be dead after a couple of days sleeping instead of just down by a certain percentage.
I'm sure I could. I actually tried to donate it to an OpenBSD developer but never heard back from them for the address to send it to, so it went back in the closet.
Could be. The boot problem is not a Manjaro problem, it's a preboot problem. It just doesn't see the eMMC occasionally, but most of the failures are it hanging trying to load the u-boot secondary stage off of it.
I remember seeing a Taiwanese group of guys who did just this.
I wish I had the link for you.
It seemed risky at the time as you were paypaling a bunch of money to these guys overseas without any storefront. But the replies and the great reviews seemed genuine enough that I would have if I had the funds to get another laptop.
The HN title is misleading. The original Pinebook was $100 (or maybe $150, I bought mine years ago). So this actually is an upgraded model with a higher price range.
The stock does not last long though. Fwiw lenovo is quoting me several months for an amd t14 thinkpad. So I don't know why you are giving Pine such flack for only doing a couple runs in a rocky year.
It’s not here. It’s been out of stock for months. Also what’s the target audience? The hardware is paltry for the “pro” label being touted. eMMC? Seriously?
The problem is few SoCs offer anything better. And btw you can use NVMe on the PBP... But there are power considerations and bandwidth limitations.
The rk3568 has quite a bit of PCIe compared to its spiritual predecessor (the rk3328). And the specs for the rk3588 (unreleased as of yet) do look juicy.
eMMC performance on the PBP is entirely acceptable, with avg. reads/writes of just over 250 MB/s. There are however other concerns with eMMC making it feel a bit sluggish when faced with lots of concurrent I/O. An NVMe SSD in the PBP solves that problem.
An NVMe in the PBP also adds new problems, like a 50% increase in cost, and power issues (hard power offs if not configured specially, always worse battery even if you do everything correctly).
Then the PBP is limited to PCIe 1.1 speeds and the power saving you have to enable makes the performance worse. So you spent $$$ on a drive and cannot get the most from it.
And to top it off, suspend breaks.
I have the NVMe adapter, but I haven't bothered to buy a drive and install it. I just use an external SSD for media storage.
From what I've heard, all stability issues with NVMe in the PBP can be solved by using one of the "known-good" NVMe models. For me the main benefit with NVMe over eMMC is that it doesn't stumble during heavy I/O. I have the adapter as well but have for other reasons not bothered installing anything. Once I do I'll settle for a $35 128GB model, as that's more than enough capacity for my needs.
Bought from the initial batch of PBPs, it sat unused for a while apart from a couple short trips. I wanted something more portable than my aging T430 at the time. Eventually I realized I did not need the T430 at all (shortly after getting video output through that cursed typec port) and consolidated my data into the PBP and an externally enclosed SSD.
Can it charge from low-current USB (e.g. 5V1A), or at least a USB battery bank? I've been trying to find a laptop that supports this so that if the power goes out I can keep coding (or reading survival manuals heh) for a few days, but no x86 laptop can do this.
How quickly does the battery discharge while sleeping?
It really wants 5V3A. I believe it will take less than that, but if you are using it at the same time it might still drain the battery. It uses 1.7W while in s2idle in my (rough) testing. I power off every night.
You know, there's something good to be said about lightweight netbooks like PineBook, even though it's currently out of stock: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
It cost me about 210 euros (235-240 dollars) and a rough comparison would look like this:
- PineBook has a 1920x1080 display, the laptop i got comes in both 1366x768 and 1920x1080 variations
- PineBook has 6 ARM cores (4 x A53 and 2 x A72), it has 2 x86 cores (N4020)
- both have 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM
- PineBook has ARM Mali T860 MP4 GPU, it has Intel HD Graphics 600
- PineBook has 64GB of eMMC storage, it has 128GB of storage
- both support additional M.2 storage
In my eyes, the biggest benefits for both would be:
- small form factor (fits in a bag)
- light weight (carried mine primarily for not taking)
- low power usage (no more laptop batteries that run out in 2 hours)
- enough for common tasks (browsed web and worked on documents, did light development while taking a bus or on vacation)
However, the biggest drawbacks could be:
- inadequate CPU performance for most of the more "serious" tasks out there, e.g. number crunching
- inadequate GPU performance for certain tasks (e.g. high definition videos, though possibly a bigger problem with ARM as some commenters pointed out, or any sort of gaming with either)
- somewhat poorer thermals under load (probably more of a problem with x86 rather than ARM, though i could be wrong)
- limited I/O (vs 4 monitors connected to my PC right now)
- limited hardware/software support (in the case of the budget x86 notebook i still haven't managed to get the fingerprint scanner working in Linux, had to get and compile Wi-Fi drivers off of GitHub, in the case of ARM there will probably be challenges with porting some software or finding precompiled releases, or even just Docker containers)
- build quality (case flexing, overall durability, look and feel of the keyboard vs a full sized mechanical one for a PC)
In short, it's nice to see computing be made more affordable and accessible (both in regards to x86 and ARM) and many of the drawbacks aren't necessarily dealbreakers for many of the use cases out there. I would have loved to have something like this be one of my first computers, provided that i'd have the resources to figure out how to fix all of the common (probably software related) things that could break.
