A $99 Laptop?! - Pinebook

if you go on amazon and search for a laptop then sort by price lowest to highest the cheapest option is 146 dollars then if you go that's not low enough and you fire up aliexpress it's about 127 usd but what if i told you that you can get a fully functional laptop for just 99 us dollars you might say to me gee linus surely there's some kind of catch and you'd be one smart shopper because while this thing is truly a fully functional laptop for 99 it's got one heck of a gotcha let's take a look at it shall we [Music] so this is the pine book it comes from the single board computer company pine64 and on first glance looks like basically every other uh you know macbook design rip-off from 2008 it comes in a couple of flavors so ours is the 11.6 inch version that comes with an ips display and then there's a separate 14 inch version that's got a tn panel instead what's nice about the 14 inch version is that it does have a bigger track pad thinner bezels and pretty much a full-size 10 keyless keyboard while this one is actually quite squished so it's got a short backspace button it's got these pinner little arrow keys you'd probably get used to that what you won't get used to is the shifts now this one i think this short left shift is actually standard somewhere i will never move to that country sorry but this one how are you supposed to get used to that uh overall the the feel of the keyboard is actually surprisingly good like i've seen laptops that cost three four five times this much that have more flex to their keyboard overall so i'm there is some to be clear but it's really not that bad the thing weighs about a kilogram and then it's got a 0.3 megapixel camera up here at the top i o is actually pretty reasonable for 2019 standards micro sd expansion headphone microphone combo 3.5 millimeter jack usb type a which is nice to have another one of those dc input so no usb type c come on guys and then due to the low profile of the machine we're stuck with a mini hdmi which in fairness gives us hdmi output which is good but um is very likely to break this is really not a very robust connector in terms of the internal specs should we should we open this thing up let's have a look at it let's do that and there it is oh 1.2 gigahertz quad-core arm cortex a53 64-bit processor two gigabytes of lp ddr3 ram 16 gigs of emmc memory i'm just kind of pointing vaguely at this small board because it's it's all on here and then we've got wireless uh n with bluetooth 4.0 and you can see your antennas are hooked up over here also of note is our spectacular stereo speakers and oh yeah look at this you can kind of see everything in here so here's our magnet for the uh for the top cover to keep it closed there's your microphones does have dual microphones so like an array microphone enough for play though let's find out just how much laptop you get for 99 bucks give her a sec now that we're booted we're looking at a kde neon linux desktop we see that there's actually no uh five gigahertz wi-fi support so just 2.4 gigahertz that's kind of to be expected on something this low spec pause per second yep uh os can we turn the brightness up we can't want to come in a little closer yeah okay webpage loading time is not spectacular it's hard to say how much of the slow experience we're having right now is software and how much is hardware though because the pine 64 guys acknowledge that this build of kde neon is quite out of date like it's got tons of issues like the fact that it takes forever to move the cursor across the screen you can't adjust the display brightness but then on the other hand the cpu in this thing has a mip score of about around 11 000 which puts it somewhere in the neighborhood of sony's playstation 3 in terms of performance with the gpu it's actually a mali 400 mp2 which gives it about the performance of the original xbox so i'm not even were you expecting this james i'm not even able to load youtube.com fortunately our journey doesn't end here though because the good folks at manjaro have a specific build of their os that you can load up using etcher on a micro sd card and boot to that instead which i think we should probably do right about now it's still slow but it's brighter right yes yes it is so now that we're in let's see if our brightness adjustment works now hey all right so this is already a better experience but with the better track pad and the brighter display let's see if youtube even manages to load it all okay this is a lot better but i think the question that we need to answer now is okay let's say that i'm willing to learn to use linux is this usable so i'm going to get logged into my gmail um maybe get some libreoffice on here try and watch some youtube videos let's see volume at 100 i can't hear it at all okay so this is weird after some dinking around in the audio settings we found that we can change our maximum volume to 150 percent so why don't we try that first nothing oh maybe we can change hey wow that's really quiet okay so a couple problems um the fact that it was configured to use the wrong audio device out of the box not the end of the world that's the kind of thing that you can fix pretty quickly but it's got some other issues so it does technically have stereo speakers but it figures this is the front right speaker and this is the front left speaker you can actually hear it coming out of this one when i press issue number two is that at a hundred percent volume in both the application and the device it's way too quiet and if we crank it to 150 well it sounds like this in fairness to it though if i was using headphones the youtube playback is actually pretty reasonable although we aren't at hd yet so let's try 720p we are dropping a lot of frames here okay let's go back to 480p even 480p in full screen mode chugs if your objective is purely just to watch youtube videos and absorb the information you can do it let's uh fire up email or something then i'm not gonna lie guys this is not a great experience uh even just performing a search in gmail so i just clicked an email let's give her a hot second here so this is like a cached page let's go back really so at this point i think it's pretty clear that the hardware in here is not really daily driver ready um and by the way if you were thinking oh well maybe i could just play like ancient games on it or something unfortunately because it's got a mali gpu and the mallee drivers are not open source well 3d acceleration is pretty much not available on any arch-based images like manjaro the lima drivers are like a reverse engineered driver but they're not complete so you could install them on the pine book but you'd have to recompile the kernel first and it frankly would not be a good experience at all anyway it's not something that we'd recommend our final project for this is to actually try to install windows now as we mentioned before this is an arm based cpu but microsoft has been working on armed versions of windows for over half a decade now remember the surface rt it was a long time ago so we're going to give it a shot maybe see if windows can save this experience so to do this and this is our first attempt at this actually this is the one thing we didn't prep before the video we used a tool called the windows on arm deployer and an image that's actually intended for use with the raspberry pi which is also arm based but isn't a pine book so we're really not sure if this is going to work only one way to find out so what we're trying to do right now is figure out how to get it to boot to this because when we threw manjaro on a microsd it just automatically booted to it but now it's not doing that i tried f2 i tried f8 i tried f10 actually f11 f11 makes an appearance once in a while let's try delete come on baby try f1 i need help ah something's happening given how utterly unsuitable this is for daily driver use and the fact that our initial attempts to install a raspberry pi build of windows didn't work um we decided to abandon it because the reality of it is pine 64 flat out says what this is not for this is not a device to use as your current work or school laptop and if that's what you're after you probably need to look elsewhere what it's really intended for is as a low-cost all-in-one solution for arm linux and bsd developers that are looking to mainline the soc or are interested in some part of it like the gpu for example one example is the lima project so that's not to say that there's no potential for something like this to achieve low-cost daily driver status in the future in fact the upcoming pine book pro could be a better daily driver it's going to be 200 rather than 100 it's based on the rk3399 so it's a hexa core soc six cores with two a72s at two gigahertz four gigs of ram instead of two uh 14 inch ips panel magnesium alloy body instead of a plastic one usbc so in summary this thing isn't what we hoped it was and that shouldn't be a surprise because they told us that it wasn't what we hoped it was but if you clicked into this and you're disappointed now because you were like oh i was really kind of hoping for a 100 laptop option we did manage to find a couple other things that look a bit more compelling so this cheap windows machine over on walmart is just 140 bucks it's got a touchscreen it's a convertible and it's only got 32 gigs of storage so it's likely that windows update will eventually be the death of it but it does look fairly usable for the price and this chromebook over on newegg is a bit more expensive it's over two hundred dollars and it's a chromebook so you're going to have software limitations finally the third option as we always love to bring up anytime someone's on a budget is picking up something used a lot of the time you can get a used laptop somewhere like ebay or craigslist or kijiji let go wherever for much cheaper than you could get something new especially if you're looking at windows machines or chromebooks as opposed to a macbook or something those things hold their value incredibly well so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured as long as you are the intended audience at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,009,990

