A $99 Laptop?! - Pinebook

If you go to amazon and look for a

laptop

, you sort by price from low to high, the cheapest option is $146, so if you go, that's not low enough and you turn on aliexpress, it's about $127, but what if you I said you can get it? a fully functional

laptop

for only 99 US dollars, you could tell me, gee Linus, there's surely some kind of catch and you'd be a smart buyer because while this thing really is a fully functional laptop for 99 dollars, it has one big problem . Check it out, so this is Pine's book, it comes from the single board computer company pine64 and at first glance it looks basically like any other, you know, a copy of the 2008 MacBook design.

It comes in a couple of flavors, so ours. It is the 11.6 inch version which comes with an IPS display and then there is a separate 14 inch version which has a TN panel. The good thing about the 14-inch version is that it has a larger touchpad, thinner bezels, and is practically full size. 10 keyless keyboard, while this one is actually quite squished so it has a short backspace button, it has these little arrow keys that you'll probably get used to, but what you won't get used to is the shifts, now this one I think it's short. Shifting left is actually standard somewhere.

I will never move to that country. Sorry, but this one, how are you supposed to get used to that? Overall, the feel of the keyboard is surprisingly good, like you've seen laptops that cost three, four, five times that. This is a lot more flexible on your keyboard overall, so there's something to be clear about, but it's actually not that bad: it weighs about a kilogram and then you have a 0.3 megapixel camera here on top. Actually, it's quite reasonable. by 2019 standards, microphone and headphone combo with micro SD expansion, 3.5 millimeter jack, USB Type A, which is nice to have another one of those DC inputs, so no USB Type C, come on guys , and then due to the low profile of the machine we are stuck with a mini hdmi which, to be fair, gives us hdmi output which is good, but very likely to break.

This is not really a very robust connector in terms of internal specifications. If we open this up, let's take a look. Let's do it. and there it is, oh, arm cortex a53 64-bit quad-core 1.2 gigahertz processor, two gigabytes of lp ddr3 RAM, 16 gigs of emmc memory. I'm vaguely pointing at this little plaque because it's all here and then us. We have uh n wireless with bluetooth 4.0 and you can see that your antennas are connected here. Also of note is our amazing stereo speakers and oh yeah look at this you can see everything here so here's our magnet for the uh for the. top cover to keep it closed, there are their microphones, they have dual microphones, so one array microphone is enough for gaming, although let's see how much laptop you get for 99 dollars, give it a second now that we have booted up, we are looking at a neon kde desktop linux we see that there's actually no support for five gigahertz wi-fi, so only 2.4 gigahertz is kind of to be expected on something with such low specs, pause per second, yeah, can we turn up the brightness?

We don't want to get any closer, yeah, okay, the website load time isn't spectacular, it's hard to tell how much of the slow experience we're having right now is software and how much is hardware, because the guys at Pine 64 acknowledge that this version of KDE Neon is quite outdated, like it has tons of problems, like the fact that it takes forever to move the cursor around the screen, you can't adjust the screen brightness, but on the other hand , the CPU in this thing has a mip score of about 11,000, which puts it somewhere close to Sony's PlayStation 3 in terms of performance with the GPU.

It's actually a Mali 400 mp2, which gives it the performance of the original Xbox, so you weren't even expecting this, James. I can't even load youtube.com. Luckily our journey doesn't end here because the good folks at manjaro have a specific version of their OS that you can load using etcher onto a micro SD card and boot from there, which I believe. We should probably get it right now, it's still slow but it's brighter, yeah, yeah, so now that we're at it, let's see if our brightness adjustment works now. Hey, okay, this is already a better experience, but with the better touchpad and brighter screen, let's see if YouTube manages to load it all.

