The Pine Formula

The &quot;killer app&quot; of the Pine formula is that it reliably gets brand-new hackable devices into the hands of the community at an affordable price point. A PinePhone is $150 + a whole lot of shipping and import taxes, but many alternatives are:<p>- more expensive - the SHIFT6mq is 600 EUR, the Librem 5 starts (!) from EUR 1600 (!!!), the Fairphone 4 starts at 580 EUR. No way in fucking hell is anyone going to be buying these unless they are already in a well-paying tech job - which is automatically exclusionary towards all tech-curious teenagers worldwide, and working adults from lower-paid countries. Do we seriously want open(-ish) tech to be a toy only for the rich? I sure as hell don&#x27;t.<p>- unreliable in production - open hardware is often (more often than not?) a limited-edition item. If you are there to order from the initial batch (or if you&#x27;re lucky, the second batch), great - you can buy it. But discover it a few months&#x2F;years too late, and the product is so unobtainable from the secondary market that it might as well have never existed.<p>- difficult to purchase across territories - USA-based (or alternatively, European-based) hackers get to enjoy having an open product, whereas the rest of the world merely gets to lick the shopfront window from across the ocean.<p>- less hackable - Can you flash an open firmware on any given Android phone? Anyone&#x27;s guess. Can you do so for any random Pine product? Most likely, yes, even if it contains blobs. User freedom-wise, blobby but otherwise unrestricted firmware is heck of a lot better than any restricted firmware.<p>- not brand-new - hardware ages both in terms of specs (less powerful than the mainstream non-open alternatives - this is IMO part of what killed OpenMoko so badly), and in terms of actual hardware PCBs, batteries, screens etc aging slowly until it can no longer reliably operate&#x2F;operate within spec.<p>I will be the first to criticise the fact that Pine seems to be increasingly leaning on the community to produce working software&#x2F;firmware for their products, but I will also be the first to commend them for their ability to deliver open(-ish) hardware to more than just the globally well-off with cash to burn on their ideals (something that not all of us can do).

What do people with Linux phones do about banking apps? All my banks force me to do online banking through an app (at the very least used as a security token generator). I would really love to have a Linux phone but I&#x27;m stuck with Android because of that.

I was going to write something similar, but this covers it pretty well actually. Hopefully there could be some more developer support in the future again like the community editions once were.

It’s worth noting that the quoted article was published on April 1 [1]. While the PineBuds were confirmed in the following community update [2], the PinePod plans are only mentioned in the description of the development board as a “platform for earbuds and a digital audio player”. It seems to me that the plans for a future DAP are still quite nebulous and I wouldn’t give that much weight to the wording used in the April Fools’ announcement.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;introducing-the-pinebuds-and-pinepod-seriously&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;introducing-the-pinebuds-a...</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;15&#x2F;april-update-no-more-unicorns&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;15&#x2F;april-update-no-more-unico...</a>

&gt; <i>Some days ago, I was sitting in a dark, neon-tinted, pleasingly nerdy computing club in Berlin, with several Linux hackers around me. Most of them either had a PinePhone or a PinePhone Pro, someone else had Librem 5s plugged into their laptop as they tested out new software.</i><p>I wish C-Base (the venue in question) were &quot;pleasingly nerdy&quot; enough to ban smoking indoors. Berlin is so maddeningly stuck in the uncivilized past in this regard; I would love to participate in these events and communities but cannot do so until this problem is fixed. There seems to be no will to do so in Berlin.

&gt; Most of the competition, at this point, is doing it: SHIFT, Purism, Framework, MNT Research, and Raspberry Pi are moving towards more openness, not less, as time passes.<p>I&#x27;m happy to consider that Pine should be doing better, but in what world is Raspberry Pi doing any better? AFAIK they still require closed blobs to boot, and it was my understanding that the company doesn&#x27;t even consider this something to fix.

&gt; Some competitors to PINE64 and Purism are now Precursor, SHIFT, MNT, and Fairphone among others<p>Great, more competitors - faster evolution. I&#x27;ll definitely get a Linux phone in near future, just a bit scared about my free time if any update will break the caller or SMS app.

