The most interesting feature of this laptop is the charger, it only needs 5V 3A to charge. Which means it can easily be topped up with power bank or solar. A neat feature for being off grid or simply using less power.
@XxDanSoloxX It support up to 3amp however most power banks don't have enough to be efficient unless they are ups inverter so it's more of an idiot tax to use a power bank than just a folding solar panel which can charge it like the mains but powerbank with built in solar are fake because it takes way to long and so you could just buy an extra battery vs junk
Alright. Gonna get haters for this one, but if you're talking about off-grid power that's not practical. You would be better off with 12-24v power for off grid. Plus, it'd be better to just buy an extra battery than a power bank as the conversion from chemical to electrical, then back to chemical (and then electrical) would result in pretty major thermal losses if you're trying to be efficient and not cook multiple batteries.
This is the kind of product you need for Linux to catch on in the consumer desktop space: Prepackaged machines, all set up and configured by the manufacturer, and working out of the box like any normal laptop. (Linux was built by tinkerers, but there have to be products that don’t require you to be a tinkerer to use them!) What the space basically needs is a whole lot of mini-Apples: Companies that have carefully married the software and hardware together, for a coherent experience.
@Eric Kleefeid Linux has a major lack of enterprise software mainly dedicated banking and communication software which are required for alot of home business and people don't want to go outside or call people on a phone .
@@erickleefeld4883 Yes people with a $200 laptop will mainly watch RUclips but if they use social media then alot of cases features get removed from the website to force use of an app .
@@damienhartley3222 modern softwares are run on browsers nowadays anyways. the only reason businesses uses windows exclusive app is probably because it's legacy app built using visual studio, using excel macros for "business", or sunken cost fallacy on active directory system. a real banking related business using $200 laptop probably can't afford monthly fee of business softwares anyways
@@FathinLuqmanTantowi Windows can support some high funtion software off web browsers but Android has its own native version of windows software provided by Microsoft and windows has its own native Android software on windows store provided by Google.
For Netflix .. pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Q should show you the stats ... I think they really do not want most people to see this .. for the same reason it is no longer possible to manually set resolution in for each individual netflix video :D
the external hardware seems pretty good. they should keep this look and do yearly chip updates. they should have recouped the tooling cost and just adding a better chip would do the trick next time. this looks very usuable as a remote terminal, so you can remote into a beast that you have elsewhere and that's more upgradable.
That's what they're doing. They're currently trying to get together an upgrade kit for their original pinebook with this board. Pine64 is small company seemingly more focused on enabling Linux development so I having the the fastest boards isn't their goal. It took a while for the pinebook to get to it's current state with software support anyway so I wouldn't want one of their new boards immediately
I'd love to see the trackpad and speakers addressed in a future revision, as well as the keyboard firmware to allow the pine key to be used in combination with the arrow keys. Btw if the keyboard issue is bothering anyone else, someone decompiled the keyboard firmware and fixed this so may be worth a look as it's working for me
The trackpad issue has already been addressed with firmware updates. His is running outdated keyboard firmware i bet. The ones shipping this may also had some case improvements that strengthened the casing, a fixed NVME adapter that you can buy now, and of course the updated keyboard firmware and the new manjaro arm distro. Further, you can enable QT-GLES in Manjaro ARM Plasma edition and you'll never get any dropped frames in video anymore, as the combination of panfrost and proper desktop hardware acceleration fixes those issues.
@@theburntcrumpet8371 For me it went away... Maybe that's because i have a original ISO variant (i got it accidentally instead of the ANSI one) and there's something slightly different with the ANSI model? They did improve alot of the issues in the ANSI models, which is why they shipped later on than the ISO model, so perhaps it's got slightly different keyboard hardware too. I wish i didn't screw up when buying it and got the ANSI model i wanted.
I was initially thinking about getting a Pinebook Pro. I changed my mind when I was able to pick up a used Chromebook off ebay for $50 and easily modify it to run Linux. It works great for the price; it's able to run 1080p 60fps videos on RUclips without frame drops (once the loading bar and all that goes away), and you can even get away with running Minecraft on it.
@@wind2536 I believe it was the Acer C740. There are 2gb and 4gb variants both of which have 16gb of Sata SSD storage. The storage can be replaced since it uses a m.2 slot.
@ETA PRIME Please enable QT-GLES on Manjaro ARM Plasma so that you can also test out Wayland and get the best experience out of the computer with no frame drops. Here's the steps: Set "KWIN_COMPOSE=O2ES" in your /etc/profile If Wayland is no working properly: Delete/move ~/.config/kcminputrc Reboot the machine, and then login and enter "qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin org.kde.KWin.supportInformation | grep "Compositing Type" " to check if it has worked. Enjoy the faster machine!
@@nuclearmonster This isn't a normal laptop. This is a Open source oriented laptop built for a low cost with community made software.. You can't expect it to be 100% perfect out of the box. And the performance he saw was acceptable, it just could be better.
@@madmax2069 They specifically state this device is for tinkerers or hackers, as well as foss enthusiasts who like to have control of their device and be able to modify and tweak what's running on the device. And if it really was the case that it doesn't need to be tweaked and that it's just a out of the box experience only, then why do they tell you in the pamphlet that comes with the device that you must update the keyboard firmware yourself?
@Deon Denis I believe it can break some programs.Honestly though the programs it breaks didn't work great in the first place though, so i personally think manjaro should just enable it by default.
Great video! I really wish more cheap laptops came with replaceable eMMC cards. Obviously, it's not expensive to implement in a laptop, and it would be great to see HP do this with their cheap Stream laptops.
Spiky They probably do, but the 32GB ones cost close to $200.00, which is what this Pinebook Pro cost, and the ones with 64GB cost over that amount. I still think they should give people the option to upgrade the eMMC storage.
