PineBook Benchmarks For The ARM Linux Laptop Starting At $99 USD

[edwaleni]

I've just been shopping for a cheap/budget laptop lately, not $99 cheap. Unfortunately even at the $200-$300 bracket there's often certain sacrifices made due to the inflexibility of swappable components like you'd have with desktops, so I ended up with a $399 system. This Acer Aspire 5 2019Q4 model seems like one of the better options out there for my needs/interests at least.

It's a recent refresh on the Intel 8th gen hardware(8145U) adding 10th gen CometLake 10110U and 802.11ax(Wifi 6) + Bluetooth 5, has a USB-C 3 gen 1 port and 128GB NVMe SSD storage, the 4GB of RAM is soldered but has another DIMM slot that can take up to 16GB(Crucial sells for $59 USD). Not sure if that's interesting to you at 4x the price, or lacking the ARM CPU for a 2/4 cores/threads CPU(2.1 GHz base, 4.1 GHz turbo).

They have a Ryzen 3200U model, but it has about 2 hours less battery life, no USB-C port, and only 802.11ac, both DIMMS are upgradeable though for 32GB total, and it was selling for $325 iirc. The Ryzen GPU is said to be 20% better in performance than the Intel 620 UHD iGPU, while Intels CPU(10110U) was up to 34% faster on some benches I think(no idea about mitigations status). Battery was important for me so I went with the newer Intel model, 802.11ax is a nice bonus.

I did the same as you and sought out an approx $300 laptop.

I found a Lenovo S145. It didnt have the USB-C port but it did give me an NVME slot, a SATA port and 2 RAM slots.

Has a Ryzen 3500U and Vega 8 GPU.

The only think lacking is the touchpad is way too flexy for me but for the money it will meet the need. It will replace my 2Gb/2 core Haswell running a lite Linux.

My Lenovo W510 Sandy Bridge is getting long in tooth and some VM software is flagging it for missing instructions.

I haven't found a replacement for that yet.

[danmcgrew]

Both the 11.6" and 14" Pinebooks are 'out of stock', and have been for some time.

With Pine bringing to market the Pinebook Pro, PinePhone, PineTab, PineTime, and CUBE camera, this situation regarding computers which Pine has said from the beginning "...are not meant to be daily drivers..." is understandable. Pine has stated that it does have plans to offer upgrades to the original Pinebooks at a later date.
I, personally, would like very much to have an upgraded 11.6", 1080P laptop with 64 MB (current) of eMMC, which I could easily slip into my briefcase.
In the meantime, the PineTab tablet, with its backlit keyboard, looks like it could be a very nice alternative.

https://www.pine64.org/

[starshipeleven]

ARM Cortex-A53 is from late 2012. Performance wise, this laptop is worse than a old phone.
This is not suitable for running any kind of GUI.

You clearly have no idea of what you are talking about. It's using the same ARM cores as the Raspberry Pi 3 and Odroid-C2

But if this had an ARM Cortex-A77, 4-8 GB RAM, 64-128 GB, storage USB 3, Bluetooth 5 and with Wi-Fi 6 this would be amazing.

It would cost an arm and a leg and it would still suck if compared to a similarly-priced x86 laptop. They are at a good price point to actually sell them.

[AndyChow]

I own one of these, bought it when it came out. Even at 1366 x 768, it can't play video files fullscreen without severe lag. I don't recommend it to anyone. Also the battery lasts 2h30-3h30 max.

The distros available aren't that interesting either, and there is no way to activate hardware acceleration (gpu).

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Meanwhile Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS now have working WiFi and Bluetooth. Next week I'll try to check what is missing for WiFi support on Lenovo Miix 630.

[torsionbar28]

I own one of these, bought it when it came out. Even at 1366 x 768, it can't play video files fullscreen without severe lag. I don't recommend it to anyone. Also the battery lasts 2h30-3h30 max.

The distros available aren't that interesting either, and there is no way to activate hardware acceleration (gpu).

That's disappointing to hear. You can buy a used i3 Chromebook for $99, install Coreboot + your fav distro, and have a working machine with 10+ hrs battery, good GPU accel, that can easily handle HD video, Libreoffice, and even large ad-heavy web pages.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

You can buy a used i3 Chromebook for $99, install Coreboot

Could you please provide which Chromebooks actually allow to replace preinstalled firmware with this inconvenient 30 seconds developer timer to normal Coreboot with regular TianoCore? I always skip Chromebooks because of this timer.

[starshipeleven]

Could you please provide which Chromebooks actually allow to replace preinstalled firmware with this inconvenient 30 seconds developer timer to normal Coreboot with regular TianoCore? I always skip Chromebooks because of this timer.

see here for the devices supported by the afaik bigger project that provides such replacement board firmware https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices
It's actually quite a lot.

[speculatrix]

Was this article a reposted from two years ago?

The PineBookPro is a very very different machine.

[torsionbar28]

see here for the devices supported by the afaik bigger project that provides such replacement board firmware https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices
It's actually quite a lot.

^ Yup, exactly what I used. This turns Chromebook into a normal laptop, no more development mode headaches.