Flip a switch to disable eMMC and boot from sd card, upgrade uboot, life continues.
(Not an owner, just a reader if your problem lies beyond this known issue you may want to be less terse seeking comment)
"Please do not order the Pinebook Pro if you’re seeking a substitute for your X86 laptop, or are just curious"
"These pre-orders are meant for enthusiasts familiar with the Arm architecture and interested in the PineBook Pro for this specific reason"
There are recovery methods, I would expect to be using a screwdriver on the first day with anything from the Pine store, tbh.
It seems Pinebook are using that as an excuse to ship low quality untested bricks.
Complaining about your dead pixels? You're obviously not a real enthusiast!
A real enthusiast would relish the fact that the unit is bricked after updating!
Pine64 has a "danger/warning" all over it. If you buy things which come with DIP switches they aren't there for decoration.
At the volumes made, and design cost, it's almost inevitable they will have a higher failure rate than Lenovo or Dell.
Not designing the uBoot update path to be fail-safe is pretty bad. But, if the cost is "use the DIP switches" maybe the problem is not being warned at the time?