@Aaron vandenberg I'm sure you can, however if you use a compiled language like rust or c++ then you're obviously going to get arm binaries. And I don't believe arm chips are capable of cross compiling. But other than that I'm sure you can :)
what is missed in this review is that this is meant to be open source hardware from top to bottom (including firmware). Just buying a laptop and installing linux on it doesn't get you the full FREE SOFTWARE experience. I'd like to see them do this with a raspberry pi 4 though, that'd be neat.
it's just not everyone sees any value in what you worship - some illusory "freedom of opensauce", so there is nothing to draw attention to. next, this is not opensauce hardware, there is no such at all, take the SoC, it's hardware design is not open. many controllers aren't even documented - HDMI, GPU, SDRAM controller, heck, even SD/MMC ones aren't. look at the released public TRM and you will see only how to program things like UART. xD ROM code is not open, SDRAM init isn't etc. and it's not a problem, it's understandable why vendors keep their secrets, for most people, except such "free dumb" maniacs.
It dropped lots of frames on youtube because the video was encoded in the new avc1 codec. with h264ify (i think that was the name of the addon) you can force yt to only use the less intense codecs. Great video though and have a nice day :D
On a 14" screen u can actually get away with video in 720p (nobody is gonna use a low-end laptop for external HD or 4K video anyway); what Im most interested in is the peformance with Linux related tasks such as generating ssh hashing, compiling code (this could be a great machine to build for many ARM variants), running Java, etc
Yeah, what I'd want a laptop like this for is a portable bash prompt, something that doesn't take much power, doesn't weigh much, doesn't cost much, etc. A raspberry Pi in a decent non-stupid laptop shell would be ideal.
Socketed emmc means it is not a throwaway when your flash eventually dies. People that buy cheap laptops/chromebooks with soldered on flash don't realize how short the lifespan can actually be with heavy use or even regular os updates.
I don't know if you have the technical skills for this or not, but if you build Gentoo specifically for this laptop using proper optimisation flags etc, then you should see a performance gain and it should outperform any other distro you install on the laptop.
I've had mine for a couple of months now. It's a fun toy and a solid machine for office work, web browsing and retro gaming. The speakers are utter garbage though. I'm planning to replace them with Nintendo Switch speakers when they finally arrive and see how that works out :D
@@RoshiGaming Yes but it turned out rather disappointing. It goes a bit louder now without distorting but the quality itself is still pretty poor. There has to be a better way.
A lot of those ARM devices you talk about, ARM handhelds and such seem to favor those lesser known SoC manufacturers. I suppose a Qualcomm high end SoC would cost a lot to the companies, but it would be interesting to see a snapdragon 865 or so with way better cooling capabilities compared to a tablet or a smartphone. It still wouldn't match x86 based devices in performance, but it would be interesting to see how hard those high end ARM SoCs could be pushed with more cooling involved, especially for emulation. Or is that Rockchip up there in performance compared to high end ARM SoCs?
Yes. Cost is a big factor for companies that put out the SBCs and devices like this. That is why they tend to use inexpensive TV Box SoCs like this Rockchip and S905, etc. The Snapdragon 820-865 have been quite expensive, as I understand it, and probably require large purchase orders. Another factor is that the integrated cellular radios in most of the Snapdragons can create regulatory issues that smaller companies don't want to deal with. With that said, there have been some Snapdragon-based laptops using maybe SD850 and 8CX so they might give a good idea of what the performance is like.
Only bad thing about the pinebook pro is how hard it is to get one... You have to pre order and wait weeks or months until they have a batch available for shipping... Most people aren't going to let this company hold onto 200$ while they wait ad infinitum for the device to ship
The s130 is 250+ and on ebay a used one goes for 150+ You were really lucky to get yours for 99. Im looking for a cheap linux learning laptop and was going to go for pinebook pro but they’re always out of stock
Always nice to see ARM chips being used in laptops (however, it's NOT nice to see Windows installed on them !). If Rockchip and the community could get the software support right (X.org drivers, OpenGL, proper hardware decoding on Chromium, etc.), this would be a nice system for computing on the go. There were ARM-based laptops/hybrids released before, but most ran Android instead of vanilla Linux. But some could run "normal" distros natively without resorting to chroot. I did have one of these, the Asus TF300T on which I installed Ubuntu (last version it ran was 14.04) in dual-boot (!) with Android. The beauty was that there were proper drivers available for X.org and OpenGL from Nvidia ! Which meant full desktop hardware acceleration and OpenGL ES was possible. There were also drivers for Gstreamer HW video decoding but sadly these never worked properly for me. I've managed to get several games running on it (Doom 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Warzone 2100, etc.) and I've also partially ported the Xscreensaver suite to it. Those were fun times... Still have a full backup of that Linux installation, complete with all my work on it.
FIY, the reason for choppy video playback is right on Rockchip's product page for RK3399: 4K VP9 and 4K 10bits H265/H264 video decoders, up to 60fps 1080P other video decoders (VC-1, MPEG-1/2/4, VP8) The video you played was in AV1, forcing youtube to VP9/H264 with an extension, or using a desktop youtube app capable of selecting preferred codec would do the trick, so would playing VP9/H264/H265 locally from a file. Without hardware accelerated video decoding, video playback happened on the CPU and no wonder you got dropped frames. The hardware is capable of 4K up to 60fps apparently, just don't give it codecs it doesn't have decoders for.
Chromium Edge and Chromium both dropping youtube frames since last 4-5 months. Firefox has hold up much better, but even it is dropping a couple of frames in Ryzen 7 when last year it didn't break a sweat.
It will be interesting to see how this product gets developed. Hopefully with better speakers, trackpad and maybe a more beefier CPU. I would love to see how well it runs Ubuntu ARM.
