I have an old iPhone 7 which has an audio IC issue and the microphone is physically disconnected. Calls don’t work, video records without sound etc. need to connect an external microphone to have one.

Apart from the inconvenience it was somehow liberating knowing there is no microphone physically active.

My Pinephone has a switch for the microphone and also my Pinebook Pro laptop. But I also would agree that this is exotic hardware.

Well i have Pinebook Pro and it's pretty much abandonware, pine doesn't do any software and OSS lacks maintainers, nobody want's it, e-waste laptop. Take it as you will.

Don't they warn you on the product page that you are buying hardware that is fully reliant on the community for functionality? That's the reason it's so inexpensive

Yeah, that's nonsense. Pinebook Pro is well supported by Linux kernel and you can thus put any aarch64 Linux distro on it. And it's been this way for the last 3-4 years at the very least.

I've been using it daily for 3 years for watching movies and main notebook while traveling.

It's not at all abandonware or e-waste.

> I suppose still not ready to be a daily driver to replace my normal phone?

I'd say that depends on your definition of daily driver and/or how much compromises you're willing to take. I occasionally see members at my larger hackerspace running around with those or other seemingly "unfit" hardware and not complain too much about it ;)

Kernel is in "maintenance and focussed on upstreaming" mode for a few years already, after getting nearly full HW support about 2-3 years ago.

As for phone feature, reliability of that depends on reliability of firmware of the modem, which was always shaky.