If you go on Amazon and search for a laptop, then sort by price, lowest to
highest, the cheapest option is $146.
Then if you go, that's not low enough,
and you fire up AliExpress, it's about $127.
But what if I told you that you can get a fully functional laptop for just $99?
You might say to me, "Gee, Lidus, surely
there's some kind of catch." And you'd be one smart shopper because while this
thing is truly a fully functional laptop
for $99, it's got one heck of a gotcha.
Let's take a look at it, shall we?
So this is the Pine Book. It comes from
the single board computer company Pine 64. And on first glance looks like
basically every other uh you know
MacBook design ripoff from 2008. It
comes in a couple of flavors. So ours is the 11.6 in version that comes with an
IPS display. And then there's a separate 14-in version that's got a TN panel
instead. What's nice about the 14-in version is that it does have a bigger
trackpad, thinner bezels, and pretty much a full size 10 keyless keyboard,
while this one is actually quite squished. So, it's got a short backspace
button. It's got these pinner little arrow keys. You'd probably get used to
that. What you won't get used to is the shifts. Now, this one, I think this
short left shift is actually standard somewhere. I will never move to that
country. Sorry. Uh, but this one, how
are you supposed to get used to that? Um, overall the the feel of the keyboard
is actually surprisingly good. Like, I've seen laptops that cost three, four,
five times this much that have more flex to their keyboard overall. So, I'm there
is some to be clear, but it's really not that bad. The thing weighs about a
kilogram and then it's got a.3 megapixel camera up here at the top. IO is
actually pretty reasonable for 2019
standards. Micro SD expansion, headphone microphone combo, 3 and 12 mm jack, USB
type A, which is nice to have. Another one of those uh DC input, so no USB
type-C. Come on, guys. And then due to the low
profile of the machine, we're stuck with a mini HDMI, which in fairness gives us
HDMI output, which is good, but um is
very likely to break. Uh this is really not a very robust connector. Uh in terms
of the internal specs, should we should we open this thing up? Let's have a look
at it. Let's do that. And there it is.
1.2 2 GHz quad core ARM Cortex A53 64bit
processor, 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 16 gigs
of eMMC memory. I'm just kind of pointing vaguely at this small board
because it's it's it's all on here. And then we've got wireless uh N with
Bluetooth 4.0. And you can see your antennas are hooked up over here. Also
of note is our spectacular stereo speakers. And oh yeah, look at this. You
can kind of see everything in here. So here's our magnet for the uh for the top
cover to keep it closed. There's your microphones. Does have dual microphones,
so like an array microphone. Enough foreplay, though.
Let's find out just how much laptop you get for 99 bucks.
Give her a sec. Now that we're booted, we're looking at
a KDE Neon Linux desktop. Uh we see that
there's actually no uh 5 GHz Wi-Fi support. So just 2.4 GHz.
That's kind of to be expected on something this low spec.
Pause for a second. Yep. This uh OS. Can we turn the brightness
up? We can't. You want to come in a little closer? Yeah.
Okay. The Ooh, webpage loading time is
not spectacular. It's hard to say how much of the slow experience we're having
right now is software and how much is hardware though because the Pine 64 guys
acknowledge that this build of KDE Neon
is quite out ofdate. Like it's got tons
of issues like the fact that it takes forever to move the cursor across the
screen. Uh you can't adjust the display brightness. But then on the other hand,
the CPU in this thing has a MIP score of about around 11,000, which puts it
somewhere in the neighborhood of Sony's PlayStation 3 in terms of performance
with the GPU. It's actually a Mali 400
MP2, which gives it about the performance of the original Xbox. So,
I'm not even Were you expecting this, James? I'm not even able to load
YouTube.com. Fortunately, our journey doesn't end here, though, because the
good folks at Mangaro have a specific build of their OS that you can load up
using Etcher on a micro SD card and boot
to that instead, which I think we should probably do right about now. It's still
slow, but it's brighter, right? Yes.
Yes, it is. So, now that we're in, let's see if our brightness adjustment works
now. Hey. All right. So, this is already
a better experience, but with the better trackpad and the brighter display. Let's
see if YouTube even manages to load at all.
Okay, this is a lot better. But I think
the question that we need to answer now is, okay, let's say that I'm willing to
learn to use Linux. Is this usable? So, I'm going to get
logged into my Gmail. Um, maybe get some
Libra Office on here. Um, try and watch
some YouTube videos. Let's see.
Volume at 100%.
I can't hear it at all. Okay, so this is weird. After some dinking around in the
audio settings, we found that we can change our maximum volume to 150%. So,
why don't we try that first?
