Preface: I picked up a Pinebook Pro back around 2019. I vaguely remember the other machine I was fiddling with at the time was a Chuwi Minibook. Nearly a year and a half went by and the Pinebook Pro spent most of it collecting dust, until my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 went missing a while back. I really had no computer to use, so I dug it out and used it as my “main machine” for a stretch. And honestly, when the Pinebook Pro first launched, the ecosystem around it was pretty incomplete (though already a big step up from the old Pinebook). Now that I have a new temporary main laptop, I can set the Pinebook Pro aside for the time being. The days of using it were an interesting and painful memory, but it was also a chance to seriously try out this “open-source Arm Linux laptop” and see its strengths and weaknesses. So I figure I’ve earned the right to give it a subjective review here.

I decided to buy a Pinebook at least a year ago, back when all the Linux news sites started covering it. Most of them called it “the $99 Linux laptop,” and sure enough it really does cost $99. But there’s nothing especially novel about it, because the so-called Pinebook is just the Pine64 dev board that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, shoved into a laptop shell. There are already plenty of similar products out there, mostly “Raspberry Pi laptops”—a Pi stuffed into a laptop case, or a 3D-printed shell with a battery and so on. Let’s look at the main specs of the Pinebook first. 11-inch or 14-inch 1366x768 screen (11-inch is IPS, 14-inch is TN) 2 GB RAM 16GB eMMC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MicroSD card reader USB port, headphone jack, HDMI output Nothing impressive there, and none of it is what got me interested in the Pinebook. The biggest selling point of the Pinebook—and its biggest appeal—isn’t performance. It’s that it looks good. Yes, compared to the whole flood of similar “Raspberry Pi laptops” on the market, the Pinebook is drop-dead gorgeous. Combined with the fact that it’s not expensive at all, I decided to buy one to play with. It’s cheap, and Pine64 claims to be a more advanced 64-bit ARM processor than the original Raspberry Pi (back when Pine64 was crowdfunding, the Pi was still on gen 1, if I remember right). At the very least it should make a decent toy. But I never expected that from deciding to buy it to actually holding it in my hands, it would take me a full year and more. Once the machine arrived I played with it for almost two weeks. There were pleasant surprises and disappointments. Picking up shells on the beach, sorting out my thoughts, let me sum up the sweet and the bitter for you.