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Comment by ev1 | Hacker News Reader

"We make no profit from selling these units. If you think that a minor dissatisfaction, such as a dead pixel, will prompt you to file a PayPal dispute then please do not purchase the Pinebook. Thank you."

"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.

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So, that's a great way of turning off enthusiasts! Right now Best Buy sells a Lenovo Chromebook with better specs for $79 and a fully featured one for $499. So, $219 is barely cheap, considering it was shipped from Hong Kong with DHL and the shipping was around $40! So, no, it's not cheap and I don't buy "we make no profit". If there are a bunch of enthusiasts making decent salaries but the corporation has minuscule profit, that's still profit in my book!

All of the products you mentioned are targeted towards consumers though. The Pinebook seems to be targeted towards enthusiasts who aren't afraid of getting their hands dirty troubleshooting issues such as this.

"Broken since day 1" and "made for enthusiasts" are not the same thing! Otherwise every crappy product will be listed as "for enthusiasts only"!

I think there's a reasonable expectation that if you're buying a product, it actually works, enthusiast or not.

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!

I bought a kickstarter device (monument2) and it's way more buggy than I expected and I do feel dissatisfied with how it eventuated, but viewed from another perspective that was basically the deal day #1 and I just didn't understand it.

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?

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