&gt; It will not drive a good screen, it nor run high-resolution flacs or (probably?) support a high-quality, high-bandwidth codec.<p>What is this drivel? 900KB of RAM is plenty for all of the above and then some, if you know how to use it. An MP3 decoder&#x27;s runtime footprint can fit into 16KB of RAM, aac needs just a bit more. A ui can be made of constant image pieces that never need to live in RAM, leaving ram only for things like rendering text.<p>Years ago i made an mp3 player with an OLED screen that properly rendered English, Cyrillic, and accented latin characters in a proportional font, all on a cortex-m3 microcontroller with 64KB flash and 32KB ram.

&gt; Pinecil from the open-source TS100 iron<p>The Pinecil is Pine64’s most polished product, and I congratulate them for getting such a high-quality soldering iron down to such a low price point ($26).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;pinecil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;pinecil&#x2F;</a><p>Even if the Pinecil weren&#x27;t open hardware running on open firmware, it would still be an incredible value. But it is, and my only criticism is that the rewritten firmware flashing tool does not yet support Linux (the older version does work). Other than this, the Pinecil is a gem and an example of the Pine formula at its best.<p>- Pinecil documentation and schematics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.pine64.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pinecil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.pine64.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pinecil</a><p>- IronOS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Ralim&#x2F;IronOS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Ralim&#x2F;IronOS</a><p>- PINE64 Updater: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pine64&#x2F;pine64_updater" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pine64&#x2F;pine64_updater</a>

I would really like to see someone raise the same questions this article does at the next community Q&amp;A.

I wish MediaTek open-sourced their drivers so we could see a PineBook Pro with a relatively capable processor, that thing with a higher res screen and a Dimensity 9000 would be amazing.

I don&#x27;t run Linux on any of my Pine64 devices, I&#x27;m happy with them just doing hardware.

&gt; This product family will never run Linux, as developers will need to develop a new firmware from scratch. This is obviously not a problem for the earbuds, but a big limitation for the player<p>Perhaps not Linux, but I suspect there would be a place here for a Unix-like platform that feels familiar. If for example we could get wide-adoption of something like the JVM or wasm3 [0] on these platforms, code could become quite portable, despite wildly different architectures.<p>For example, Apache&#x27;s NuttX [1] (that I first learned from Lupyuen [2], a guy making great progress working with Pine64 products).<p>&gt; Processing wise, this chip is well sufficient for TWS headphones, but very inadequate for an audio player. It will not drive a good screen, it nor run high-resolution flacs or (probably?) support a high-quality, high-bandwidth codec. In fact, a first generation iPod Nano (retailing for $149 in 2006) had 16MB RAM, so over 16 times what the PinePod would offer. In fact, even the features of any custom firmware are limited from so little memory<p>I wouldn&#x27;t call it time just yet. Displays can be interacted with intelligently (to reduce pixel bandwidth) and ultra high quality audio codecs offer diminishing returns, especially when you don&#x27;t have a DAC or headphones to make the most of them.<p>My advice to Pine64 would be this:<p>1. Consolidate your product lines. The Pinebook is just a slower Pinebook Pro, just go with the Pinebook Pro. The PineTab is just a Pinebook without the keyboard, again I would consolidate this with the Pinebook Pro and just make the keyboard detachable.<p>2. The SBCs should just go straight into the device, thus creating a clear upgrade path for future products. If you want a PineBook Pro running Quartz, just swap the boards (of course with daughter boards for USB expansion, display driver, power, etc).<p>3. Don&#x27;t be afraid to kill off products. The Pinebook and PineTab have never seen a new release. The PinePhone appears to be taking a back seat to the PinePhone Pro. The PineCube is basically DoA due to the processing power struggling to process the camera image.<p>More generally, try to do fewer things, but do them well.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wasm3&#x2F;wasm3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wasm3&#x2F;wasm3</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nuttx.apache.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;latest&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nuttx.apache.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;latest&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lupyuen.github.io&#x2F;articles&#x2F;sensor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lupyuen.github.io&#x2F;articles&#x2F;sensor</a>