To the people saying 200 dollars is too expensive, you're missing the point of this computer. It's to develop arm software. It's not a daily driver replacement.
I have the impression it will do what it needs to because there is a rockwell backing to it. A portable terminal was probably the concept because of Rockwell's idea on modems. I see a great terminal.
The keyboard and the chassis feel much nicer than your typical $200 laptop. Also, you would struggle to find an x86 laptop for £200 which charges over a regular 5v usb type C. Plus it's just interesting to see what you can do with different architectures
@@ross5200 i just googled them again... they are 200 - $230 depending on where you buy it from. AMD A4-9120e - 4GB RAM - AMD Radeon R3 HP Stream 14. even if you could only find it for $230 its still a better machine than one with an ARM CPU.
Use firefox and h264ify for better video playback. When I was running chrome, I could barely watch 4k videos, it was skipping frames and everything. But with firefox and h264ify, I can watch 4k video flawlessly. The only thing is that h264ify only supports youtube, as most streaming sites already use h264 as their main codec.
"you won't notice that we dropped 70 frames"... Yes I will... I was the one to notice someone messed up a render on an intro scene and it was dropping one frame.
It is beyond me why top phone manafacturers dont place their phone motherboards, peripherals etc into a laptop shell they only have to figure how to interface it with the bigger screens and would open up a new market for way more powerful android or linux laptops than this.
It seems like the accepted solution to get more performance/usability is to install Manjaro. Would definitely be interested in a video going over that. Not sure if it's a process for mere mortals.
Oh hell no. I'm still dealing with PTSD from trying to daily-drive Linux on an ARM CPU back in 2014. Sticking with IA86 until I see a modern PowerPC chipset hit the market.
Given that the specs are pretty similar to the Rockpro 64 and the performance so far seems to be about the same, I'd imagine that emulation performance will be nearly identical between the two.
I think you will have a better experience with a more up to date distro like Arch or Manjaro, Debian is always at least 1 year if not more behind on packages and it's Kernel. Debian 10 runs like Kernel 4.19. A good tool for Linux while testing is "inxi" which can be installed on debian/ubuntu distros with "sudo apt install inxi" once installed in the terminal just type "inix -b" this will give you an entire read out of the Kernel drivers you can even look to see what codecs are installed. If you want even more info just type "inxi --help" this will tell you the other commands to see what all inxi can do. Also inxi comes by default in manjaro.
I would love to see how well this works as a thinclient for Parsec/Shadow.
4 года назад+3
Could you check if youtube is using hardware acceleration? It is not easy to get this working without proper drivers, and customized patched chromium. Even in x86 machines, chromium needs a patch to enable hardware decoding. I was surprised when I tried to play a 4k video in my x86 Debian machine with chromium and found that the CPU usage was at maximum. To solve that I needed to compile some drivers myself because this is not officially supported by Debian nor chromium.
yeah, that's true also Firefox doesn't use Hardware decoding by default (also on x86 based machines) although that is going to change when they release their Wayland version (but only for Wayland, not Xorg)
It's clear that RUclips isn't using hardware acceleration. I also have the Samsung Chromebook Plus with the same Rockchip RK3399 and it can play 1440p without any problem.
I just looked at their website. They have an adaptor to add an internal ssd or m.2 only 6 bucks. I was glad to see they do a UK keyboard. When the lock down is over I will get one. For now saving every penny for holiday when we're allowed out. Stay safe everyone, live long and prosper.
This pc is the best for people who are afraid to migrate to linux, and when it comes installed, the most tedious step to install linux will be saved, namely: the boot, gpt, mbr, partitioning and others
I bought a £350 Windows laptop even replacing hard drive with SSD and putting linux on the cpu would 100% if I opened any browser and I was lucky to get 480p, that was barely over a year ago!
Whatever you bought Was not worth the 350£ and you got ripped off. I have an old 2005 laptop powered by a single core Celeron M and 2gb of ram here which does 720p on RUclips with Windows 10, all of that on its original 2006 harddrive.
@@kjjustinXD I think it was purely just a bad laptop, I took it apart as wanted to upgrade the hard drive for the SSD and the motherboard was about the size of a 8 inch tablet and most of that was just connectors so who knows it may of been ARM based. I think it was capable of 720 or 1080p it was just so sluggish you had to let it buffer for a while as the cpu was maxed out. I took it back a week later and spent £50 more on a AMD laptop that ran silky smooth with 1080p vidoes and could use PS2 emulators on it, but the graphics card was so useless it couldn't even play San Andreas above 15fps yet I could 1080p even harder to emulate PS2 games.
I have to point out to many tech reviewers: Dell Optiplex i3s 2012-2011 models USED here in the philippines costs > 200usd just the CPU only. They are only sold by resellers and you cannot get any warranty on this. Minimum wage here is 150usd/mo. The circumstance in the Philippines is similar to Indonesia, vietnam, thailand, and much of india. Not to forget the billions also that are in worse situation in Africa. The strange tech that are at or below 200usd is really geared towards people who are in that world that have households (averaging 5-7) and need $1 a day to survive per person (5-8usd per day x 30 days = 150-240usd per month).
FYI: "Pine64 offers a bunch of bistro for the PineBook Pro Like Debian, Manjaro Arm, Kali, and even Android." In the description you have to change 'bistro' to 'distros' matey, thanks :)
I would wait for the 8gb ram future model. I bought a Chromebook with FHD display and almost the same price. But it seems to perform better than this pinebook.
Should include power consumption stats/test in your reviews so we can have an idea if the computer would be a good option for off-grid or power outages.
ryzen laptops for $400 and even less if bought on sale can do way way more and can run most games like GTA5. skimping too much and you get too little. you get what you pay for! as a gpu analogy this is like getting a GT710 when getting a GT1030 gives you playable frame rates versus picture slide slow on the gt710. always go for the sweeter spot!
