Battery and hard drive upgrades et al.

[Corkonian]

I have to slowly shake my head.
WTF are people expecting? This is first and foremost a Linux machine. You can customize the OS and remove any slack to make it just as big or small as you need it. 64 GB will be great, if you just keep it sensible. Unless, of course, you're going to cut the next blockbuster movie on it. But then you are basically on the wrong boat anyway.
It is, what it is. A cheap appliance thÖat you can toss around as you like without the fear of losing $$$$$.  A tool to learn and improve on your Linux - and that includes different desktop environments and slimming down the system. A tool for things to do you don't want to use your valuable MacBook for.
The original PineBook is a tad too far on the lo-spec side now. There are major webpages that don't load on it due to lack of RAM. The PBP will rectify that.
If you want a workhorse, get yourself a Thinkpad x220 from a refurb, put in max RAM and an SSD and buy some spare batteries. You will be able to put any OS - Linux, WIndows or MacOS - on it and work with it productively. And you will possibly pay less than you will pay for a PBP.
PBP is, what the PineBook should have been in the first place. A tinkering machine. A machine to play around without the fear of losing valuable data, A machine to break and fix. The PineBook was broken in too many ways, lack of RAM, flimsy plastic cases ... but it was a start, a concept that points to the right direction.
I have great hopes for the PBP. Still, it won't replace my MacBook or my Surface, but - like it's ancestor - it will follow me to places that I would not dare to take my MacBook to; and this time it hopefully won't disintegrate like the PineBook did....

Sure, but I did pretty good with a ten year old discarded gateway single core laptop with two gigs of RAM running Enlightenment w/ Slackware and GhostBSD. I got some additional years out of it once I sourced good batteries. The machine was a good little work horse, but one day I had a bad day and the machine did not survive it. No fault of the machine. It was shaky, but mostly held together. I can do a lot with a little. But if the pro is not reliable, then it's pointless. I like supporting underdogs who have the heart in the right place, but I will use the machine to death.

The original Pinebook did well for me, I used to have a 14" and a 11". The 14" died in an attempt to switch the display to a high reselution panel and the 11" literally drowned. Am I sad? Yes. Am I devastate that I destroyed $$$$? Obviously, I wasn't happy, but frankly, for $99 I could not care less. Both survived for much longer than expected.
Will I hope for more, for a better Hackbook? Obviously yes. Will I expect Macbook level of power and quality? No! The Pinebook Pro is going to be my hackable toy that I will take everywhere I don't want to take my MacBook or my Surface.
Sure, functionality is to be expected. Better quality than the Pinebook, too. But for $199 it still is a hacking toy, albeit this time more software hacking than hardware hacking.