Tech
Pinebook is a lightweight, low-cost notebook designed and manufactured by the company Pine64. It was announced in November 2016 and production started in April 2017. It is based on the platform of Pine64's existing Pine A64 single board computer and it costs US$89 or US$99 for the 11.6" and 14" model respectively. Its appearance resembles the MacBook Air. Unlike traditional notebooks, Pinebook uses an ARM CPU rather than x86. It uses the Allwinner Technology A64 SoC, containing quad ARM 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 cores and Mali 400 MP2 GPU, together with 2 GB RAM LPDDR3. Instead of a hard disk drive it uses 16 GB of eMMC 5.0 flash memory, expandable to 64 GB. The storage capacity can be further extended using the microSD card slot (up to 256 GB). It supports WiFi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 wireless networks, has 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 mini HDMI port and a headphone jack. It also contains 2 downward-facing speakers. The display is a TN LCD with a resolution of 1366 x 768. The unit's weight is 1.04 kg (11.6"), or 1.26 kg (14") respectively. The Pinebook supports Linux and Android operating systems. As of 2019, the Pinebook can be run on free software in the form of RISC OS and Linux. Support for most hardware has been merged into the kernel mainline as of 4.19, with other drivers slowly trickling in.