I use mine as a more flexible chromebook-like device and I love it. I think that some of the major issues (screen tearing, frame drops in RUclips) will be corrected in the future. I've had mine since November 2019 and I really love the battery life and light weight. I'm looking forward to trying the new Manjaro build too.
I plan on getting an Ideapad Duet and putting Debian ARM on there. I'm hoping projects like Pinebook Pro will have some cross over benefits for my project
@Fredd Colour Green Yea I've had to turn of secure boot for all my Debian laptops. I've watched a couple tutorials on installing Linux on Chromebooks that require the installation of a custom bootloader. I'm not really psyched about using chromebooks but I want to be an early adopter to arm based Linux. and hopefully it is powerful enough to be a daily driver.
Hi, this is a bit off topics. I stumble upon a budget gaming phone Realme C3 which has the potential of emulation. I would love to see it tested out in your channel.
Hello everyone, so I have 17 dual graphics laptop is not very easy to carry around and i am afraid of breaking it; so I need a tiny cheep laptop. I bought pinebook pro 10 month ago. In the beginning it was not so great; the touchpad was like ride a chihuahua with your feet, problem with the battery, and performance issue. But after the make a big update and everything work fine. I can also run eclipse and netbeans. I am very surprised for what you can do with 200 dollar pc.
Good for you! Technology has come a very long ways when it comes to computational power and electrical efficency. If you are ever in need of a cheap and power efficent desktop check out the raspberry pi 4. I personally bought a cheap used thinkpad and booted LM20.1 on it
![Eminem - Somebody Save Me (feat. Jelly Roll) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Vwa0HenQMi4/mqdefault.jpg)
The most interesting feature of this laptop is the charger, it only needs 5V 3A to charge. Which means it can easily be topped up with power bank or solar. A neat feature for being off grid or simply using less power.
If it's anything like the original Pinebook of mine, it might take a good part of the day to charge from empty.
@XxDanSoloxX It support up to 3amp however most power banks don't have enough to be efficient unless they are ups inverter so it's more of an idiot tax to use a power bank than just a folding solar panel which can charge it like the mains but powerbank with built in solar are fake because it takes way to long and so you could just buy an extra battery vs junk
@iTheGeek im pretty sure no one uses punctuation online as long as you can understand what they say
Alright. Gonna get haters for this one, but if you're talking about off-grid power that's not practical. You would be better off with 12-24v power for off grid. Plus, it'd be better to just buy an extra battery than a power bank as the conversion from chemical to electrical, then back to chemical (and then electrical) would result in pretty major thermal losses if you're trying to be efficient and not cook multiple batteries.
if they use components right, i can make macbook air kind of laptop that runs on battery for a month
This is the kind of product you need for Linux to catch on in the consumer desktop space: Prepackaged machines, all set up and configured by the manufacturer, and working out of the box like any normal laptop. (Linux was built by tinkerers, but there have to be products that don’t require you to be a tinkerer to use them!)
What the space basically needs is a whole lot of mini-Apples: Companies that have carefully married the software and hardware together, for a coherent experience.
@Eric Kleefeid Linux has a major lack of enterprise software mainly dedicated banking and communication software which are required for alot of home business and people don't want to go outside or call people on a phone .
@@damienhartley3222 Hey, anyone buying a $200 laptop would be the type of person to do those tasks through their web browser, anyway!
@@erickleefeld4883 Yes people with a $200 laptop will mainly watch RUclips but if they use social media then alot of cases features get removed from the website to force use of an app .
@@damienhartley3222 modern softwares are run on browsers nowadays anyways. the only reason businesses uses windows exclusive app is probably because it's legacy app built using visual studio, using excel macros for "business", or sunken cost fallacy on active directory system. a real banking related business using $200 laptop probably can't afford monthly fee of business softwares anyways
@@FathinLuqmanTantowi Windows can support some high funtion software off web browsers but Android has its own native version of windows software provided by Microsoft and windows has its own native Android software on windows store provided by Google.
For Netflix .. pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Q should show you the stats ... I think they really do not want most people to see this .. for the same reason it is no longer possible to manually set resolution in for each individual netflix video :D
the external hardware seems pretty good. they should keep this look and do yearly chip updates. they should have recouped the tooling cost and just adding a better chip would do the trick next time. this looks very usuable as a remote terminal, so you can remote into a beast that you have elsewhere and that's more upgradable.
That's exactly what I use it for and I love it. The trackpad isn't great but I do most of my work just in terminal with keyboard.
@@JohnThinks maybe they could have the same modules as raspberry pi compute modules next time so you can upgrade the power and body separately.
That's what they're doing. They're currently trying to get together an upgrade kit for their original pinebook with this board. Pine64 is small company seemingly more focused on enabling Linux development so I having the the fastest boards isn't their goal. It took a while for the pinebook to get to it's current state with software support anyway so I wouldn't want one of their new boards immediately
Also internal support for NVMe drives with the adapter board.
Okay, this is going the right direction. For people who just need a basic computer for web stuff and office stuff, this could work well.
It's GREAT for a travel computer you don't need to baby
like raspberry pi
I'd love to see the trackpad and speakers addressed in a future revision, as well as the keyboard firmware to allow the pine key to be used in combination with the arrow keys. Btw if the keyboard issue is bothering anyone else, someone decompiled the keyboard firmware and fixed this so may be worth a look as it's working for me
The trackpad issue has already been addressed with firmware updates. His is running outdated keyboard firmware i bet. The ones shipping this may also had some case improvements that strengthened the casing, a fixed NVME adapter that you can buy now, and of course the updated keyboard firmware and the new manjaro arm distro. Further, you can enable QT-GLES in Manjaro ARM Plasma edition and you'll never get any dropped frames in video anymore, as the combination of panfrost and proper desktop hardware acceleration fixes those issues.
