Pine64 Pinebook

5owners with an opinion

20%of verdicts positive

1/1positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for value and battery; criticized for performance and display.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it

Pinephone is tragic, bought a bunch of Pine64's devices (PP, PPP, PB, PBuds, arm tablet, eInk tablet) but old tech, missing drivers, can't blame em no money no drivers... Still the community on Discord is great/helpful people.

Likes it

The Pinebooks are pretty neat and affordable bits of kit. I got the original Pinebook, and it came with a free upgrade from whichever display they originally said to a full 1080 resolution display. The limiting factor for the original is likely the single gigabyte of memory, but so long as I'm not running a popular browser, it's quick and the battery lasts forever (well, for easily more than six hours of constant use). The article points out that there's good support in NetBSD for the hardware, which is good to know. Between the article and my own experience with various PINE64 hardware, aside from wifi (which is the bane of all open source OSes, apparently), everything works well, and PINE64 comes across as quite open and welcoming to all open source OSes, not just the popular ones. If I need a laptop with more memory, I'd definitely get a Pinebook Pro.

Doesn’t like it

The pinebook pro comes close, but I can’t get over the speaker whine and poor suspend life. Also, I think the aspire one might have higher specs.

Doesn’t like it

I'll never understand why both the Purism and Pine folks don't focus heavily on making one or two _really good products_ and instead try to make a bunch of stuff. Purism has: - Liberty Phone - Librem 5 - Librem 11 - Librem 14 - Librem Mini - Librem Server - Librem Key Pine64 has a more severe case of ADHD: - A bunch of SBCs: Pine A64, A64 LTS, Rock64, RockPro64, Pine H64, Quartz64 A and B - Pinebook, Pinebook Pro - Pinephone, Pinephone Pro, Pine Note, Pine Tab - PineTime, - SOEDGE, SOPINE compute modules - IP Cam - Soldering Iron - A powersupply - Pinenut I have bought several Pine devices (A64, RockPro, Pinebook, Pinephone) none have really been _great_ though. I've not hear a lot of good things about Purism hardware either.

Likes it

None of the machines on that list are more hackable than a Mac though. Some are more "hackable" than an iPhone, but only in some strange symbolic way, since once you de-googled android is somehow more user-hostile than iOS and completely unhackable in practice (in the sense that I can't make it do what I want and also be usable as a daily driver that lets me do stuff like pay for stuff, use public transit, charge my car, park, or take an uber/lyft). I'm a happy owner of a pine book pro, and a pc engines router; I get it. However, I don't think there are any viable Linux laptops or phones that compare favorably to the linux laptop + phone I had a decade ago.

Doesn’t like it

I have a pinebook. its. a fun toy but the trackpad is trash and there's not much if any HD space so I still use my MBP as a daily driver. I'd happily pay more for a pinebook pro with at least 512 gb of space, 8 gb of ram and a beefier battery. the cpu performance is on the low end but workable.

Likes it

The Pinebook Pro is well supported by NetBSD (not sure about OpenBSD), and it can take eMMC, at least. It's quite affordable, battery life is excellent, and my Pinebook feels pretty rugged. It has a six core RK3399 and 4 gigs of memory. I don't think you can get a better laptop for the price ($220 US).

Recommends itDoesn’t say they own it

Hmmm, if you're ok with say 0.1 of an M1, then maybe one of the Pinebook laptops would be useful to consider? https://pine64.com/product-category/pinebook-pro/ They're only about US$200, so depending on your budget it might be a useful experiment. :)