Same. I thought it was new laptop. Title should say (2020) at least. But not sure what this blog adds apart from some chock-standard Docker and portainer install steps.
Have you actually done this comparison? I have compared a T430 (2012 era Intel) and the PBP directly. Power consumption on the PBP is a lot lower IME, and the machine is much lighter. I decided I could out source raw performance to the cloud and then dropped the dead weight.
I have not. I’m a gadget guy so I’m always wanting to buy a new X. My laptop? 2013 MacBook Air! All the ports they showcase on the new laptop are right there. MagSafe is awesome. Has well i5 honestly is pretty great. Runs Linux like a champ. User replaceable battery. You would think 4gb makes it unusable but a light arch install with plasma screams on it. It’s intel everything so their drivers are top notch.
Current apple stuff is crap. That laptop is a piece of art.
How does it compare with a T430-like Thinkpad? I bought my second-hand T430s for 200 CAD some 5 years ago, still working well for it's purpose and I didn't bother moving to a lighter OS (am on Win10).
I have a w540 which I think is compatible with t440. The thinkpad has more oomph but lacks in lightness and MagSafe which honestly I love.
Win10 honestly isn’t that bad! I have to use it for work. That and wsl is great. But for personal use I would never use windows. Any reason for personal use you need to use it? To me Linux is easier and better. I have 3 kids who I made their computer which runs arch and them and their mother now complain when the computer is not an arch/plasma computer.
Linux at least today and with a simple distribution like arch is very user friendly.
Main reason I'm still with Windows 10 (perma-watermarked editions) on my laptop and my PC is pure inertia. I've been telling myself I should switch to Linux if only to learn (am a work-in-progress coder), but have procrastinated it forever. I've just got some Linux exposure thru my Raspberry Pis on Raspbian.
I would however need to be able to play AoE2:DE on my PC, might have to keep a Win10 partition on the PC if I make the move as, AFAIK, it doesn't work great on Linux (haven't looked into it in a while, maybe outdated).
I have yet to replace my 2013 Air; while the general performance is mostly still OK (it was top spec when I got it), the battery is so degraded it might as well not exist at all.
A 5-10 year old used high-end device of any make is going to be better bang for your buck than any new low-power device. Aside from SSDs, screen resolution, and battery efficiency, laptops haven't gotten that much faster, and the "is not brand new" depreciation is steep.
How does this compare to various Chromebooks? I thought there was a way to run just Linux on them if you want. I remember I had one in like dev mode for awhile. But those are affordable ARM laptops and have been around for ages. Although maybe it was not really just Linux and was still booting into Chrome OS.
I think most of the Chromebooks based on the rk3399 had LPDDR3 RAM and this has v4 RAM. Of course that has caused issues with suspend to RAM because new code paths in TF-A...
I bought one in early 2020 which has been sitting mostly unused, mainly because of how painful the trackpad is (even with the best available firmware), how clunky the keyboard is, and the complete lack of color profiling capabilities in the Rockchip DRM driver - the display of the PBP is in my opinion just terrible, and there's no way to profile/tune it to make it bearable.
That aside, I think the platform is interesting and useful from a technical and computational perspective. eMMC storage has some shortcomings making it a bit sluggish and stalling during concurrent I/O, but an NVMe SSD gets around that problem.
86 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadThen you have a nice ARM laptop, not a poverty spec machine for a 7 year old to use instead of a Chromebook.
The ram does feel paltry in this day and age though. I wish you could use a sodimm module like the honeycomb uses.
Tomorrow i will buy that incredible new laptop, any cheap atom/celeron netbook would be faster..and better...and probably cheaper:
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Chromebook-Processor-Graphics-...