@@izaicslinux6961 I was on the latest keyboard and trackpad firmware and still experiencing issues, hence choosing to flash the modified one
@@theburntcrumpet8371 For me it went away... Maybe that's because i have a original ISO variant (i got it accidentally instead of the ANSI one) and there's something slightly different with the ANSI model? They did improve alot of the issues in the ANSI models, which is why they shipped later on than the ISO model, so perhaps it's got slightly different keyboard hardware too. I wish i didn't screw up when buying it and got the ANSI model i wanted.
IPS LCD alone is worth that money.
I was initially thinking about getting a Pinebook Pro. I changed my mind when I was able to pick up a used Chromebook off ebay for $50 and easily modify it to run Linux. It works great for the price; it's able to run 1080p 60fps videos on RUclips without frame drops (once the loading bar and all that goes away), and you can even get away with running Minecraft on it.
@@MichaelGraham21 No, I knew that I wanted it to be a Linux machine from the get go. I do a fair bit of programming so Linux is much more useful to ms
Which one did you get?
@@wind2536 I believe it was the Acer C740. There are 2gb and 4gb variants both of which have 16gb of Sata SSD storage. The storage can be replaced since it uses a m.2 slot.
Im running Windows 10 on my Dell Chromebook.
Not all Chromebooks support Linux though. Always check compatibility.
the simplicity of arm based machines is amazing. this has to take off
@ETA PRIME Please enable QT-GLES on Manjaro ARM Plasma so that you can also test out Wayland and get the best experience out of the computer with no frame drops. Here's the steps:
Set "KWIN_COMPOSE=O2ES" in your /etc/profile
If Wayland is no working properly: Delete/move ~/.config/kcminputrc
Reboot the machine, and then login and enter "qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin org.kde.KWin.supportInformation | grep "Compositing Type"
" to check if it has worked.
Enjoy the faster machine!
Is it an honest review if he has to do anything on the command line to get good performance?
@@nuclearmonster This isn't a normal laptop. This is a Open source oriented laptop built for a low cost with community made software.. You can't expect it to be 100% perfect out of the box. And the performance he saw was acceptable, it just could be better.
@@madmax2069 They specifically state this device is for tinkerers or hackers, as well as foss enthusiasts who like to have control of their device and be able to modify and tweak what's running on the device. And if it really was the case that it doesn't need to be tweaked and that it's just a out of the box experience only, then why do they tell you in the pamphlet that comes with the device that you must update the keyboard firmware yourself?
@Deon Denis I believe it can break some programs.Honestly though the programs it breaks didn't work great in the first place though, so i personally think manjaro should just enable it by default.
cool
I just ordered the new Pinephone, and I am extremely excited to get it!
Great video! I really wish more cheap laptops came with replaceable eMMC cards. Obviously, it's not expensive to implement in a laptop, and it would be great to see HP do this with their cheap Stream laptops.
Spiky They probably do, but the 32GB ones cost close to $200.00, which is what this Pinebook Pro cost, and the ones with 64GB cost over that amount. I still think they should give people the option to upgrade the eMMC storage.
holy shit, I have this exact laptop - in fact I'm writing on it now. It's so good with Manjaro as has been the best laptop I have ever owned
@Aaron vandenberg I'm sure you can, however if you use a compiled language like rust or c++ then you're obviously going to get arm binaries. And I don't believe arm chips are capable of cross compiling. But other than that I'm sure you can :)
what is missed in this review is that this is meant to be open source hardware from top to bottom (including firmware). Just buying a laptop and installing linux on it doesn't get you the full FREE SOFTWARE experience. I'd like to see them do this with a raspberry pi 4 though, that'd be neat.
Shadepariah this is not the review, per his own words.
it's just not everyone sees any value in what you worship - some illusory "freedom of opensauce", so there is nothing to draw attention to. next, this is not opensauce hardware, there is no such at all, take the SoC, it's hardware design is not open. many controllers aren't even documented - HDMI, GPU, SDRAM controller, heck, even SD/MMC ones aren't. look at the released public TRM and you will see only how to program things like UART. xD ROM code is not open, SDRAM init isn't etc. and it's not a problem, it's understandable why vendors keep their secrets, for most people, except such "free dumb" maniacs.
It dropped lots of frames on youtube because the video was encoded in the new avc1 codec. with h264ify (i think that was the name of the addon) you can force yt to only use the less intense codecs. Great video though and have a nice day :D
On a 14" screen u can actually get away with video in 720p (nobody is gonna use a low-end laptop for external HD or 4K video anyway); what Im most interested in is the peformance with Linux related tasks such as generating ssh hashing, compiling code (this could be a great machine to build for many ARM variants), running Java, etc
Yeah, what I'd want a laptop like this for is a portable bash prompt, something that doesn't take much power, doesn't weigh much, doesn't cost much, etc. A raspberry Pi in a decent non-stupid laptop shell would be ideal.
Regarding video playback performance, I think it's slow because it's being served avc1. Consider trying an extension like h264ify.
avc1 same as x264
The USB C does a good job outputting to different display types with the right adapter. It will only duplicate the display, but will do so at 1080.
"micro usb card reader"
I have many usb cards and require many usb card readers to use them everyday
Yeah, I think that was supposed to be "MicroSD" card reader...
Maybe do another take on this, now that Manjaro and Debian are a lot further along?
Socketed emmc means it is not a throwaway when your flash eventually dies. People that buy cheap laptops/chromebooks with soldered on flash don't realize how short the lifespan can actually be with heavy use or even regular os updates.
