12-26-2021, 08:28 AM
I bought an used Pinebook Pro as an addition to my trusty ThinkPad x230 a few weeks ago. I wanted a laptop with a somewhat better battery life (my x230 has a FHD mod and usually runs for 3-4h), a somewhat larger screen, and preferred it to be low on noises. After a few days of research I took the recent MacBook Air M1 as well as the Pinebook Pro into consideration, and ultimately decided to go with the PBP as I didn't need the extra performance the M1 offers on the go (I ssh into one of my more powerful machines if I need to do heavier computing, such as compiling complex software, or boot my x230 if I need 16GB of RAM, anyways). So far I couldn't be happier with daily driving that rockchip rk3399.
The build quality is, especially for the price of 200USD, above average. The keyboard is okay, even though it feels a lot cheaper than the x220 keyboard, I modded my x230 with, or a XPS 13 keyboard (according to monkeytype I average on roughly 105 WPM on the PBP keyboard, so I'd say it's perfectly usable for day to day computing).
Performance-wise there's not much to complain about. The PBP is roughly as powerful as a Nintendo Switch, so I didn't expect it to be considerably fast, but fast enough for the majority of tasks I want to do on a personal laptop. So far I've used the PBP for writing/editing/scripting in Perl, AWK and Python using Emacs, keeping my life somewhat organized in Emacs Org-Mode, reading mails (neomutt), news (newsboat) and browsing the web (using chromium) as well as browsing gemini pages with Lagrange. I tried emulating PSX and GBA games on it using RetroArch (surprisingly Crash Bandicoot ran smooth). I use a Matrix Client (NeoChat) as well as a few other instant messengers on it as well, Discord in a browser tab, occasionally I watch YouTube or CCC talks, and so far there weren't any considerable performance bottlenecks. I should mention that I have limited the max. RAM chromium is able to allocate on a 750mb soft and 1GB hard limit.
Albeit, I'd say that my usage is somewhat terminal and Emacs heavy, so if you rely on GUI applications for most of the things you do (e.g. wanting to use Libre Office for writing), your experience may be a different one.
To sum my initial impression up, I did get what I expected out of my PBP. It's not the fastest machine I own, but it's usable as a daily driver. To me, it kinda falls in the same category my old EEE PC, I used before getting a x230 in 2012, did (as I felt similar about both machines when I got them), a lightweight well-made computer with a somewhat good battery life that gets me somewhat good through my day as a personal laptop.
The build quality is, especially for the price of 200USD, above average. The keyboard is okay, even though it feels a lot cheaper than the x220 keyboard, I modded my x230 with, or a XPS 13 keyboard (according to monkeytype I average on roughly 105 WPM on the PBP keyboard, so I'd say it's perfectly usable for day to day computing).
Performance-wise there's not much to complain about. The PBP is roughly as powerful as a Nintendo Switch, so I didn't expect it to be considerably fast, but fast enough for the majority of tasks I want to do on a personal laptop. So far I've used the PBP for writing/editing/scripting in Perl, AWK and Python using Emacs, keeping my life somewhat organized in Emacs Org-Mode, reading mails (neomutt), news (newsboat) and browsing the web (using chromium) as well as browsing gemini pages with Lagrange. I tried emulating PSX and GBA games on it using RetroArch (surprisingly Crash Bandicoot ran smooth). I use a Matrix Client (NeoChat) as well as a few other instant messengers on it as well, Discord in a browser tab, occasionally I watch YouTube or CCC talks, and so far there weren't any considerable performance bottlenecks. I should mention that I have limited the max. RAM chromium is able to allocate on a 750mb soft and 1GB hard limit.
Albeit, I'd say that my usage is somewhat terminal and Emacs heavy, so if you rely on GUI applications for most of the things you do (e.g. wanting to use Libre Office for writing), your experience may be a different one.
To sum my initial impression up, I did get what I expected out of my PBP. It's not the fastest machine I own, but it's usable as a daily driver. To me, it kinda falls in the same category my old EEE PC, I used before getting a x230 in 2012, did (as I felt similar about both machines when I got them), a lightweight well-made computer with a somewhat good battery life that gets me somewhat good through my day as a personal laptop.