From the product description: With the Pinebook you are getting a lot for the asking price. If you are looking for a device in a convenient laptop form-factor that you wish to tinker with, then it is safe to say the Pinebook is the right device for you — in particular if you are a developer or tinkerer who is willing to document, share and give back to the community. This is also especially true for those of you who wish to run Linux on the device, since Linux is by-and-large a community undertaking. We do not wish to discourage anyone from getting a Pinebook, as it is a good piece of hardware, but if you are looking for a device to replace your current work or school laptop, then perhaps it’s wise to look elsewhere.
I would be developing on this. I would be running Linux on this. I would be using it in my workflow.
I am a little put off by them telling me that perhaps this computer is not for me.
Personally, I'm not really sure who the Pinebook is for. It seems to be a device with the processing power of a Raspberry Pi 3, but with double the RAM, and in a laptop form factor.
I don't think it's particularly bad for the price, but I don't really see why anyone would need something like this.
Relatively speaking, yes. But for someone looking for a daily driver, it won't be powerful enough, and someone looking to tinker and develop will be fine with a Raspberry Pi.
It's meh. It'd be nice as a cheap laptop to tinker with (because ARM is kinda fun) but if someone's just looking for a laptop and doesn't care about it being small, an old Core 2 Duo laptop will happily stomp all over the pinebook all day, every day for as long as it pleases.
If they gave it a gigantic battery that would let the Pinebook chug along for a couple of days, I would be far, far more interested in it. It would be an excellent long-haul notebook for writing if it could do that.
Well, think of it as basically a RPi3 in a laptop form, and that's about what you'll be getting. Can you do your development on a raspberry pi? Can you do everything else you want on one? That's really the test to see if you can use it as your daily driver. You're not going to be playing any pre-packaged steam games on it though, nor any other pre-packaged software or VMs, and Wine is right out.
But the compilers should work, albeit slowly, X should work, and you should have access to at least two web browsers and the LibreOffice suite. Probably don't expect to run Eclipse on it.
Yeah, for me to use this as a development machine (Able to run full IDE's, Docker, RKT, VM's, whatever) it would really need a bit more punch, a minimum of 4 gigs ram, and a larger battery. And I basically just described an actual laptop, something that is a different price bracket. I really struggle with justifying the cost of a laptop because it is such a "one-and-done" purchase with minimal upgradability (ram, ssd).
