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Pinebook-Pro-review.md (4355B)

    

  1. ---
  2. title: Pinebook Pro review
  3. date: 2021-05-14
  4. ---
  6. I received the original Pinebook for free from the good folks at Pine64 a few
  7. years ago, when I visited Berlin to work with the KDE developers. Honestly, I
  8. was underwhelmed. The performance was abysmal and ARM is a nightmare to work
  9. with. For these reasons, I was skeptical when I bought the Pinebook Pro. I have
  10. also [spoken of my disdain for modern laptops in general before][0]: the state
  11. of laptops in $CURRENTYEAR is abysmal. As such, I have been using a ThinkPad
  12. X200, an 11 year old laptop, as my sole laptop for several years now.
  14. [0]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/02/18/Fucking-laptops.html
  16. I am pleased to share that the Pinebook Pro is a pleasure to use, and is likely
  17. to finally replace the old ThinkPad for most of my needs.
  19. Let me get the bad parts out of the way upfront: ARM is still a nightmare to
  20. work with. I really hate this architecture. Alpine Linux's upstream aarch64
  21. doesn't work with this laptop, so I have to use [postmarketOS][1], an Alpine
  22. derivative, instead. I do *like* pmOS — on phones — but I would
  23. definitely prefer to use Alpine upstream for a laptop use-case.  That being
  24. said, the Pine community has been doing a very good job of working on getting
  25. support for their devices upstream, and the situation has been steadily
  26. improving. I expect that one of the next batches of PBPs will include an updated
  27. u-Boot payload which will make UEFI booting possible, and Linux distros with the
  28. necessary kernel patches upstreamed will be shipping in the foreseeable future.
  29. This will alleviate most
  30. of my ARM-based grievances.
  32. [1]: http://postmarketos.org
  34. The built-in speakers are also pretty tinny and weak. It has a headphone port
  35. which works fine, though. Configuring ALSA is a chore; these SoCs tend to have
  36. rather complicated audio setups. I have not been able to get the webcam working
  37. (some kernel option is missing, my contact at pmOS is working on it), but I
  38. understand that the quality is pretty poor. It can supposedly be configured to
  39. work with a USB-C dock for an external display, but I have never got it working
  40. and I understand that there are some kernel bits missing for this as well. The
  41. touchpad is also pretty bad, but thankfully I use mainly keyboard-driven
  42. software. The built-in eMMC storage is pretty small, though it can be upgraded
  43. and I understand that there is an option to install an NVMe — at the
  44. expense of your battery life.
  46. Cons aside, what do I like about it? Well, many things. It's lightweight and
  47. thin (1.3kg), but has a nice 14" screen that feels like the right size for me.
  48. The screen looks really nice, too. The colors look good, it works well at any
  49. brightness level, and in most lighting situations. It's definitely better than
  50. the old X200 display. The keyboard is not as nice as the ThinkPad (a high bar to
  51. meet), but it's pretty comfortable for extended use. The two USB-3 ports and the
  52. sole USB-C port are also nice to have. It can charge via USB-C, or via an
  53. included DC wall wart and barrel plug. The battery lasts for 6-8 hours: way
  54. better than my old ThinkPad.
  56. It is an ARM machine, so the performance is not competitive with modern x86_64
  57. platforms. It is somewhat faster than my 11-year-old previous machine, though.
  58. It has six cores and any parallelizable job (like building code) works
  59. acceptably fast, at least for the languages I primarily use (i.e. not Rust or
  60. C++). It can also play back 1080p video with a *little bit* of stuttering, and
  61. 720p video flawlessly. Browsing the web is a bit of a chore, but it always was.
  62. [Sourcehut works fine][2].
  64. [2]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-05-08-sourcehut-is-the-fastest-who-cares
  66. The device is user-servicable, which I appreciate very much. It's very easy to
  67. take apart (a small Phillips head screwdriver is sufficient) and you can buy
  68. individual parts from the Pine64 store to do replacements yourself.
  70. In short, it checks most of my boxes, which is something no other laptop has
  71. even come remotely close to in the past **ten years**. It is the only laptop I
  72. have ever used which makes a substantial improvement on the circa-2010 state of
  73. the art. Because ARM is a nightmare, I'm still likely to use the old ThinkPads
  74. for some use-cases, namely for hobby OS development and running niche operating
  75. systems. But my Pinebook Pro is here to stay.