The RK3566 that is used in the latest Pine64 products like the Quartz64 and PineNote can address more, I would expect a laptop using this chip at some point.
The newest raspberrypi starterset at that moment (2028)?
Do you think you can even get a replacement battery for your a12 in 3 years?
Ah yes since the producer of phones needs to support them 5 years in franc (repair and updates), and hopefully 7 years (just security updates) in the future by eu law.
Ok then lets say 2027 ;)
'Low spec' is a pretty normal phrase that gets the point across.
To your larger question, the problem of why equating "poverty" with being bad is that as human beings we have the tendency of overgeneralizing negative characteristics, sometimes called the Horn Effect. A person is poor, and that's bad, and therefore the person themself is bad.
The laptop is targeting a specific price point, its specs are appropriate to that price point. There are plenty of reasons to want a low-cost linux laptop that have absolutely nothing to do with being poor.
Using the phrase now in this context can feel jarring. I think taste and sensibilities have changed - lots of old jokes don't land like they used to.
Also Apple went out of their way to make Linux and other OSs able to boot on it, so don't expect Apple to take away what they worked hard on.
What's novel about this Linux Laptop though is the low cost, $200. But you get what you pay for. And the M1 is, a year from now, probably going to have better (if not completely) upstream hardware support.
Also, while there is a ways to go, a shocking amount is fully completed: I2C, UART, Power Management, GPIO, Display Controller, USB, Thunderbolt, NVMe storage, the works. Hector says he is just rewriting a few drivers from other folk, going to merge it upstream, and then really only the GPU is remaining.
But he has a friend working on that and less than a year later and despite not being the primary focus, they're nearly at OpenGLES, which has shocked people for how fast the GPU drivers are coming together.
Do you have more details? I was under the impression Apple did nothing and haven't published any documentation, making a Linux port an exercise in reverse engineering every little bit. If Apple really wanted Linux to be able to run on M1s, they could have upstreamed patches / sponsored the development required. Instead people are volunteering their time to do that without any help (direct or just documentation or tooling), hoping Apple won't pull the rug from under them.
Apple could have just copied-and-pasted the iPhone boot process, and that would have been extremely easy to do because M1 Macs and iPhones and iPads all share the same system for booting (being all Apple Silicon chips), that is, iBoot. Apple could have just thrown in iBoot but with signature enforcement for macOS instead of iOS and called it a day. Nothing but macOS would boot, but would Apple really care?
However, Apple went out of their way to not do this, but extended iBoot with Boot Policies, also referred to as the LocalPolicy. Apple documents this themselves at:
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-modes-sec10869...
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/contents-a-localpol...
Along with the Permissive Security mode at
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/startup-disk-securi...
With the LocalPolicy, every partition and OS install gets their own Security Policy, which is another area where Apple goes above-and-beyond other systems. On Windows computers and Android devices, a device would typically be marked as "Secure Boot Enabled" or "Secure Boot Disabled" (no signature enforcement), on a chip/system-wide level. With this Boot Policy system, every OS can have their own secure boot mode, meaning you could have a fully-secure MacOS install alongside a (unsecured) Linux install, no problem.
You might wonder, if every OS can just have their own secure boot settings, how come a thief couldn't just replace a secure boot MacOS partition with a Linux no-secure-boot partition. Apple managed to prevent this with an extremely complicated "ownership" system that prevents a third-party hacker or a thief from being able to clear those BootPolicies without the owner's permission, as documented at:
https://eclecticlight.co/2021/07/18/last-week-on-my-mac-the-...
Again, if Apple only cared about letting macOS run, copying-and-pasting regular iBoot would have worked fine. Instead, they had to tack on Permissive Mode, code signing from the Secure Enclave (for custom kernels), "ownership," and Boot Policies. A lot of work to just pull out the rug, right?
As if just enabling it with all of these otherwise-unnecessary add-ons wasn't enough, there are other signs of Apple being more... permissive about things. For example, unlike almost every other ARM chip which makes a huge mess of things, Apple has implemented their drivers in a way that means the same driver can handle different chips with the same core designs without almost any rewrites. An example of this is that, imagine the high-performance Firestorm cores on the M1. Marcan can just write a driver for Firestorm, and it will just work on the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max without rewrites for each chip that contains it (other than updating the device tree outside the drivers). That's unheard of for other ARM chips and makes future maintenance a breeze.
