That said, I too would love to see higher specced devices from Pine. An update to the Pinebook with a fancy new ARM chip and 16GB ram would be tempting indeed.
If you want to change this, you'd need to either start a semiconductor company, or engineer some sort of coup at one or more of the "most unpleasant to deal with" Silicon vendors (Broadcom, Qualcomm, etc.).
Otherwise, as unpleasant as it can be, you have to make a deal with Broadcom/Qualcomm, or get some other vendors to license their ARM chipset to you.
The latter doesn't seem like the end of the world to me TBH. Of course I'd love an ideal world where open architectures like RISC V have taken over and are actually usable, but until we get there usability remains more important than purity - unless you're RMS of course - even if it involves a small "deal with the devil".
I believe that most of the geeks out there love open-source products not much because they work daily with kernels and drivers (if that's the case then the argument for a pure open hardware without hex bloats makes sense), but because of the flexibility that they offer. Because they can install anything that they want on them and aren't prone to abandonware/planned deprecation like many products powered by Google or Apple. But if you don't give them products that they can use as main daily drivers, you'll rarely get enough momentum outside of the small tinker-and-show-off circles.
My iPhone 6S is more than 5 years old, and is perfectly usable as a daily driver (and my SO's iPhone 6 is too - it's 6 years old, only runs iOS 12, but still gets security updates and is perfectly usable).
It's fine if on the freedom/performance/up-to-dateness tradeoff, you're not pine64's customer.
Many people are.
If you're making a point about 5-year-old hardware being still useful today, I think you need to reference typical 5-year-old hardware. The 6S was weird (albeit in a good way).
My Xiaomi Mi Band probably has similar specs. I bought it last year. You position this as outdated, but for me, the specs mean that I only have to charge it every couple of weeks.
I know this is a bad cliche, but this "decade old" processor is more powerful than the most powerful PDP-11 systems that have ever existed, that were last sold back in 1990s.
When you have a powerful processor like the Apple Watch does, your power draw is pretty high. This is why the Apple Watch only gets 1-2 days of battery life, while the Pebble has 7 days, and the Apple watch just got a display that is always on, while the Pebble has had a always on display since day 1.
I bought a pinebook pro and i have some SBCs. The PBP is perfect travel laptop with long battery life that can run on my phone charger. Firefox runs buttery smooth on Manjaro i3.
It's always hard to stay true to ones beliefs; when it comes with so many shortcomings.
You might be interested in Librem 5 phone: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.
Unfortunately, the mediocre hardware used in their devices keeps holding me back.
First came a phone with a 9-year-old A53 Cortex chipset. Then a tablet with the same outdated chipset. Then a laptop that ships with a Rockchip RK3399 with 4GB of RAM, in an era when 4GB barely suffice to run a browser with a few tabs. And now they are releasing a smartwatch with a 64 MHz core and 64 KB of RAM - some specs you would have expected from a very cheap smartwatch released 7-8 years ago.
Why should I use a device whose hardware is almost a decade old at the time of purchase? And how do they even expect anyone to actually use these devices as their primary daily drivers, and not as proofs of concept, nice toys to tinker on every now and then or show off to friends?
I understand that Pine wants to use 100% open hardware, and that comes with heavy compromises, but are these compromises worth it?
If you ask even the geekest user out there whether they prefer a device whose source code is 100% pure and doesn't contain any binary blobs, or a device that doesn't start freezing/lagging after a couple of minutes of normal usage, I bet that anyone would opt for the latter.