It's called "pro" because they sell a plain pinebook and the pro has comparatively better specs. I don't think it's supposed to mean anything else.

The problem is few SoCs offer anything better. And btw you can use NVMe on the PBP... But there are power considerations and bandwidth limitations.

The rk3568 has quite a bit of PCIe compared to its spiritual predecessor (the rk3328). And the specs for the rk3588 (unreleased as of yet) do look juicy.

It is here, I am typing this on one right now...

The hardware is fine, it runs ssh and a browser, what else would I need in a laptop?

eMMC performance on the PBP is entirely acceptable, with avg. reads/writes of just over 250 MB/s. There are however other concerns with eMMC making it feel a bit sluggish when faced with lots of concurrent I/O. An NVMe SSD in the PBP solves that problem.

An NVMe in the PBP also adds new problems, like a 50% increase in cost, and power issues (hard power offs if not configured specially, always worse battery even if you do everything correctly).

Then the PBP is limited to PCIe 1.1 speeds and the power saving you have to enable makes the performance worse. So you spent $$$ on a drive and cannot get the most from it.

And to top it off, suspend breaks.

I have the NVMe adapter, but I haven't bothered to buy a drive and install it. I just use an external SSD for media storage.

From what I've heard, all stability issues with NVMe in the PBP can be solved by using one of the "known-good" NVMe models. For me the main benefit with NVMe over eMMC is that it doesn't stumble during heavy I/O. I have the adapter as well but have for other reasons not bothered installing anything. Once I do I'll settle for a $35 128GB model, as that's more than enough capacity for my needs.