Should you buy a Pinebook Pro in 2022?
You might be one of those people on the fence if you should buy a Pinebook Pro or not. I’ve purchased one in 2020, played with it, got rid of it, then got a new one in 2022 when orders opened up, and have spent A LOT of time with it.
This might qualify me to answer the burning question: Should you buy a Pinebook Pro in 2022? Is it worth it? What are you signing up for?
The short answer is: No, probably not.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been rooting for the Pinebook Pro for years, and am a big fan of Pine64 as a company too. However, there are some glaring issues with the PBP that few people seem to be talking about or honest about. So if you get to the end of this article, and you still want one, GO FOR IT, you’re one of the few people that this is for. But I hope this at least gives you an honest view of where things are at.
What’s Good?
Before I get into the issues with the Pinebook Pro, let me first talk about what they got RIGHT with it.
- The price. In 2020, It was $199, and today it’s still only a modest $219. This puts it in range of most chromebooks. But this for a native Linux machine is appealing.
- The keyboard. It’s shocking how few laptop makers get this right. I do wish it was backlit, but don’t expect it for this price. Otherwise, it’s great. Keys are spaced out well, nice travel, etc. It’s basic, but works really well. One of my favorite keyboards, honestly.
- The screen. It’s not the brightest screen, but a 14.1" 1080 IPS panel is really quite nice at this price point, and it holds up.
- The power consumption. This runs / charges with 5v / 3a.. aka 15 WATTS! I was even able to power this off a backpacking solar panel on an overcast day. It sips electricity.
Those are great, but it’s about all the good things I can find to say about it after all the time spent in it’s glow.
Poor Performance
No one expects a $200 arm device to be an ultrabook, but most people (myself included), was hoping this could be a lightweight coding or web browsing machine. But sadly, the performance is just not there for either of those things. I found the stock Manjaro KDE to be almost unusably slow with painful lags in nearly every UI interaction you did. Even something simple like opening the menu, or launching krunner lags by noticeable seconds.
I tried mate, XFCE, i3 and even rolled my own Sway build to try and give it a chance to catchup, but speed always felt short of usable. It might be 6 cores, but they’re pretty slow cores, so things like web browsing make even replying to something in twitter feel like a big effort.
Again, I understand that it’s basically just a raspberry pi in a laptop shell, but I struggle to understand the use case for this machine. A simple browser octane benchmark showed that a cheap, $199 dual core celeron laptop was twice as fast. It’s just not good enough for nearly everything I was hoping to do with it.
Hardware / Firmware issues
If you ever played with a Pinebook Pro in the first couple years it came out, you probably noticed how terrible the trackpad was. Like people just would hook up an external mouse because it was hopeless. And if you were on something like sway / i3, you were annoyed by the fact that the super + arrow key wouldn’t work (at the firmware level)
The good news is that someone finally wrote proper firmware for the trackpad, and there is even a fix for the keyboard, but shockingly, even though these have been out for a while, the NEW Pinebook Pros still ship with the old broken firmware. So you’ve got to do the 3–4 step scary firmware flash with an external keyboard an the warning that you could brick the keyboard if you mess it up.
Even with the whole keyboard / trackpad thing aside, you’ll sometimes just get a “dead” machine where the power button does nothing. At which point, you need to take the bottom of the laptop off, hit the reset button.. some number of times (it varied for me), to hopefully get it back booting again. This kind of behavior is fine if it’s a one time thing, but it was a recurring issue for me.
Boot Headaches
They say, “you never know what you had until it’s gone”, and boy is that true with booting on the Pinebook Pro. Without a proper bios like you’d be used to in any x86 machine, the boot process feels like the Wild West of the 1990’s Linux days.
The machine comes with Manjaro KDE on the emmc and U-boot installed on the emmc too. If you throw in an SD card, you’d think it would boot from that, or at least give you the option… but you’d be wrong. It will just keep booting from the EMMC and not let you do anything else. The fix for this is, once again, taking the back panel off, physically removing or switching off the EMMC to force it to boot to your SD card. But then you’ll have to eventually flip the EMMC back on if you want to use it again.. and those reset buttons are usually needed between these changes. It’s a mess.
The great news is that these Pinebook Pro’s come with something called an SPI, which is a little “bios like” drive, where you can install an amazing thing called “Tow-Boot”. This will let you start up the machine, hit ESC, and select what you want to boot from! Like an actual computer.
Problem solved right? If only it were that easy. Because once Towboot is on there, booting anything from the SD card seems to work fine, but oddly only OLD OS images (pre 5.10 kernel) load from the EMMC, and anything newer will just fail to boot with no helpful message (even the “official” manjaro).
I’ve spend HOURRSSS on this problem and spoken to so many people in the community, and no one knows. And this is happening with both the 2020 and the 2022 model, so it’s not machine specific.
Lack of Progress
When I got the Pinebook Pro in 2020, I accepted that this was all new and uncharted territory. This was very much a “proof of concept” device, and I was an early adopter. I always assumed that if this “concept” worked, they’d iterate on it, and the next version will have better hardware and software support.
In the 2 years since the first and the current PBP, nothing has changed hardware wise (except the new ones have a slightly smaller battery). It’s hard to imagine anything in the tech world being the exact same in 2 years.
Software support has gotten slightly better, but the boot headaches I’ve been experiencing didn't’ seem to be an issue back in 2020. So in a strange way, it feels like it’s gotten worse.
Conclusion
Despite me being quite critical of the Pinebook Pro above, I DO love the machine. Or maybe better said, I WANT to love it. It brings me no pleasure to come here with this opinion. I wish the title of this article was “Why you need a Pinebook Pro in 2022”.
I’m giving this some tough love because I DO love it, and think it could be more than just some “gee whiz” device nerds buy and then put in the drawer, never to be used. I want it to truly succeed.
So if you’re an arm fan, or just want one for your collection, or are way smarter than me, maybe you’ll get on with this thing. I have seen people who seem to be perfectly happy. But the vast majority of the people I talk to, have quietly given up on it and moved on.
If all you’re after is a cheap, Linux friendly laptop that you can toss around and do casual things on, you’re better off with something like the Chuwi Hero or Gemini Book. The Celeron’s are cheap and slow, but still outpace the Pinebook Pro by quite a bit.
