Am I crazy, or has pine64 actually managed to build a sustainable ARM Linux company? There have been a hundred of these projects over the years. I feel like they tend to launch with a lot of fanfare, and eventually lose steam and die.
But pine64 seems to have started humbly and slowly be building momentum.
Their margins have to be tiny though, judging by the impressive build quality of my $150 PinePhone.
Yes, sounds like a miracle, but I'd say this is not something exceptional for a seasoned electronics company, which 99% of previous contenders weren't.
Building hype, and getting people's moneys is an an easy thing.
But I say it is completely impossible for newcomers to the industry to succeed commercially in anything, but a one off project carried at a very slow pace.
I've met countless people people coming from the other side of the Pacific to Shenzhen to do manufacturing, thinking that they knew what they are doing solely because they did few years of PCB design, EE, or worked a year in a small EMS in America.
All of them were up for a very rude awakening. The scope of knowledge one gets from "few years EE" in America would count for just few percents of expertise needed to run manufacturing commercially.
Just one thing that I think sinks half of them: near zero supply chain expertise. I'd say you absolutely cannot do any manufacturing in serious commercial volumes without at least 10 engineers hired just to do supply chain management full time.
If you are small manufacturer, or OEM, hunting for parts, and components, studying, and testing them, spamming Alibaba, and spending time on the phone with suppliers would be easily taking more than a half of your engineering manpower.
> ...near zero supply chain expertise. I'd say you absolutely cannot do any manufacturing in serious commercial volumes without at least 10 engineers hired just to do supply chain management full time.
As a small manufacturer with less than 10 engineers total (though in industrial automation, not B2C electronics), how do "real" electronics manufacturers do supy chain management?
We did a "small" run of a little machine that went from our usual quantity 1-3 units to quantity 100, and the strain it put on engineering was intense. Usually we just sent purchasing a BOM, this was something else. You have to be an engineer to comprehend the specs and requirements that engineering sends to you, you have to be in finance/management to understand tradeoffs of quality, savings in volume, and time, and you have to do grunt-work just to keep track of it all and keep communication and relationships active. The result was that design engineers were spending a ton of time on supply chain management long after the design had ended; do bigger shops have engineers who spend all day on the phone asking "where's my stuff" or surfing Alibaba?
> do bigger shops have engineers who spend all day on the phone asking "where's my stuff" or surfing Alibaba?
Yes, lots, and lots of them.
Can testify of working in an engineering team of 50 people, with close to half of engineering manpower spent on SCM.
> As a small manufacturer with less than 10 engineers total (though in industrial automation, not B2C electronics), how do "real" electronics manufacturers do supy chain management?
It actually becomes easier the bigger you get because you can simply buy more parts right away, in bigger batches, keep bigger inventories, and get higher part availability because suppliers themselves will be chasing after you with hopes of selling more parts.
But for everybody else, it's tough life, and 50%+ of engineering resource spend, no trick around it.
I think all of biggest ones like Foxconn, Flextronics, and Pigatron have their own proprietary IT systems for supply chain. Instead of running after suppliers, they force them themselve to enter their parts data into their system, and do test, and validation on their own too.
> I'd say you absolutely cannot do any manufacturing in serious commercial volumes without at least 10 engineers hired just to do supply chain management full time.
This is why the sole EE at your hardware startup practices Digi-Key oriented design. If a part isn't available regularly and in reasonable quantities on Digi-Key, it doesn't go into the product. Your margins will be lower than ideal, but you can usually build in batches of ~1000 this way without getting totally sunk.
Of course, if you're even moderately successful, you'll eventually find Chinese clones selling for half price, so you'd better have some other competitive advantage if you plan on taking this route.
The big difference between Pine64 and the other (phone) projects that have come and gone over the years is that Pine64 really seems to have the manufacturing (including sourcing and logistics) side down. The other projects came across as seeming to think of all the 'physical stuff' as a distraction that they'd just outsource, when in fact it's the most important part. They also don't seem to have any 'year of the Linux on X' delusions: they are in the 10's of thousands of units on PinePhone and they're fine with that.
I've been happy enough with my Pinephone (just don't call it a daily driver!) that I'm seriously considering picking up their next gen Pinebook Pro whenever that gets announced/released.
Agreed! I really like how they’re not trying to act like their products are going to revolutionize computing and destroy Apple — they’re just “we made some cool devices for hobbyists that are totally open, have fun”
Plus they’re frank that their affordable price is community orientated, and if you’re looking for a polished experience or would chargeback due to “a couple dead pixels”, please reconsider your purchase.