Keywords: pinebook, arm, arm 64, windows, cheap, cheapest, manjaro, linux, distro, laptop, value, worst

Id: sXLdIYL30tw

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RADical-muslim]

The entire comment section is urging people to buy a used Thinkpad instead lol

I don't disagree, but it's missing the point of the laptop.

[u/[deleted]]

Well, Linus tried.

[u/ComfortableBanana1]

Oof. In Poland my girlfriend bought an Kiano Intelect x2 HD for equivalent of 120$ (it was about 2 years ago) . There is a x3 version now for the same cost. It has a Windows 10 on board and a touch screen so it can be used as a tablet. It works pretty well even after 2 years of usage. It's weak side is mediocre Wi-Fi. You must be pretty close to the sauce. Also battery dies after 2 years (a lot of users had the same issue) , so you better change it before the warranty goes off. Other than that YouTube videos play really nicely in 720p. It's Intel atom processor is doing great job. I could recommend it to anyone who is looking for a laptop/tablet that pinebook wish could have become.

[u/verbmegoinghere]

It's a mobile phone in a laptop body (which is what a mac book air is).

I find the fact that you get a screen, keyboard (pretty good for all reports) , track pad, battery, IO for $99 pretty amazing.

[u/alphachan123]

Tbh it feels like they're forcing the laptop to do what the manufacturer specifically says it can't and then comes out saying "it sucks". It's like going to LTT to look for a lipstick review and say "wHy DOn'T tHey HavE tHAt?"... Whoever wrote that (James I think?) sounds like they haven't seen a single board computer (something like a Raspberry Pi or a Pine A64).

[u/recluseMeteor]

I am not sure about ARM on non-smartphone devices. Having no BIOS/UEFI nor compatibility with a lot of OS and software is very limiting.

[u/HayHeather]

I funded the original pine64 Kickstarter but I got a lot more out of my raspberry pi than I have out of my pine64

[u/karlsmission]

Asus has a windows laptop for $159 on amazon, I reviewed it here:
https://youtu.be/aff3msyNpXI

​

It's a really good laptop. Not just for the price. it's a decent piece of equipment.

[u/G33kounet]

What's that gorgeous computer on the desk behind ? _