03-26-2021, 05:43 AM
(03-22-2021, 09:44 AM)moonwalkers Wrote: If I were to hazard a guess - it has to do with costs. I wouldn't be the first one to express an idea that by price-limiting their products Pine are painting themselves into a corner - they cannot get new units into the hands of the users since the shortages hit, and I have to wonder how are they financing their original R&D. Because all the economic breakdowns of the device costs I've seen show one of the biggest parts is actually amortized R&D cost, and it's the R&D that's needed to resolve the issues, not just QC alone - certain designs are just more prone to issues than others, given the same workmanship quality.
Please, keep in mind that Pine64 actually cannot function without the community, because pretty much the entire software support for all their products has been implemented by the community. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but the bad and weird part is that Pine64 now actually remains silent to the the community efforts aimed at product improvements.
(03-22-2021, 08:36 PM)Vasant Wrote: My suggestion for them would be to partner with a high volume Android phone/tablet manufacturer who is willing to release kernel and uboot code and resell them as development platform. Another benefit would be that we can have access to more recent SOC's built on new process technology.
That would be great, but IMHO that's never going to happen with the current state of IP protection. Unfortunately, nearly all embedded hardware manufacturers keep the internals of their SoCs and ASICs close to their chests, as a way to protect their IP.