Looking at crunchbase, they've only raised funds using a kickstarter once. It seems like they're making enough to pay salaries and keep the show going. I know some of their products are not priced for profit, but the company as a whole seems to be doing well and growing. It doesn't seem like the typical overhyped SV company that only survives on VC money.
Considering Apple doesn't sell any devices running Linux, I don't see how they could've possibly beaten PINE64 in building a sustainable ARM Linux company.
In theory yes, in practice, only under virtualization (though I'm one of https://www.patreon.com/marcan sponsors so maybe one day this will change).
However this is a moot point as Apple doesn't sell what Pine does - Linux device. Apple sell Apple devices. If they incidentally runs Linux is irrelevant to Apple.
Unless I am doing something very wrong (and sometimes I do), most of my Python development flows fit very comfortably on a 4GB Celeron laptop (that's currently with my 8yo daughter).
If they can't perform decently on this, I need to fix it.
I live in Ireland and I really enjoy that small Celeron I mentioned in the other message - the one my daughter is using. It's small, the battery lasts for at least 5 hours, completely silent, and, while it certainly isn't as fast as my Mac or the Dell (or the Xeon under my desk), it's fast enough for my tests to run while I think about the next steps. And it did cost me about $200. It's an expendable computer.
I assume a Pinebook Pro is a much nicer experience.
Gladly? I am happy I get paid money to develop in Swift ona Apple... Happy to develop (in Python, reluctantly, nothing is perfect!) on my Raspberry PI.
We are a grumpy opinionated lot - developers. Very hard to make us glad
I totally agree with you, but would add that some of us find dealing with Apple extremely frustrating. The most valuable company in the world, and a money grubbing pack of unethical rotters...
While not mentioned in the blog post: A huge thanks to the Mobian folks for making a really good mobile OS on top of Debian with only a few packages in a custom repo while still using the standard Debian repo for the rest.
As for the PinePhone keyboard: It would be nice to have a ThinkPad-like TrackPoint to not rely on the touch screen and also for external monitors that don't have touch support.
As a user of Mobian, just wanted to give everyone a friendly reminder that the project has a LiberaPay page at https://liberapay.com/mobian/donate, through which you might be able to help encourage/enable the developers to keep up the great work :)
I think the touchscreen is fine on a screen that small. It would be cool to be able to use the touchscreen as a touchpad when using an external monitor though. Obviously that's doable purely in software.
They plan on making a keyboard for the Pinephone which effectively gives you a ~$250 phone-sized linux computer with a cell phone modem. That's seriously cool
I love that the battery is replaceable. Though I wish mobile devices included tiny backup batteries that give you ~1min to swap the battery without having to reboot the device. This would especially be useful for my gopro which I often use for long captures that I don't want to interrupt. But it would also be nice on my PinePhone.
I'd have to look at the numbers, but a few percent points of efficiency can be a big difference in the power (and thus heat) dissipation of the device; going from 90% to 92% efficiency reduces the power dissipated in the device by 20%.
Have you run linux on it ? I'm running mint on mine, and can't get the sim/modem to work. Says there is a driver, won't install it. Have tried phone and tablet Sims. No joy with either.
Indeed, they are many times ahead any previous take on open source hardware exactly because they are pragmatic, without big nebulous plans to attract the crowd, and money.
The later proves to be too easy, and actually doing something with the money raised is much harder that "go to the first ODM behind the corner"
Too many Kickstarter crowd people chose the "go to the first ODM behind the corner" route, and get burned over, and over, and over again.
Very happy with my pinebook pro and rockpro. The pinebook pro has amazing build quality and usability for the price. When my oneplus dies hopefully there will be a pinephone 2!
It's easy to charge less when you do not develop any software and use software developed by Purism. This is not an entirely fair price in my view. $10 donation to developers per purchase does not cut it. Also, higher specs definitely must be more expensive.
True. I think the issue is that for a platform like this to survive it will need community developers. Idk how much purism software they use or what they lend from pureOS but Pine64 has distros and projects like kde throwing themselves behind the idea with their mobile variants and probably contributing upstream. They also all help advertise. This is great especially when in the early stages it generally isn't purchased to replace a main phone.
Pinephone's pricepoint allows for people to get it on the side to tinker with, develop for it, etc and people that get it at that price don't really care too much bout the occasional bit of lag or glitch.
Additionally something like a better camera on the librem to account for the price doesn't appeal to a lot of people if they have to wait for drivers for it.
I also think pine64 has more people working remotely from all over the place and is registered in hong kong or malaysia since recently whilst purism with lots of remote stuff going on also has staff in san francisco and pays more taxes there? Correct me if i'm wrong tho.
