Cheap for good reason; an A53 quad core is Raspberry Pi 3 class. Hope every package you're gonna need is precompiled for arm64 because building anything nontrivial is not going to be fun.

Can you not cross-compile from a cloud instance? It seems like compiling software would be a perfect fit for per-minute or per-second VMs.

I used a aws spot instance to compile GCC for Alpine Linux. It's a decent idea I think, especially if you already know what you need to do.

I had to do a lot of trial and error stuff to get it right, but anyway, I was having that spot instance sitting there almost idle, while using up the credits I got for free, so I had no issues with it.

The C5 instances are great for this kind of stuff.

I got my x220 for 150€ plus 70€ (3 years ago, still running smooth) for a new replacement battery, so it's not directly comparable. The x220 might be a bit heavier but it's not too bad and I got a x86 cpu (i5-2540M) with 8GB of memory compared to the arm64 with 2GB in the pinebook. Considering the memory usage of many contemporary desktop programs thats makes quite a difference too me

I got this thinkpad without hard drive for under $100 so they are a lot closer then some would have guessed.

And how long does its battery last?

10000mah and an ARM A53 mean it should last 10 hours or more with moderate brightness settings. It's hard to beat this for a light cheap terminal/browser with plenty of battery if that is something you need.

Reviews I read said 4-6 hours. Poorly optimized probably.

I bet it's software compositing. GPU acceleration doesn't work on those boards last time I checked, so it's probably having to do a lot more work on the CPU. It would also explain why it feels so sluggish despite being on paper more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. You should probably forget about trying to play video on it.

Can't speak for parent, but my T430s lasts for three or four hours, despite longterm heavy battery use. Beware of Lenovo's rootkits if looking to buy from them, however.

ThinkPads never had the rootkits, it was the consumer Lenovo models that had them. Very different culture between those two groups.