And, yes, Apple didn't provide and still does not provide much public documentation about their chip, but there is an extra grace: MacOS, apparently, has the ability to run under a lightweight hypervisor with hardware passthrough with no flak or patching necessary on the M1 chip (amazing considering how few ARM chips have virtualization, let alone this well implemented?...
Overly-complicated and ever-changing boot procedures are a soft form of locking down. They strangle the competition with discouraging roadblocks that generate backlash only among people who know more than they can explain.
Also ROFL @ "they went out of their way"
[0] https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers...
[1] https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-11-27-reform-producti...
See also https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform/updates/post-campaign... and https://mastodon.social/@mntmn
I hope the RPi5 will make a similar jump in performance as the fourth generation. Right now desktop use is kind of slow, but still nice because a good passively cooled case keeps it around 50°C without any noise.
My main issue with it so far is that 3/4 of the time it fails to boot from eMMC (if you bought the serial cable, you can see that u-boot just hangs).
Also, the default Manjaro image doesn't have hardware video acceleration so good luck watching YouTube at more than 480p.
Lack of hw video accel does suck, but I've been able to watch 1080p using ffplay and mpv without it. I wouldn't try that on the battery though.
I have a PBP from the same batch and Manjaro (the default installation from eMMC) has been so reliable that I 've held off from distrohopping.
SD card boot works all the time though.
It seemed risky at the time as you were paypaling a bunch of money to these guys overseas without any storefront. But the replies and the great reviews seemed genuine enough that I would have if I had the funds to get another laptop.
leave that for an upgraded model for an upgraded price range
good OS choice! easy to use and manage!
I knew it would be unavailable just from the headline.
"Due to global electronic components shortage , Pinebook Pro currently out of stock until further notice."
EDIT: Also, the listed price is $220 not $200.
The stock does not last long though. Fwiw lenovo is quoting me several months for an amd t14 thinkpad. So I don't know why you are giving Pine such flack for only doing a couple runs in a rocky year.
It was under $200 when the article was written. Again, supply chain issues.
The rk3568 has quite a bit of PCIe compared to its spiritual predecessor (the rk3328). And the specs for the rk3588 (unreleased as of yet) do look juicy.
The hardware is fine, it runs ssh and a browser, what else would I need in a laptop?
Then the PBP is limited to PCIe 1.1 speeds and the power saving you have to enable makes the performance worse. So you spent $$$ on a drive and cannot get the most from it.
And to top it off, suspend breaks.
I have the NVMe adapter, but I haven't bothered to buy a drive and install it. I just use an external SSD for media storage.
Applications:
* Firefox (Element, Slack are thickest websites I use commonly apart from video streaming)
* Supertuxkart
* thin client to my VPS
* Ardour for recording music (using a USB audio interface, only tried recording one channel at a time so far so good)
* managing personal files, KeepassXC, backups, et al
I have it docked to a monitor and keyboard, but I have taken it with me on the road before. The keyboard is decent and screen is nice but small.
How quickly does the battery discharge while sleeping?
This might work for you: https://www.amazon.com/Charmast-26800mAh-Portable-Li-Polymer...
I actually got a vaguely similar x86 based netbook a few years back, a slightly older release of this: https://techbite.eu/en/laptopy/laptop-zin-3-14-1
It cost me about 210 euros (235-240 dollars) and a rough comparison would look like this:
In my eyes, the biggest benefits for both would be: However, the biggest drawbacks could be: In short, it's nice to see computing be made more affordable and accessible (both in regards to x86 and ARM) and many of the drawbacks aren't necessarily dealbreakers for many of the use cases out there. I would have loved to have something like this be one of my first computers, provided that i'd have the resources to figure out how to fix all of the common (probably software related) things that could break.When I saw the title I thought it was about new hardware.
Current apple stuff is crap. That laptop is a piece of art.
Win10 honestly isn’t that bad! I have to use it for work. That and wsl is great. But for personal use I would never use windows. Any reason for personal use you need to use it? To me Linux is easier and better. I have 3 kids who I made their computer which runs arch and them and their mother now complain when the computer is not an arch/plasma computer.
Linux at least today and with a simple distribution like arch is very user friendly.
I would however need to be able to play AoE2:DE on my PC, might have to keep a Win10 partition on the PC if I make the move as, AFAIK, it doesn't work great on Linux (haven't looked into it in a while, maybe outdated).
That aside, I think the platform is interesting and useful from a technical and computational perspective. eMMC storage has some shortcomings making it a bit sluggish and stalling during concurrent I/O, but an NVMe SSD gets around that problem.