A quick update concerning PinePhone Pro availability
As some may have heard, the PinePhone Pro has indeed been discontinued. This is due to low sales and therefore no longer being viable for the PineStore to produce. Spare parts may continue to be produced for up to two years depending on how well sales go. If you still want one, at the end of this month refurbished PinePhone Pros will go on sale just like after the PineBook Pro was discontinued. So this will be your last chance to nab one.
On the other hand, the PinePhone (A64) will continue to be sold for around two years. It is currently still selling well.
As for the future of ARM products from the PineStore. It is not likely as the PineStore has moved focus onto RISC-V and LLMs/AI. This change can be seen looking at the recent product launches (Oz64, Star(/Pro)64 and Alpha One).
And just a quick reminder that as the community we do not have knowledge about any future products. At this current point in time there is no currently known plans for a new PinePhone.
And I think that's it, have a great rest of the week!
PunnO)))
in reply to PINE64 Community • • •Chris
in reply to PINE64 Community • • •I bought the Pinephone Braveheart, was invited to get an early Pinephone Pro Development system, and used the Original Pinephone for a lot of Linux Mobile development.
While this news is disappointing, I can't say I am surprised. The following article: drewdevault.com/2022/08/18/PIN… Echos my sentiment of Pine64.
1/5
PINE64 has let its community down
drewdevault.comCaffeine
in reply to Chris • • •@kop316
I have read through your thread and I agree that many improvements can be made on both the community and PineStore end.
I have recently stood up to be the new community manager for the Pine64 community and will work towards bridging the communication gap between the community and the company. In this post I will use the name Pine64 to represent the community and PineStore to represent the company behind the devices.
PineStore's goal is and always has been to make cheap and affordable devices for developers by depending on our loyal community to develop the software for the hardware that PineStore releases.
Bringing back community editions is something that we have personally been asking PineStore to do for a while. This requires compensation to be arranged up front before a device is put up for sale. So while PineStore has continued in it's goal to make cheap hardware that can easily get in the hands of developers, key community members who helped set up the community edition program have gone. This means that there has been nobody to help arrange compensation for those who have worked on software for recent products. If community editions return in the future it will increase the price of new devices, but this sacrifice is something we're sure community members would be willing to pay if it meant supporting the developer(/s). We pledge to keep on PineStore's heels about this and make sure that it will happen in the future so that developers will be paid for their effort. We can only hope that this will happen for future products.
In terms of quality control and hardware failures I am aware that such issues exist. So to anyone, if these reports sent to Pine via email/tickets don't get a reply for hardware replacements like Chris did, I will get in touch directly with the PineStore founder to attempt to get the issue solved. Unfortunately I cannot do anything about fixing hardware defects other than report them but I will do what I can.
We admit that both PineStore and Pine64 have dropped the ball and it has been very difficult to restart and recover after everything that has happened in the past. We will do our best to rebuild the community and we are going to start by replacing large community updates with smaller more frequent community driven project updates that **anybody** will be able to post onto the blog (not without moderation of course). We are doing this because it is tedious to write large community updates every month (and to keep a schedule). This will give power to project maintainers to announce important updates like new factory image releases through our community blog. I will write a tutorial on how to do so, which will be available on the Pine64 documentation website in the future.
We have confidence that the future is bright for the community and we hope you will join us in rebuilding our community.
- Camden