I'd love to see the Android os test, and see how it runs apps and low end emulation.
I don't know if you have the technical skills for this or not, but if you build Gentoo specifically for this laptop using proper optimisation flags etc, then you should see a performance gain and it should outperform any other distro you install on the laptop.
I've had mine for a couple of months now. It's a fun toy and a solid machine for office work, web browsing and retro gaming. The speakers are utter garbage though. I'm planning to replace them with Nintendo Switch speakers when they finally arrive and see how that works out :D
You ever end up making the swap?
@@RoshiGaming Yes but it turned out rather disappointing. It goes a bit louder now without distorting but the quality itself is still pretty poor. There has to be a better way.
Also the Manjaro build performs sooo much better
I'm simply blown away at the quality of the little guy.
If you want sn ARM based laptop for 200$ this thing is nice.
If you want a Laptop for 200$, there are waaaaaay better options.
Agreed. I'd rather get an x86 based slimbook for that price given the compatibility you get with that.
New, no.
Used ThinkPad, yes. :)
@@madmax2069 I'd love to see them.
@@robkam643400 Walmart Motile specifically with Ryzen 3's.
@@SeanSu Thats 350 before tax lol
A lot of those ARM devices you talk about, ARM handhelds and such seem to favor those lesser known SoC manufacturers. I suppose a Qualcomm high end SoC would cost a lot to the companies, but it would be interesting to see a snapdragon 865 or so with way better cooling capabilities compared to a tablet or a smartphone. It still wouldn't match x86 based devices in performance, but it would be interesting to see how hard those high end ARM SoCs could be pushed with more cooling involved, especially for emulation. Or is that Rockchip up there in performance compared to high end ARM SoCs?
Yes. Cost is a big factor for companies that put out the SBCs and devices like this. That is why they tend to use inexpensive TV Box SoCs like this Rockchip and S905, etc. The Snapdragon 820-865 have been quite expensive, as I understand it, and probably require large purchase orders. Another factor is that the integrated cellular radios in most of the Snapdragons can create regulatory issues that smaller companies don't want to deal with. With that said, there have been some Snapdragon-based laptops using maybe SD850 and 8CX so they might give a good idea of what the performance is like.
Love how plain that laptop looks. That's how they should look, all black, no names and simple, classic shapes. It's very pleasing to the eye
Only bad thing about the pinebook pro is how hard it is to get one... You have to pre order and wait weeks or months until they have a batch available for shipping... Most people aren't going to let this company hold onto 200$ while they wait ad infinitum for the device to ship
Agreed, except for the chiclet keyboard, which is a design that no laptop should use (but almost all do).
The s130 is 250+ and on ebay a used one goes for 150+
You were really lucky to get yours for 99. Im looking for a cheap linux learning laptop and was going to
go for pinebook pro but they’re always out of stock
Always nice to see ARM chips being used in laptops (however, it's NOT nice to see Windows installed on them !). If Rockchip and the community could get the software support right (X.org drivers, OpenGL, proper hardware decoding on Chromium, etc.), this would be a nice system for computing on the go.
There were ARM-based laptops/hybrids released before, but most ran Android instead of vanilla Linux. But some could run "normal" distros natively without resorting to chroot.
I did have one of these, the Asus TF300T on which I installed Ubuntu (last version it ran was 14.04) in dual-boot (!) with Android. The beauty was that there were proper drivers available for X.org and OpenGL from Nvidia ! Which meant full desktop hardware acceleration and OpenGL ES was possible. There were also drivers for Gstreamer HW video decoding but sadly these never worked properly for me.
I've managed to get several games running on it (Doom 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Warzone 2100, etc.) and I've also partially ported the Xscreensaver suite to it. Those were fun times... Still have a full backup of that Linux installation, complete with all my work on it.
FIY, the reason for choppy video playback is right on Rockchip's product page for RK3399:
4K VP9 and 4K 10bits H265/H264 video decoders, up to 60fps
1080P other video decoders (VC-1, MPEG-1/2/4, VP8)
The video you played was in AV1, forcing youtube to VP9/H264 with an extension, or using a desktop youtube app capable of selecting preferred codec would do the trick, so would playing VP9/H264/H265 locally from a file. Without hardware accelerated video decoding, video playback happened on the CPU and no wonder you got dropped frames.
The hardware is capable of 4K up to 60fps apparently, just don't give it codecs it doesn't have decoders for.
i have the same on a normal desktop, chrome and chromium dropping frames like it had diarhea, but in firefox even on 4k, not a single frame dropped.
This!
Chromium Edge and Chromium both dropping youtube frames since last 4-5 months. Firefox has hold up much better, but even it is dropping a couple of frames in Ryzen 7 when last year it didn't break a sweat.
Firefox does hardware decoding on linux, chromium does not.
It will be interesting to see how this product gets developed. Hopefully with better speakers, trackpad and maybe a more beefier CPU. I would love to see how well it runs Ubuntu ARM.
Would love a follow up video to this with Manjaro. See how it all works as well as some emulation.
The master of all Linux Laptops! I've been waiting for this forever! Cool video!
To the people saying 200 dollars is too expensive, you're missing the point of this computer. It's to develop arm software. It's not a daily driver replacement.
This is the point. You get and ARM SBC, keyboard, mouse, and monitor in one unit.
*Website takes 30 seconds to load* - "Yeah this isnt too bad."
I have the impression it will do what it needs to because there is a rockwell backing to it. A portable terminal was probably the concept because of Rockwell's idea on modems. I see a great terminal.
I am surprised battery life is not longer on that thing. Still its looks neat and for me a big plus is that its totally silent. Tnx for the overview
Your trackpad issue can be fixed via a firmware update you can find it on the forums after performing that update my trackpad has no issues
$200. Is too much when you can get a x86 laptop for the same price and install linux on it.