I bought a Pinebook Pro when they were last available and I was really pleasantly surprised at how good the build quality was and the display quality was excellent. Unfortunately they are not currently available - their LCD supplier bailed on them (according to the December news). Once they become available again I could easily imagine worse things to do with US$200.
Aah I was wondering what happened to the Pinebook Pro order option. I regret not getting in on the previous order as there's basically nothing comparable on the market from what I can find.
I did. I also applied the software patches I found when googling the problem, such as https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9094. It made the trackpad go from unusable to really annoying, which is progress.
Could be. Certainly the problem is not unique to mine. Maybe they eventually fixed it, or maybe it only shows up on some batches, and I've been unlucky.
I want to emphasize that this is my only complaint regarding the Pinebook Pro. Everything else is really good, actually much better than could be expected for the price.
I don't think they even have a real supplier bound by contract.
Anybody making less than 100k+ devices a year is much more likely just to buy from a small distributor who can only vouch for availability of inventory on hand.
I have a Pinephone, and I can tell I've been really conditioned by Androids flow. Haven't quite figured out the UI yet, but I'm going to put KDE on it and see if my desktop muscle memory helps things.
The hardware is a bit slow, but man is it fun to have Linux in my pocket:)
I'm hoping you can develop your own "ROM" for it, I wouldn't mind making everything like blocks to reduce GUI load if that's a thing. Like the Windows Phone UI, just my opinion. It's also on my wish list to do i3-wm on it so can get some ram back in desktop mode.
omg that's literally it haha, at least the i3wm part wow. It's funny too seeing it you're like hmmm but if you had a simple button toggle to use it as a phone or dock... man that's great.
Yikes, those photos aren't so great. There's a decent amount of noise. I guess it's hard to compete at the level of some phone manufacturers. I do love the elegance of taking photos with commands:
Yeah the sensor really needs daylight to get acceptable picture quality, ideally a cloudy day because it doesn't have the latitude to deal with the highlight/shadows of direct sunlight. It might be possible to get slightly more from the sensor for static scenes using astrophotography techniques like stacking but in most cases that won't be practical.
The Google Pixel camera app does stacking to decrease noise and improve dynamic range. They only apply it to areas of the image that haven't moved between frames. If I had a PinePhone and some extra time it would be fun to implement the HDR+ algorithm.
The PinePhone camera is not good, blurry at high light, noisy at medium to low light levels. The Megapixels app is an attempt to create the best software possible for the PinePhone hardware, and looks less bad than the default camera used before.
I nearly wasn't able to change my phone number with Google because they send you an authentication code by MMS. (Why they feel the need to use MMS rather than SMS for a 6-digit code I couldn't possibly imagine).
Not used it for over a decade aside from that - in the dim and distant past it used to be the only way to send pictures, but they were so expensive most people never bothered.
The main use is for group conversations with family and friends. A close followup is for sending/receiving photos and videos from people who don't have an RCS capable device (or if it is RCS capable it doesn't play nicely with Tmobile)
Unfortunately, the issue with MMS is it is very country specific. With some of the other big ticket items, since it is universal, you have a lot of people working on it.
MMS seems to be a big issue in the USA and France (and maybe couple of others? I have just noted those two so far). On top of it, it is a very complex issue. I spend as much time getting it to work as I do to try to fight misconceptions about it to try and motivate folks to want to help.
Thankfully now it is more of an integration issue than it is a "does it even function" issue. But the integration issue is not trivial either.
The convergence package increases the internal flash (eMMC) storage from 16GB to 32GB, and the RAM from 2GB to 3GB. That leaves two hardware configurations, each available with Manjaro or KDE pre-loaded.
It looks like the Manjaro version may only be available in the EU, so that might simplify your decision.
The PinePhone is awesome--I love my Braveheart edition--but you should probably have a decent understanding of Linux and/or embedded systems (at least replacing an Android bootloader) in order to appreciate it at this point. If your goal is to learn then it certainly could be fun, although you might want to supplement with something a little more beginner friendly like a Raspberry Pi or a laptop/desktop you can boot from USB. Personally I would only advise someone to purchase a PinePhone now if they're totally comfortable replacing the OS, in which case the edition it ships with doesn't really matter (other than the branding).
I am very much a linux guy/tinkerer, and it is very very close to being a main phone. What really hurts me to not do it is lack of MMS (YMMV). (I would say for the average person, it is not there yet).
If you bricked it, I would be impressed. They made it very easy to flash, and made it easy to boot from an SD card.
I'm looking forward to receiving my pine phone whenever it gets here(said Jan). My excuse to learn QT ha, also a taste of the docked computing experience.
But pine64 seems to have started humbly and slowly be building momentum.
Their margins have to be tiny though, judging by the impressive build quality of my $150 PinePhone.