> The trackpad couldn't tell the difference between scrolling and zooming. The keyboard regularly skipped keypresses. Firmware updates were promised, but never arrived.

Only when people run into things like that, they get appreciation for people making decent low-end hardware.

I say, it is twice as hard to design a decent $300 laptop that a decent $1000 laptop.

Supply chain for low-end parts is a total Wild West (or East if you want.) If you want 100k top-tier panels from Samsung, you sign the contact and go away having a good sleep. If you want 100k of ok quality and moderately priced panels, you are up for a lot of sleepless nights picking them up from random distributors, through all of manufacturing run.

For touchpads that don't go on standalone modules, calibration is also case by case. Some times, it simply doesn't work - you plastic is too thick, it's dielectric value is off. Ideally, you have a specialist company making a custom made module for you, with Synaptics blessing, but for budget stuff, you your only option is to calibrate it yourself using SDKs leaked to Chinese FTPs

And stuff like keyboards - there are no dedicated keyboard module makers these days, your chassis maker is doing that nowadays. You are up for a lot of trial and error on that, and if you want any custom switches, god save you.

Ideally, if you are a budget maker, you want to spin as many models on a single "chassis" as possible to cover RnD expenses. This is the only way big ODMs like Quanta and Clevo or brands like Asus can make cheap and moderately good stuff.

Trying to be small and differentiated differentiated is the hardest thing to do for a budget OEM.

Checkout a brand called Chuwi - it's a miracle how they can make five different chassis a year, and do it profitably, while being an e-commerce-only brand.

Indeed. Casio is one of my favorite brands in electronics because they have been so reliable about doing cost reduction without compromising the core device functions. For example, when they do a high end keyboard, which seems to happen about twice a decade, the key features are soon brought back down to their low end models, meaning that at any given moment their offering is most likely biased towards the cheapest of the range, with a bit of price differentiation on features.

Casio is a well-established brand and gets the benefits of scale, but that only makes some parts of the job easier. They still have to carve out market share one product at a time, like everyone else, and they don't do it through the expensive flagship pieces.

> There was also very little software support. The occasional community build of of Ubuntu or Android. Neither of which received much in the way of bug fixes or development.

This is exactly why I gave up on the PINE ecosystem. Their hardware is amazing. But their software support is dreadful. I don’t understand why they cannot have PINE supported OS builds.

I have a Pinebook, I'm happy with it, I don't run Linux on it though.

What are you running on it?

NetBSD.

Care to share a bit about what has worked with the Pine64 and what hasn't?

I'm pretty interested in how you installed this; I am very dissatisfied with the default KDE crap they put on the Pinebook.

I was curious enough to try it too. Wish I hadn't. It's e-waste in my opinion. My inner environmentalist wanted me to make my first youtube review video to warn people off but it looks like we'll have to settle for this HN comment for now.