6 hour battery life for $200 is worth the price to me. This is essentially a chromebook without the google bs.
@Omega That has not been my experience but If you want this I'm not stopping you from buying it.
@@rickyrigatoni RUclips is owned by Google. I also wouldn't buy a Chromebook though.
@Tony Lewis It's a piece of junk for coding.
The keyboard and the chassis feel much nicer than your typical $200 laptop. Also, you would struggle to find an x86 laptop for £200 which charges over a regular 5v usb type C. Plus it's just interesting to see what you can do with different architectures
Seriously considering this laptop. Thanks.
HP Stream 14 with AMD/vega APU is the same price and ALOT better.
Would love to see retro arch and malls testing on this. Maybe compare FPS with the Lenovo?
@@mikehensley78 no it's not it's more expensive
@@ross5200 No, i bought 2 of them for my kids. i paid $209 each tax n all.
@@ross5200 i just googled them again... they are 200 - $230 depending on where you buy it from. AMD A4-9120e - 4GB RAM - AMD Radeon R3 HP Stream 14. even if you could only find it for $230 its still a better machine than one with an ARM CPU.
Use firefox and h264ify for better video playback. When I was running chrome, I could barely watch 4k videos, it was skipping frames and everything. But with firefox and h264ify, I can watch 4k video flawlessly. The only thing is that h264ify only supports youtube, as most streaming sites already use h264 as their main codec.
I liked the white color of Pine64. So In my personal opinion there should be a color variant of Pinebook Pro as a white also. Thanks for review.
Looking forward to your emulation video.
"you won't notice that we dropped 70 frames"... Yes I will... I was the one to notice someone messed up a render on an intro scene and it was dropping one frame.
Oh you got me excited. I thought they were back in stock.
@@adamschackart6859 how long is forever ordered mine 3 weeks ago
@@Eddthompson I ordered mine late March. The website said they estimated shipping in mid May 2020.
It is beyond me why top phone manafacturers dont place their phone motherboards, peripherals etc into a laptop shell they only have to figure how to interface it with the bigger screens and would open up a new market for way more powerful android or linux laptops than this.
Or just sell the mother boards as a high end single board computer.
Because hardware is the easy part. Creating a marketable ecosystem is far far harder.
Michael Graham Samsung galaxy tab with the desktop mode is just that
The Debian os is good for installing recalbox in docker, Manjaro is good for an all around os for everyday use
It seems like the accepted solution to get more performance/usability is to install Manjaro. Would definitely be interested in a video going over that. Not sure if it's a process for mere mortals.
Maybe with the full review post a top 5 reasons/uses/positives for the Pinebook Pro?
Oh hell no. I'm still dealing with PTSD from trying to daily-drive Linux on an ARM CPU back in 2014. Sticking with IA86 until I see a modern PowerPC chipset hit the market.
OpenPOWER is too powerful for slim laptop thernal cooling constraints but if people adopt OpenPOWER desktops, a laptop won't be far behind.
Given that the specs are pretty similar to the Rockpro 64 and the performance so far seems to be about the same, I'd imagine that emulation performance will be nearly identical between the two.
Can you do a video of it running batocera or retroarch? I want to know how well it handles emulation.
I would like to see this as well.
I think you will have a better experience with a more up to date distro like Arch or Manjaro, Debian is always at least 1 year if not more behind on packages and it's Kernel. Debian 10 runs like Kernel 4.19. A good tool for Linux while testing is "inxi" which can be installed on debian/ubuntu distros with "sudo apt install inxi" once installed in the terminal just type "inix -b" this will give you an entire read out of the Kernel drivers you can even look to see what codecs are installed. If you want even more info just type "inxi --help" this will tell you the other commands to see what all inxi can do. Also inxi comes by default in manjaro.
watching this on a pinebook pro -_-)
i want one >_
@@ferbyfurben9640 looks like you can pre order one now but your have to wait a while to get it.
I love it but I don’t want a Linux OS that I have to keep connected to the internet. Great review 👍🏿
it comes shipped with manjaro linux nowadays which is really sweet
I would love to see how well this works as a thinclient for Parsec/Shadow.
Could you check if youtube is using hardware acceleration? It is not easy to get this working without proper drivers, and customized patched chromium. Even in x86 machines, chromium needs a patch to enable hardware decoding. I was surprised when I tried to play a 4k video in my x86 Debian machine with chromium and found that the CPU usage was at maximum. To solve that I needed to compile some drivers myself because this is not officially supported by Debian nor chromium.
yeah, that's true
also Firefox doesn't use Hardware decoding by default (also on x86 based machines)
although that is going to change when they release their Wayland version (but only for Wayland, not Xorg)
It's clear that RUclips isn't using hardware acceleration. I also have the Samsung Chromebook Plus with the same Rockchip RK3399 and it can play 1440p without any problem.
Were you able to get the manjaro on it? Couldn't find any follow up videos.. still in the works? Thanks for the great content.
Great alternative to a Chromebook.
This laptops are future hackintosh mashines...
Manjaro performs better only because of newer software. Otherwise, Debian is okay. Quick tip, use zram to make do with 4GB.
Or use Armbian where latest kernel and ZRAM is stock.
as usual with arm sbc, gpu and video encoders/decoders are always an afterthought
Have a look at the Odroid C4 with CoreElec. They claim it can play 4K HDR and 8K.
I just looked at their website. They have an adaptor to add an internal ssd or m.2 only 6 bucks. I was glad to see they do a UK keyboard. When the lock down is over I will get one. For now saving every penny for holiday when we're allowed out. Stay safe everyone, live long and prosper.
