Hypothetical Pine Phone 2.0?

[bcnaz]

There has been talk in the past about the possibility of upgrading the main board,
and
You already can upgrade the earlier versions to the 1.2b revision main board.

Though I wonder if the next main board will be a "fix" or an upgrade.?

[ryo]

Honestly, I think the old/slow hardware is actually a good thing.
Every time we make hardware higher end, developers are getting lazy and crank up the requirements along with it, so you'll be forced to buy the newer model too whether you like it or not.
Remember the days when you had to have 128 MB of RAM to play the most hardware exhausting 3D video game ever?
Now all of the sudden we need an 8 GB of RAM PC just to be able to open a few tabs in Google Chrome.

Meanwhile if the specs remain low, app developers will have no other choice than to make lightweight, native apps without ads, *anal*ytics, Javascript/Electron, a 8k MP4 file forced-autoplaying in the background, or some other unnecessary bloat attached to it.

Even if it means to get more people on board, would be nice to get more Linux users and people in places where human rights are heavily abused like North Korea, China, Hong Kong, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia.

[zetabeta]

Honestly, I think the old/slow hardware is actually a good thing.
Every time we make hardware higher end, developers are getting lazy and crank up the requirements along with it, so you'll be forced to buy the newer model too whether you like it or not.
Remember the days when you had to have 128 MB of RAM to play the most hardware exhausting 3D video game ever?
Now all of the sudden we need an 8 GB of RAM PC just to be able to open a few tabs in Google Chrome.

Meanwhile if the specs remain low, app developers will have no other choice than to make lightweight, native apps without ads, *anal*ytics, Javascript/Electron, a 8k MP4 file forced-autoplaying in the background, or some other unnecessary bloat attached to it.

Even if it means to get more people on board, would be nice to get more Linux users and people in places where human rights are heavily abused like North Korea, China, Hong Kong, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia.

i'm still little pissed off lack of wifi ac. 2.4GHz is too congested. i activated 2.4GHz band just for pinephone.

for that internet browser, they have become memory hogs. some cases if i just shutdown a web browser, then all the cpu and ram waste goes away.

[Zebulon Walton]

i'm still little pissed off lack of wifi ac. 2.4GHz is too congested. i activated 2.4GHz band just for pinephone.

for that internet browser, they have become memory hogs. some cases if i just shutdown a web browser, then all the cpu and ram waste goes away.

I would agree that the lack of 5Ghz wifi is the hardware limitation that's most annoying. (Of course in a future model something faster than a potato for a CPU would be welcome as well. )

[ragreenburg]

Honestly, I think the old/slow hardware is actually a good thing.
Every time we make hardware higher end, developers are getting lazy and crank up the requirements along with it, so you'll be forced to buy the newer model too whether you like it or not.
Remember the days when you had to have 128 MB of RAM to play the most hardware exhausting 3D video game ever?
Now all of the sudden we need an 8 GB of RAM PC just to be able to open a few tabs in Google Chrome.

Meanwhile if the specs remain low, app developers will have no other choice than to make lightweight, native apps without ads, *anal*ytics, Javascript/Electron, a 8k MP4 file forced-autoplaying in the background, or some other unnecessary bloat attached to it.

Even if it means to get more people on board, would be nice to get more Linux users and people in places where human rights are heavily abused like North Korea, China, Hong Kong, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia.

I think the alternative to having developers support low end devices is that they just won't do it. They don't want to limit their apps/programs to what can be run on an outdated CPU with low RAM, they would rather just have it run however they want it to run which means that we don't get that app support anyway. Which is basically what we have right now.

[gamerminstrel]

Once the PineNote has helped get the Quartz64 board to full hardware support in the Linux kernel, I'm willing to bet Pine64 will consider making a new phone using the newer SoC. I don't know about using other better specs like a higher resolution screen though.

How many years from now this happens will probably depend on the ongoing chip shortage as well as the state of maturity for software on the current pinephone. And considering the PineNote is $400+ now, a newer phone using similar hardware could be similar in cost.

[ryo]

i'm still little pissed off lack of wifi ac. 2.4GHz is too congested. i activated 2.4GHz band just for pinephone.

for that internet browser, they have become memory hogs. some cases if i just shutdown a web browser, then all the cpu and ram waste goes away.

WiFi:
That's a good reason indeed.
Though I use the Ethernet cable through the dock while at home, but a phone not being a stationary desktop PC is a valid argument.

Browser:
From my own experimenting, you can lower the memory usage by a lot by using a browser without extension support, disabling JS, distrusting Cloudflare's SSL root certificate, using your PC's hosts file to block all the ads and analytics domains, along with all Google, Facebook, and Twitter owned domains.
It might (partially) break 95% of the whole normie internet/clearnet/censorweb (and 4% of the Tor, I2P, and Freenet internet, and 100% of the IPFS internet, and 1% of the Gopher, Gemini, and Finger internet), but the current internet can just die anyway (and I'm a web dev myself by the way).

It's not just the browser's fault, the problem lies on a lot of sides.
The use of MITM spyware like Cloudflare and Fastly, the use of CDNs (too lazy to self host resources), the use of Javascript (because normal websites are no longer cool apparently), way too many ads, analytics software, and all of that cause so much harm in the first place.

