What a joke. You can get a remarkable 2 for less than the cost of this device when "Most of the device’s functionality, including the e-paper display, do not work at this time".
Nobody has attempted to reverse engineer the boot blobs. Hard to do.
My question is: why rockchip? Why not focus on amlogic or mediatek? What does rockchip offer the open source community that other vendors don't?
Although given Mediatek has been moving up a lot in the world and powering some really nice budget devices (Lenovo Chromebook/Chrome Tablets come to mind) I really hope for some sort of mediatek SBC to materialize as ARM adoption grows.
For now chromebooks remain one of the only ways for me to get linux (via crostini) ARM devices with any sort of performance vs slowly tinkering around on a Pinebook Pro.
Also, comparing stats[1] they are different devices[2]. The PineNote has a more powerful CPU, 128G of storage vs the Remarkable 2's 8G, and a bigger battery.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29304365 [1]https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/ [2]https://remarkable.com/#Specifications
So you get more hardware and freedom for the $. I think also that price point, coupled with the warnings, forces people to think hard before they make the jump to try it out.
It just seems very expensive to me considering how lacking it is even in terms of basic drivers but I suppose if people who are into this stuff think it's fairly priced then it's all good! Replies to me certainly seem to confirm that!
Remarkable 2 is $399 without a stylus.
The only way Remarkable 2 is "cheaper" is with an $8/mo subscription-- $299 + $8/mo.
I never did, but clients of mine paid for some and I can tell you they aren’t cheap either - quite the contrary.
This is ridiculously cheap for early access developer hardware.
If this is hobbyist kit it's very pricey.
Many people contribute to mainline and to distros because they believe in those projects, no-one expects that these projects co-finance their hardware.
People will spend a lot more money than 400$ in other things, this is how they choose to spend both their money and time.
Will they eventually release a consumer version that packages up all of the software other folks have written on their own dime? Or do they only release these as developer kits?
That has been the Pine M.O. for their product line. The PineBook was a 'developer' release about 4 years ago. Now it is sold commercially as a full fledge ARM laptop.
The PineTime has now reached a stable hardware but still under SW development and the PineNote is I think the first HW revision that they are shipping.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Kobo_Clara_HD_(kobo-clara...
No, you're not. In fact, if you're not a developer who specifically signed up in advance to get your hands on the hardware in order to start building the stuff that will make it usable, you can't buy it right now at all.
Producing electronics at small quantities is expensive. Prototypes are expensive. Economies of scale is everything when it comes to producing cost-effective electronics.
Correct that's the way Pine64 works. Really it's the way the vast majority of niche ARM powered dev boards work. It is often stated on the product pages for people that don't seem to understand this. Their devices are often sold for very little margins above cost as they are mainly to drive developers to the platform. (as development on these devices benefits the SoC manufacturers)
If you want something more consumer friendly come back in two+ years when some of the kinks have been worked out.
These people try to make these products in the open and without huge funding so it can actually reamin open.
There is no indication they will ever leave this stage. I believe they generally sell at cost, even for working products. The purpose is to advance the technology, not to make a profit. But, the manufacturing and NRE costs need to be paid somehow.
It's not ideal, but its better than nothing.
To then follow that up with allowing most of the multi-million dollar development to be done by hobbyists who have purchased your non-functional hardware and you have a recipe for... something.
“ The main purpose of Pine Store creation is servicing PINE64 community. Most of the profit generated from Pine Store uses for production cash flow, new product engineering fee, sponsor community event expense, maintain server cost, and also supporting other open source communities.”