Pinebook ARM Linux Laptop Powered by Allwinner A64 CPU

[woodruffw]

It's nice to get a laptop form-factor with a 720p screen for less than $100, but it's worth noting that the specs are on-par with a 2-year old smartphone flagship. Given Allwinner's history of GPL skirmishes and backdooring, I'm also not too happy to see their CPU in this machine.

[lgeek]

> specs are on-par with a 2-year old smartphone flagship

Cortex-A53 is a low cost, energy efficient, slow, in-order implementation. I don't think it was ever used as the main core in a flagship smartphone. Something like a 2012 ODROID-X2 SBC with its Cortex-A9 cores should have no trouble outperforming it, but it doesn't support AArch64.

> Given Allwinner's history of GPL skirmishes and backdooring

On the other hand, the linux-sunxi community does a pretty good job of bringing mainline support for Allwinner SocS and they're working on the A64. That's probably the longer term plan for the creators of this laptop.

[colindean]

This must be based on the NexDock: http://nexdock.com/

The pictures of the laptop are exactly the same device I have sitting in my lap right now. The NexDock of course has no computer inside it: it's a keyboard, touchpad, SD reader, USB hub, and display.

[tdubhro1]

Anyone know how does nexdock compare with Andromium? I definitely want this type of product, but I don't know enough to make a decision on which one to back.... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

[kogepathic]

There are still a few places selling the Motorola Atrix lapdock. I got a brand new (old stock) one for 50€!

[pawadu]

No, it doesn't have to be based on nexdock. They probably both use the same cheap generic shell mass produced by some Chinese factory.

[welly]

Looks pretty interesting and my initial excitement for this soon dulled when I thought that if I'm taking this device somewhere I might as well just take my laptop.

Still, it looks like a very cool gadget. What's the battery life like on it?

[tluyben2]

What device do you attach to it?

[olegkikin]

PineBook is cheaper than Nexdock though.

[tiku]

i guess if you would make the battery smaller you could fit a raspberry pi inside it, and perhaps thats exactly what they've done..

[Animats]

That's useful. I've been buying old Asus EeePC machines on eBay for small projects. Unlike a Raspberry Pi, you get a keyboard, screen, case, and power supply, all for under $50. But the supply of old subnotebooks can't hold out forever.

[akhilcacharya]

What sorts of small projects?

[sattoshi]

I would do this but I have little to no faith in ebay sellers. I usually buy off old electronics from people I know in person.

[kefka]

Remember, this company is known for flouting all of the GPL, and providing extremely out of date drivers. And they also refuse to submit back into main any of the hardware changes they make.

Whatever condition you buy it in now will be the condition it will be in 10 years. Expect absolutely no upgrades of the kernel subsystem.

[rwmj]

Here's more details on that (see the section on GPL violations): https://linux-sunxi.org/A64

[vegabook]

sure but I have been running a Cubietruck with Fedora 20 with an allwinner A20 for 2 years, hooked up a proper SATA 128gig SSD for 35 bux, and when it comes to IO, it beats my Raspberry Pi 3 4:1 even trying my best with "high speed" sd cards. This thing has been humming along beautifully with nginx, elixir, postgres, the lot, serving web pages all day long.

[throw2016]

The sorry state of open source on ARM is not due to the vendors but ARM itself and to an extent Google. The effort to open GPU drivers on ARM is over 5 years old now I think and you can see all the promises made on the ARM community forums.

The blame is shifted from the vendor to ARM and then back like a football and open source developers give up and look for something productive to do.

It appears Arm is not interested in open source or moving beyond the mobile market where things are tightly controlled.

[hoverbear]

Are there any other 64 bit ARM laptops out there worth looking at? Maybe with a GSM/LTE module, more RAM, or a better screen?

[rwmj]

Well it's not exactly a laptop, but how about a Denver-based tablet with a nice keyboard? https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/nexus-9-ssh-on-the-go/

[aexaey]

Some chromebooks have aarch64 ARM CPU, including new Acer Chromebook R13

[lgeek]

The Samsung Chromebook Pro looks pretty promising (RR3399, 4GB DRAM, 2K screen), but it hasn't been officially released yet.

[akhilcacharya]

This is getting close, but I don't think my dream machine is on the market yet - I'd really like something dirt-cheap, has has an ARM chipset running Debian/Ubunt and lasts for 15 hours on battery. A modern Tandy 100.

Are there any other machines like this, or are cheap machines like the post as far as it gets? I would have considered the ARM Samsung Chromebook, but it has pretty awful battery life.