And I didn't even mention the "mobile-app-wanabee" web designs that force you scroll hours on a web page just to read 1 sentence you're looking for, even more unbearable if they use things like smooth scroll (because apparently there's something wrong with the normal scroll functionality?) and/or infinite scroll (because simply using pagination is no longer cool?).

I think the alternative to having developers support low end devices is that they just won't do it. They don't want to limit their apps/programs to what can be run on an outdated CPU with low RAM, they would rather just have it run however they want it to run which means that we don't get that app support anyway. Which is basically what we have right now.

If you're like me who run multiple apps at all times, then lightweight is the way to go even on a high end gaming PC.
I'm having a high end gaming PC (by 2015 definitions though), and I'm still careful about system resources and I still avoid soyware like a plague.
Because not everyone has the money to buy themselves a Core i21 processor with 512 PB of RAM and a 9000 Tbps internet connection just to find a recipe online.

It's perfectly possible to make highly advanced and good looking apps with minimal system resources, you just have to use ANSI C with some lightweight GUI library rather than Electron/Node/React/HTML5/CSS3/ES6 and than adding lots of telemetry on top of all the telemetry these libraries on their own already bring for example.

[ragreenburg]

i'm still little pissed off lack of wifi ac. 2.4GHz is too congested. i activated 2.4GHz band just for pinephone.

for that internet browser, they have become memory hogs. some cases if i just shutdown a web browser, then all the cpu and ram waste goes away.

WiFi:
That's a good reason indeed.
Though I use the Ethernet cable through the dock while at home, but a phone not being a stationary desktop PC is a valid argument.

Browser:
From my own experimenting, you can lower the memory usage by a lot by using a browser without extension support, disabling JS, distrusting Cloudflare's SSL root certificate, using your PC's hosts file to block all the ads and analytics domains, along with all Google, Facebook, and Twitter owned domains.
It might (partially) break 95% of the whole normie internet/clearnet/censorweb (and 4% of the Tor, I2P, and Freenet internet, and 100% of the IPFS internet, and 1% of the Gopher, Gemini, and Finger internet), but the current internet can just die anyway (and I'm a web dev myself by the way).

It's not just the browser's fault, the problem lies on a lot of sides.
The use of MITM spyware like Cloudflare and Fastly, the use of CDNs (too lazy to self host resources), the use of Javascript (because normal websites are no longer cool apparently), way too many ads, analytics software, and all of that cause so much harm in the first place.

And I didn't even mention the "mobile-app-wanabee" web designs that force you scroll hours on a web page just to read 1 sentence you're looking for, even more unbearable if they use things like smooth scroll (because apparently there's something wrong with the normal scroll functionality?) and/or infinite scroll (because simply using pagination is no longer cool?).

I think the alternative to having developers support low end devices is that they just won't do it. They don't want to limit their apps/programs to what can be run on an outdated CPU with low RAM, they would rather just have it run however they want it to run which means that we don't get that app support anyway. Which is basically what we have right now.

If you're like me who run multiple apps at all times, then lightweight is the way to go even on a high end gaming PC.
I'm having a high end gaming PC (by 2015 definitions though), and I'm still careful about system resources and I still avoid soyware like a plague.
Because not everyone has the money to buy themselves a Core i21 processor with 512 PB of RAM and a 9000 Tbps internet connection just to find a recipe online.

It's perfectly possible to make highly advanced and good looking apps with minimal system resources, you just have to use ANSI C with some lightweight GUI library rather than Electron/Node/React/HTML5/CSS3/ES6 and than adding lots of telemetry on top of all the telemetry these libraries on their own already bring for example.

Sure it is possible to do that but also most people don't and they don't want to. Which then would lead to us having less and less apps. Ultimately we can't pigeon hole people into only building apps a certain way or else you limit the people making apps because they have to learn a new language just to do it so we need a phone strong enough to support other ways of building an app. For example, I've made 2 (nearly done with a third) apps for the PP but if I had to do it with ANSI C then I would have made zero and I would never make one because the time it would take to competently learn that just to make an app that might get downloaded by 100 people isn't viable.

[ryo]

Sure it is possible to do that but also most people don't and they don't want to. Which then would lead to us having less and less apps. Ultimately we can't pigeon hole people into only building apps a certain way or else you limit the people making apps because they have to learn a new language just to do it so we need a phone strong enough to support other ways of building an app. For example, I've made 2 (nearly done with a third) apps for the PP but if I had to do it with ANSI C then I would have made zero and I would never make one because the time it would take to competently learn that just to make an app that might get downloaded by 100 people isn't viable.

Well, Golang is pretty OK too if ANSI C is too hard (though made by Google, but at least it doesn't output resource heavy apps by default).
And I'm sure there are many other languages out there that don't just waste memory just because the underlying platform (in the case of Electron apps, that's Chromium) takes a few GB of RAM just as soon as you start the app (a part of which you'll never get back until you reboot your PC/phone), and that's before any of your own code would load.
The reason why I used ANSI C as an example here is because it's as light as it can get (unless you make it bloated yourself obviously), but I didn't intend on saying it's the only option.