Open Source Smartwatch
I'd be the perfect target for the products of a company like Pine. A long-time geek who uses open-source software on nearly all of his devices, a tinkerer who doesn't mind recompiling a kernel or picking a solderer to make things work, and someone who seeks for absolute flexibility from his devices with zero corporate compromises.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 Then a tablet with the same outdated chipset.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.