This would be amazing for camping
Id leave the computer at home while camping, it’s the last disconnect from tech and into nature
Isn't the point of camping to get out into nature?
This pc is the best for people who are afraid to migrate to linux,
and when it comes installed, the most tedious step to install linux will be saved, namely: the boot, gpt, mbr, partitioning and others
Hadn't heard of this one in awhile. Time to refresh my memory.
I bought a £350 Windows laptop even replacing hard drive with SSD and putting linux on the cpu would 100% if I opened any browser and I was lucky to get 480p, that was barely over a year ago!
Whatever you bought Was not worth the 350£ and you got ripped off. I have an old 2005 laptop powered by a single core Celeron M and 2gb of ram here which does 720p on RUclips with Windows 10, all of that on its original 2006 harddrive.
@@kjjustinXD I think it was purely just a bad laptop, I took it apart as wanted to upgrade the hard drive for the SSD and the motherboard was about the size of a 8 inch tablet and most of that was just connectors so who knows it may of been ARM based. I think it was capable of 720 or 1080p it was just so sluggish you had to let it buffer for a while as the cpu was maxed out. I took it back a week later and spent £50 more on a AMD laptop that ran silky smooth with 1080p vidoes and could use PS2 emulators on it, but the graphics card was so useless it couldn't even play San Andreas above 15fps yet I could 1080p even harder to emulate PS2 games.
I have to point out to many tech reviewers: Dell Optiplex i3s 2012-2011 models USED here in the philippines costs > 200usd just the CPU only. They are only sold by resellers and you cannot get any warranty on this. Minimum wage here is 150usd/mo. The circumstance in the Philippines is similar to Indonesia, vietnam, thailand, and much of india. Not to forget the billions also that are in worse situation in Africa. The strange tech that are at or below 200usd is really geared towards people who are in that world that have households (averaging 5-7) and need $1 a day to survive per person (5-8usd per day x 30 days = 150-240usd per month).
FYI: "Pine64 offers a bunch of bistro for the PineBook Pro Like Debian, Manjaro Arm, Kali, and even Android." In the description you have to change 'bistro' to 'distros' matey, thanks :)
AFAIK the problem with the video is the lack of optimized hardware codec. so the power of the machine is actually better than it seems.
I would wait for the 8gb ram future model. I bought a Chromebook with FHD display and almost the same price. But it seems to perform better than this pinebook.
I totally get all the jokes about schools buying cheap knockoff computers but I think this laptop would be great for a coding class at least.
Should include power consumption stats/test in your reviews so we can have an idea if the computer would be a good option for off-grid or power outages.
It should be great for that considering you can charge it with USB type C. There is plenty of solar power banks that could charge this device.
ryzen laptops for $400 and even less if bought on sale can do way way more and can run most games like GTA5. skimping too much and you get too little. you get what you pay for! as a gpu analogy this is like getting a GT710 when getting a GT1030 gives you playable frame rates versus picture slide slow on the gt710. always go for the sweeter spot!
I use mine as a more flexible chromebook-like device and I love it. I think that some of the major issues (screen tearing, frame drops in RUclips) will be corrected in the future. I've had mine since November 2019 and I really love the battery life and light weight. I'm looking forward to trying the new Manjaro build too.
better than a chromebook
I wounder how a notebook with an older SD 845 would perform and how expensive it would be?
it's almost like there is conspiracy going on ... get cheap soc .. or a overly price phone .. nothing in between
Biggest pro is that you don't get the guilt from _technically_ paying for a Windows license.
I ordered mine a week ago with the m. 2 adapter
@Peter Z thank you
About the Lenovo: I have the bigger brother of it. Awesome little machines :)
Imagine a Linux laptop with Snapdragon 888, a real MacBook competitor.
I plan on getting an Ideapad Duet and putting Debian ARM on there. I'm hoping projects like Pinebook Pro will have some cross over benefits for my project
@Fredd Colour Green Yea I've had to turn of secure boot for all my Debian laptops. I've watched a couple tutorials on installing Linux on Chromebooks that require the installation of a custom bootloader. I'm not really psyched about using chromebooks but I want to be an early adopter to arm based Linux. and hopefully it is powerful enough to be a daily driver.
"Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect." hmm
Read that too and have second thoughts on buying because i've seen dead pixels and they are annoying.
Roberto Martin how in the hell dead pixels isn't a defect
Like the concept from pine64 , they just need a better cpu&gpu
Arm laptops sold without OS ready to install Linux (any distro) will be the future!!
I see Bojack Horseman and i just push the like button
Macbook Air M1 with Manjaro ARM? :D
Pass...thanks for the great video ETA
Let's see some games on this!
Linux is not an stand alone OS, it's just the kernel
Hi, this is a bit off topics. I stumble upon a budget gaming phone Realme C3 which has the potential of emulation. I would love to see it tested out in your channel.
Linux FTW!
I'm surprised the battery life isn't longer, given the nature of the CPUs. I'd like to see someone come close to what Apple is doing with ARM.
what about a review of the pinephone ?
Hello everyone, so I have 17 dual graphics laptop is not very easy to carry around and i am afraid of breaking it; so I need a tiny cheep laptop. I bought pinebook pro 10 month ago. In the beginning it was not so great; the touchpad was like ride a chihuahua with your feet, problem with the battery, and performance issue. But after the make a big update and everything work fine. I can also run eclipse and netbeans. I am very surprised for what you can do with 200 dollar pc.
Good for you! Technology has come a very long ways when it comes to computational power and electrical efficency. If you are ever in need of a cheap and power efficent desktop check out the raspberry pi 4. I personally bought a cheap used thinkpad and booted LM20.1 on it
@etaprime i know it's not "emulation based" but have you looked at the matching PineTime watch?