Nothing. Oh, maybe we can change Hey.
similar. Wow, that's really quiet.
3D space. Okay, so a couple problems. Um, the fact
that it was configured to use the wrong audio device out of the box. Not the end
of the world. That's the kind of thing that you can fix pretty quickly. But
it's got some other issues. So, it does technically have stereo speakers, but it
figures this is the front right speaker
and this is the front left speaker. You can actually hear it coming out of this one when I press
right. Issue number two is that at 100% volume
in both the application and the device,
it's way too quiet. And if we crank it to 150%, well, it sounds like this.
Now, I want to talk about the size. So, in fairness to it, though, if I was
using headphones, the YouTube playback is actually pretty
reasonable. Although we aren't at HD yet, so let's try 720p. We are dropping
a lot of frames here.
Okay, let's go back to 480p. Even 480p
in full screen mode chugs.
If your objective is purely just to watch YouTube videos and absorb the
information, you can do it. Let's uh fire up email or
something then. I'm not going to lie, guys. This is not a great experience. uh
even just performing a search in Gmail. So, I just clicked an email. Let's give
her a hot second here.
So, this is like a cached page. Let's go
back.
Really? It's still loading. So, at this point, I
think it's pretty clear that the hardware in here is not really
daily driver ready. Um, and by the way,
if you were thinking, "Oh, well, maybe I could just play like ancient games on it
or something," unfortunately, because it's got a Mali GPU and the Mali drivers
are not open source. Well, 3D acceleration's pretty much not available
on any archbased images like Mangaro,
uh, the Lima drivers are like a reverse engineered driver, but they're not
complete. So you could install them on the Pine Book, but you'd have to
recompile the kernel first, and it frankly would not be a good experience
at all. Anyway, it's not something that we'd recommend. Our final project for
this is to actually try to install Windows. Now, as we mentioned before,
this is an ARMbased CPU, but Microsoft has been working on ARM versions of
Windows for over half a decade now. Remember the Surface RT? That was a long
time ago. So, we're going to 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
one thing we didn't prep before the video. Uh we used a tool called the
Windows on ARM deployer and an image
that's actually intended for use with the Raspberry Pi, which is also
ARMbased, but isn't a pine book. So, uh,
we're really not sure if this is going to work. Only
one way to find out. So, what we're trying to do right now is figure out how
to get it to boot to this because when we threw mangaro on a micro SD, it just
automatically booted to it. But now it's
not doing that. I tried F2. I tried F8. I tried F10. Actually, F11. F11 makes an
appearance once in a while. Let's try delete. Come on, baby. Try F1. I need
help.
Uh, something's happening.
Oh god. Given how utterly unsuitable this is for
daily driver use and the fact that our
initial attempts to install a Raspberry Pi build of Windows didn't work, um, we
decided to abandon it because the reality of it is Pine 64 flat out says
what this is not for. This is not a device to use as your current work or
school laptop. And if that's what you're after, you probably need to look
elsewhere. What it's really intended for is as a lowcost all-in-one solution for
ARM Linux and BSD developers that are looking to mainline the SOC or are
interested in some part of it like the
GPU for example. One example is the Lima project. So, that's not to say that
there's no potential for something like this to achieve lowcost daily driver
status in the future. In fact, the upcoming Pinebook Pro could be a better
daily driver. It's going to be 200 rather than $100. It's based on the RK
3399. So, it's a hexaore SOC, six cores
with two A72s at 2 GHz, 4 gigs of RAM
instead of two. Uh, 14-in IPS panel,
magnesium alloy body instead of the plastic one, USBC. So, in summary, this
thing isn't what we hoped it was, and that shouldn't be a surprise because
they told us that it wasn't what we hoped it was. But if you clicked into
this and you're disappointed now cuz you were like, "Oh, I was really kind of hoping for a $100 laptop option." We did
manage to find a couple other things that look a bit more compelling. So,
this cheap Windows machine over on Walmart is just 140 bucks. It's got a
touchcreen. It's a convertible and it's only got 32 gigs of storage. So, it's
likely that Windows Update will eventually be the death of it. But, it
does look fairly usable for the price. And this Chromebook over on Newegg is a
bit more expensive. if it's over $200 and it's a Chromebook, so you're going
to have software limitations. Finally, the third option, as we always love to
bring up anytime someone's on a budget, is picking up something used. A lot of
the time, you can get a used laptop somewhere like eBay or Craigslist or
Kijiji, LetGo, wherever, for much
cheaper than you could get something new. Especially if you're looking at Windows machines or Chromebooks as
opposed to a MacBook or something. Those things hold their value incredibly well.
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