[david-given]

I have an Asus Flip Chromebook. It doesn't do 15 hours, merely 10, but it's very light, pretty cheap (I bought mine in the UK for £250, but I've seen it in the US down at about $150), has 4GB RAM and a quad core ARM processor making it plenty fast enough for development, and it's even got a reasonable keyboard.

Minor features: capacitative touchscreen, screen that folds all the way round for use in tablet mode, MicroSD card slot, nice big clicky touchpad, completely silent, and a metal case.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/asus-chromebook-c201-review

I run ChromeOS on mine, with Debian in a chroot using Crouton; but I gather you can run Debian on it natively, although with some blobs:

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/C201

[ant6n]

Acer Chromebook R13 seems pretty nice, 13.3", glossy full HD screen, 12-hour battery, I think it runs android apps. (350$ in Amazon right now)

I'm waiting for the previously announced, but now delayed Samsung Chromebook Pro. It's thinner, has a higher-rez screen, and has the pen-technology of the 'note' tablets. (rumored 500$)

What I would really like to see is a Tegra X1 based laptop with a nice IPS screen, preferably something matte.

[andrey_utkin]

There's ongoing development of Pyra Handheld PC: http://pyra-handheld.com/ . Not dirt cheap, though.

[jklinger410]

This is going to be exactly $89 worth of computer.

More for people who never leave terminal or for teaching kids linux.

[phpnode]

even if you live in a terminal all day 1280 x 720 is just too small to be practical.

edit - I too once basked in the warm rays of a 320x200 CRT, it's OK at the time if that's all you've ever experienced, but it's hard to go back to that from 4k.

[hsivonen]

What's the mainline kernel story? Or story for ongoing kernel security updates by other means?

[makomk]

For the A64, mainline support is still very much a work in progress that isn't usable as-is I think.

[andreiw]

Why only 2GB? Especially for a device that's not shipping yet. I understand there might be SoC limitations, but I would be really surprised if the A64 cannot support 3 or 4GB.

A53 is a bit on the slow side, but the worst part is that it's not a great (as in, representative of the architectural requirements on software) chip for porting software to AArch64, because of its simplistic design - you will be able to get away with forgetting a barrier, or TLB or cache maintenance instruction here or there, and your code will work (but blow up on other, more advanced uarches, like A57 or other non-ARM designs). It's basically a minor step above using Foundation Model.

[jamespo]

I wish they could do exactly the same thing, but the form factor of a Psion 5MX Palmtop

[teekert]

As someone who emails from a Nextcloud instance online, writes and reads a lot of text and logs into a Linux cluster for data analysis in Jupyter Notebooks. This could completely replace my company issues HP Elitebook (price around 1200€), the screen is even better.

I would like it even more if it were just a Raspberry Pi (possibly with a very fast ssd if it were possible) inside, simply because of the support and trust I have in them.

[vegabook]

I fully expect it to be an utter piece of junk, but at 89 dollars with 2GB RAM this beats a Raspberry Pi or a Cubietruck hands down on price/performance considering either of the latter require at the very least 100 bucks extra for monitor, keyboard, power supply, SD card, and cabling, after which you're also left with a rats nest of wiring and awful little plastic bits and pieces all over the place.

[npx]

I've been waiting on this for years! Not specifically THIS, but hardware along these lines. I'd like to see at least 4GB of RAM, and then I think that I could use this with Alpine Linux as my daily driver. Not quite perfect yet, but very close to what I want!

[escap]

if you don't mind X86, http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/10/24/jumper-ezbook-2-cherr...

Current black friday sale is $178 to $185

[faragon]

I own a Pine 64 board (2GB RAM, 1 gigabit ethernet) based on the same Allwinner A64 SoC. It performs OK for light tasks (Debian), however, it lacks proper graphic acceleration (which is OK for using it as a build server, but short if you want e.g. play YouTube videos, so unless in the case of the laptop hardware accelerated graphics are provided, it would be hard to use it comfortably -if they do, I would love to buy one!-).

[SwellJoe]

Anyone know if more RAM will be plausible for a machine like this in the near future? I'd love to have a new netbook, but 2GB is what my 6+ year old Dell mini 9 has; this wouldn't be a very big upgrade, though a bigger screen and keyboard would make it more suitable for actual work.

[Paul_S]

If it had a normal keyboard I'd buy one. Amazing little package.

[ant6n]

Article says it has full-size QWERTY. In what sense is that, umm, not normal?

[crudbug]

Impressive specs, How much cost difference if 1080P screen is used ?

[Zekio]

major downside for me is the DC jack for charging, they always break for me...

[batbomb]

The entire machine is the same price as an apple power adapter.