User experience

[moonwalkers]

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.

What I was talking about is that even with community actively contributing actual designs they would still need to do at least some of their own effort to integrate that, and that takes time and therefore money. But again, like I said before, I may be just talking out of my ass. All I can say with certainty is I would love to see Pine64 succeed releasing great hacker-friendly devices and fostering a great community, and if it requires to pay a bit more for their devices to help them achieve that - I'm willing to do so.