Okay, this is much better, but I think the question we need to answer now is okay. Let's say I'm willing to learn how to use Linux. Is this usable? I'm going to log into my Gmail. Maybe I'll get some LibreOffice here. Try watching some YouTube videos. Let's turn the volume to 100. I can't hear it at all. Okay, so this is weird. After some fiddling around in the audio settings, we found that. We can change our maximum volume to 150 percent, so why don't we try that first? Nothing, oh maybe we can change, hey, that's very quiet, okay, so there are a couple of problems, the fact that it was configured to use the wrong audio device out of the box is not the end of the world, that's the kind of thing that can be fixed pretty quickly but it has other problems so technically it has stereo speakers but this is supposed to be the front right speaker and this is the front left speaker which you can actually What I hear get out of this when I press number two is that at one hundred percent volume on both the app and the device it is too quiet and if we turn it up to 150 it sounds like this, to be fair, although if I was wearing headphones, the YouTube playback It's quite reasonable, although we're not in HD yet, so let's try 720p, we're losing a lot of frames here, okay, let's go back to 480p, even 480p in full screen mode, if your goal is purely watch youtube videos and absorb the information, they can do it.

Let's turn on email or something. So I'm not going to lie to you guys, this is not a great experience. I even just did a search in Gmail, so I just clicked on an email. Let's give it a hot second here, so this is like a cached page, let's actually go back, so at this point I think it's pretty clear that the hardware here is not really ready for the daily driver and by the way, if you were thinking, Well, maybe I could just play. like old games or something, unfortunately because it has a mali gpu and mallee drivers are not open source, well 3D acceleration is practically not available in any arc based image like manjaro, lima drivers are like an engineering driver reverse but they are not complete so you could install them on Pine Book but you would have to recompile the kernel first and frankly it wouldn't be a good experience at all, it's not something we would recommend for our final project as we actually try install Windows now, as we mentioned before, this is an Arm-based CPU, but Microsoft has been working on armed versions of Windows for over half a decade.

Now remember the Surface RT was a long time ago so we'll give it a shot maybe see if Windows can save this experience so to do this and this is our first attempt at this actually this is the only thing that doesn't We prepared before the video, we used a tool called Windows on Arm Implementer and an image that is actually designed to be used with raspberry pi, which is also based on arms but it is not a pine book, so we are really not sure if this will work there's only one way to find out so what we're trying to do now is figure out how to get it to boot with this because when we launched manjaro on a microsd it just started automatically but now it doesn't work.

I tried f2, I tried f8, I tried f10, actually f11, f11 comes up every now and then, let's try it. delete, come on baby, try f1, i need help. Something is up given how completely unsuitable this is for everyday controller use and the fact that our initial attempts to install a raspberry pi version of Windows didn't work. We decided to abandon it because reality. It's Pine 64 and it flatly says what it's not for. This is not a device to use as your current work or school laptop and if that's what you're looking for you probably need to look elsewhere, what it's really designed for is as a bass.

Low cost all in one solution for arm linux and bsd developers who are looking to develop the soc or are interested in some part of it such as the gpu for example an example is the lima project so that doesn't want Saying there isn't potential for something like this to achieve low cost daily driver status in the future, in fact the next pine book pro might be a better daily driver, it will be 200 instead of 100, it's based on the rk3399 , so it's a six-core hexa core soc with two a72s at two gigahertz, four gigs of ram instead of two, 14-inch ips panel, magnesium alloy body instead of a plastic one, a usbc, so Which, in short, this is not what we expected and that should not be a surprise because we were told. which wasn't what we expected it to be, but if you clicked on this and now you're disappointed because you said, oh, I was really hoping for a 100 laptop option, we managed to find a couple more things that look a little more convincing, so This cheap Windows machine at Walmart is only $140, has a touchscreen, is convertible, and only has 32GB of storage, so the Windows update will likely eventually wipe it out, but it looks pretty usable. the price and this Chromebook on Newegg is a little bit more expensive, it's over two hundred dollars and it's a Chromebook so you're going to have software limitations.

Finally, the third option, as we always love to mention it whenever someone is on a budget. something that gets used most of the time, you can get a used laptop somewhere like eBay, Craigslist or Kijiji, let it go anywhere for much cheaper than buying something new, especially if you're looking at Windows machines or Chromebooks in instead of a MacBook or something. those things hold their value incredibly well, so thanks for watching guys, if you didn't like this video you can hit that button, but if you did like it, hit like, subscribe or maybe consider checking out where to buy the things we feature, always and when the recipient is. audience at the link in the video description, also below is our merch store which has cool t-shirts like this and our community forum which you should totally join.