UBports on pine phone?

[Kevin Kofler]

That is completely not true.

Your denial is not going to make market realities any less true.

Note that I do not get any money from Pine64 (nor any discount on their products) for writing this. I am just a user.

You are forgetting Apple which was considered late to the Cell Phone Market. People are paying a premium for those phones and the OS which comes with it.

Wow, that is now really apples to oranges, or should I say, Apples to Pines! Apple did not start the iPhone coming from nowhere. They were already a tech giant, with loads of money from their huge sales of Mac(intosh) computers for decades, when they even started it. They had the hardware designers, operating system and user interface developers and a reputation for building user-friendly interfaces that helped attract users. They also found a completely empty market, since smartphones had not really taken off yet at that time. Now they make enough money from the iPhone sales alone to fund development of new models, even without all the other things they sell. Not to mention the app store monopoly enforced by locked-down hardware which is a huge source of profits (publishing fees, commission on each sale) for which Apple has to do very little work (just some censorship, everything else is done by the ISVs), a business model that is inherently incompatible with the openness Pine64 is propagating.

And you know what? People who purchase the PinePhone (PP) or PinePhone Pro (PPP) are paying premiums also for those phones and not even getting a fully functional OS. Last year, I bought a Samsung Android based phone which blows away the specs of PPP, but for the Price of the PP.

That, too, is an unfair comparison. Samsung produces its hardware in much higher volumes, so they have much lower production costs. Ask any company trying to produce hardware in low batches (be they Open Hardware companies, semi-open hardware companies such as Pine64 (which publishes some schematics, but not under a Free license, and whose hardware is unlocked for any software you may want to install), or just startups producing completely closed, but not (yet) mass-marketed hardware) and they will all tell you the same: It is really hard to get a foothold into the hardware market if you are not already an established player, because the smaller the batches, the more expensive per unit they are, but you cannot really preproduce huge batches if you have neither the spare money to anticipate production before even selling the first unit nor any idea how many of those devices are actually going to get bought. So some of those small companies accept only preorders, others like Pine64 produce a first batch for those who have preordered and then small batches to maintain a small stock without sitting on it for too long (which is more likely to work than a strict preordering-only policy if they want to sell to risk-adverse customers like me). Only the likes of Samsung can afford to mass-produce huge batches in advance and can expect to actually sell those fairly quickly. That is the main reason the Samsung phone has a much better value for the price, if you are happy with a more or less locked down phone with proprietary drivers.

And the last sentence brings up another reason that partly explains the price difference: Android phones can use pretty much any component designed for smartphones, because pretty much every component vendor has a proprietary driver blob for the Android kernel. Pine64, on the other hand, has to design with components that have FOSS drivers available (only the firmware is in some cases proprietary, the kernel and userspace drivers are all FOSS), which limits the choice of components and drives up the price.

Then Microsoft finally caught up in the mobile OS space with their Windows Phone 8. A really nice OS which finally gained some ground. Companies had been paying Microsoft a huge licensing fee to use that OS, and one could still get a phone with equal or better specs than the PP or PPP for the same or less price. I have a Windows 10 phone from 2016 (Alcatel One Touch Plus - even has a VoLTE modem) which I still use where I paid around 2/3 the price of the PP with specs which are a little better than the PP.

Yet even Microsoft had to give up against the Apple/Google duopoly! Except for Apple, all the mainstream smartphone companies ship Android (or some fork of AOSP, i.e., of Android). Microsoft has discontinued Windows Phone.

The tech from the PP is well over 10 years in age now. When is a price drop coming after nearly 4 years, and still no OS?

When masses of people buy the phone so that hardware can be produced in larger and cheaper batches. Which is not going to happen with the low customer satisfaction that can be seen on this and other forums. Chicken&egg problem.

This is sad, but it is just how capitalism works, unfortunately.

Oh, and  here is Wyze (not a tech giant - and for profit) with a fully functioning smart watch for about the same price as the Pine64 watch.

https://www.wyze.com/products/wyze-watch-44mm

How long has the Pine64 watch been out, and still no fully functioning OS?

Again, apples and oranges. The Wyze watch includes a completely proprietary OS, not hackable at all. There is no custom firmware for it, let alone a FOSS one. The Pine64 PineTime's whole point is to run a FOSS firmware.

If you do not care about Free Software and just want a working OS (even if it is proprietary and maybe even tries to lock you into a monopolistic app store), then Pine64 products are not for you. So please stop complaining and let those of us actually in the niche buy and use our Pine64 products. I can tell you that the PinePhone is by far the cheapest and easiest to obtain GNU/Linux smartphone I have ever seen. All the others were/are way more expensive and basically preorders-only (be it the old OpenMoko stuff or now the Librem 5).

I would also suggest that we stop this off-topic discussion here.