"Let me start by making one thing clear – the current Pine Store isn’t going away and the pricing in the Pine Store will remain unchanged."
Then near the end:
"The Pine Store, in its current form, isn’t going anytime soon and the current community-oriented price point will not change."
I don't want to nitpick, but I believe some further clarification would be needed; those "in its current form" and "anytime soon" can make a world of difference.
Don't get me wrong, I totally support the move, although I'm not sure bumping the price to $299 for a device that isn't 100% ready yet would be a good move, especially considering that most customers in retail shops wouldn't be so sensitive about privacy, openness, etc. compared to online purchasers.
If I may offer an idea to recover some costs, why not making a backplane board for the PinePhone mainboard, with screws, flat cables to the mainboard and connectors to the external world? It could become both a development platform for the phone, and be used as a SBC for tinkering. Also all people who upgraded their phone to the 3GB/32GB version could make some use of their old mainboard.
It could become a normal procedure: phone is upgraded, old mainboard becomes useable again, everything is reused and nothing is thrown away. The message sent would be so different from other phone manufacturers and their planned obsolescence.
My take was that they were primarily referring more to the costs associated with handling the overwhelming tech support requests from less/non-technical users rather than what sounds like occasionally selling specific items at a loss.
It's the difference between user 'A' getting their device, having a problem and realizing that they need to do some searches/ask in the forums/get in a chat room to resolve it (i.e. self-support by the user... what many Linux users have been used to forever on the desktop/server side) and user 'B' having the same problem but deciding to contact Pine64 saying 'make this work!' (i.e. full support from the seller)
It's one thing to contact Pine64 if you've done your due diligence and determined you have a faulty device (or worse: found a design flaw.) It's something else entirely, and the thing they aren't set up to handle, to expect it to be a consumer ready/friendly solution.
OT - due to a desktop failure I recently handed my MacBook over to my wife and took my PBP off the shelf. The default OS is now Manjaro. And it’s great! The original default (Debian) was pretty janky. If you’re like me and relegated yours to occasional toy duties, spend an hour and get it upgraded. It’s a whole new experience.
Edit: on topic - the community support is generally quite good. I got great forum and Twitter response. I do think that the retail option will provide some incentive to polish up the product a bit. Can’t imagine giving one of these to my mom yet.
Honestly I hadn’t even heard of Manjaro until I saw that it was the new PBP default image. I’m not familiar with the drama. Sorry. It seems to be a smooth product so I do hope they work it out.
I appreciate the challenge they face, and this attempt at a solution. If their retail arm does succeed better than anticipated, that would be a welcome bonus and richly deserved success that could augment the FOSS investment.
In a sense this is a messaging problem leading to mismatched expectations, even when they have clear disclaimers on their product page. I wonder what alternative solutions might look like. Maybe advertise “community discount codes” prominently among Linux community forums and websites, so that only those who’re familiar with the online support community and asking for help will be likely to use those codes (rather than some naive consumer seeking to score a bargain). They could even mention on the product page that prominent Linux community forums should be a source for the relevant discount code (which might help introduce and “on board” newbies to Linux/FOSS communities).
It's funny, there was a goofy toy computer called the "DevTerm" that popped up on the top of HN a couple times recently. It was more expensive than this, had a terrible non-hinged design, and was about $50 more than this, likely with comparable or worse performance.
IMO for $199 with a full clamshell and ARM Linux... this is the real deal if you want to learn to code on the cheap or just have an inexpensive laptop for dev tasks.
I think this is probably a mistake, as I doubt people who don't know they're purchasing a hobbyist/selfsupported device will know or care about the difference between "community pricing" and "retail pricing".
And, on the flip side, I would adore a store that was accessible over SSH. (That is, it's not just selecting against non-techies; some of us more technical folks would see it as an improvement over a web UI)
Yeah I get the same vibe from the whole thing. If someone can't read the obvious disclaimers on the store that the device is community driven and to expect some work to make it run, what hope is there that they will understand they HAVE to pay that 10$ increase?
A similar model worked for Red Hat, where you got the software free but if you needed support you paid. This is like that, but with hardware. I think it will work out fine.
This I think is an excellent model and has worked for FOSS communities in the past. One example of a similar strategy is RHEL, where you pay for support rather than software. Of course with hardware it is different, you will pay for the hardware, but the price increase for consumer purchased hardware reflects additional cost of customer support. I think this is a viable and ethical business model.
On another note, I hope to one day see projects like pine64 specifically using RISC V architecture.
They just released their first product using Risc-V: the Pinecil soldering iron. Honestly, RISC-V or not, I'm just planning to use mine for soldering...
Readit News
https://www.pine64.org/2020/12/02/pine-store-community-prici...
"Let me start by making one thing clear – the current Pine Store isn’t going away and the pricing in the Pine Store will remain unchanged."
Then near the end:
"The Pine Store, in its current form, isn’t going anytime soon and the current community-oriented price point will not change."
I don't want to nitpick, but I believe some further clarification would be needed; those "in its current form" and "anytime soon" can make a world of difference.
Don't get me wrong, I totally support the move, although I'm not sure bumping the price to $299 for a device that isn't 100% ready yet would be a good move, especially considering that most customers in retail shops wouldn't be so sensitive about privacy, openness, etc. compared to online purchasers.
If I may offer an idea to recover some costs, why not making a backplane board for the PinePhone mainboard, with screws, flat cables to the mainboard and connectors to the external world? It could become both a development platform for the phone, and be used as a SBC for tinkering. Also all people who upgraded their phone to the 3GB/32GB version could make some use of their old mainboard. It could become a normal procedure: phone is upgraded, old mainboard becomes useable again, everything is reused and nothing is thrown away. The message sent would be so different from other phone manufacturers and their planned obsolescence.
It's the difference between user 'A' getting their device, having a problem and realizing that they need to do some searches/ask in the forums/get in a chat room to resolve it (i.e. self-support by the user... what many Linux users have been used to forever on the desktop/server side) and user 'B' having the same problem but deciding to contact Pine64 saying 'make this work!' (i.e. full support from the seller)
It's one thing to contact Pine64 if you've done your due diligence and determined you have a faulty device (or worse: found a design flaw.) It's something else entirely, and the thing they aren't set up to handle, to expect it to be a consumer ready/friendly solution.
Edit: on topic - the community support is generally quite good. I got great forum and Twitter response. I do think that the retail option will provide some incentive to polish up the product a bit. Can’t imagine giving one of these to my mom yet.
https://www.armbian.com/pinebook-pro/
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/12332-pinebook-pro/page/3/
It is something you view as a non-issue or is it just not enough to make you look elsewhere? I'm genuinely curious.
Best.
In a sense this is a messaging problem leading to mismatched expectations, even when they have clear disclaimers on their product page. I wonder what alternative solutions might look like. Maybe advertise “community discount codes” prominently among Linux community forums and websites, so that only those who’re familiar with the online support community and asking for help will be likely to use those codes (rather than some naive consumer seeking to score a bargain). They could even mention on the product page that prominent Linux community forums should be a source for the relevant discount code (which might help introduce and “on board” newbies to Linux/FOSS communities).
IMO for $199 with a full clamshell and ARM Linux... this is the real deal if you want to learn to code on the cheap or just have an inexpensive laptop for dev tasks.
Hopefully it works out for them.
BTW I have Mobian on mine. Wonder why they never mention it.
On another note, I hope to one day see projects like pine64 specifically using RISC V architecture.