Pine64 first ended the Rockchip CPU based Pro line of cheap BYO-OS phones last year, they have a business model which rides upon the high price of Purism devices writing paychecks for in-house devs like @dos grinding on the OS and software while they just crank out cheap Linux ready hardware in Shenzhen and leave OS and software development to ‘the community’. I will admit that I got started with pine64 hardware before I bought a Librem to have reliable phone hardware. But now that cheap hardware is no longer possible the whole business model breaks down.
This whole thing is a mess where LLM farms buying up components on the world market and manufacturers working as a industry cartel and nobody spending the startup costs to enter and normalize the market we will pay the price with unavailable technology at reasonable prices.
We literally need more players in the mobile Linux game not less.
We anti-monopoly pro-libre & privacy mobile device users are struggling for survival with both Pine64 dropping out and Liberux not showing recent updates. It seems like the Jolla 2026 phone which will be new custom hardware will be Linux and not a libhybris arrangement on a LineageOS background, we will see how open they build the SailfishOS. I worry that Jolla will muddy the waters with closed blob drivers like the N900/maemo5 was plagued with locking us down to an often recompiled compatible kernel version which took over 10 years to hack FOSS drivers for OSs like Postmarket and Maemo-Leste.
By way of illustration, I bought a portable SSD two years ago. The exact same make and model today, from the same supplier, is asking a 90% higher price i.e. almost double. Had I known, I would happily have bought 10 back then (for my own use, not to resell for a profit).
This is an opportunity to buy used hardware, support those who hack FOSS drivers. Replace proprietary software and OSes in existing laptops and smartphones with GNU/linux free software.
I am concerned that it will be the opposite for a while, especially since the hardware going to data centers risks being nationalized or just scooped up by another large corporation in bankruptcy rather than falling to the individual user class. Even then this server level hardware CPU, GPU, and ASICs are not really aimed at or packaged for individual and especially mobile users. For now at least the RAM(they are ordering HBM not DDR5) and SSDs are transferable to desktop and laptop machines, perhaps there will be a de-soldering campaign to allow these chips to be integrated to mobile PCBs. But best practice is still to get freshly manufactured chips direct to the new PCB.
Support that you mention will hopefully come after the sideloading window is closed on Android, but cleanroom hacking FOSS drivers is not easy.
As much as I hate China’s authoritarianism, we really are praying at this point for Chinese companies like ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) for DRAM, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC) for 3D NAND Flash, GigaDevice Semiconductor for SPI NOR and NAND flash and Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing (XMC) for 3D NOR flash to save us from all the consolidation of the memory industry that was allowed outside of China.
The fact that Western governments allowed three companies to gain control 90% of the global DRAM market and 5 companies to gain control 90% of the global NAND flash market really has come back to bite us. Lack of anti-trust enforcement on the global electronics industry is part of the problem, but the bigger problem is the fact that the U.S. government has promoted the AI boom and encouraged the insane levels of investment in AI which will inevitably lead to a crash and economic recession.
The entire world is paying the price for the AI boom being led by the U.S. Sadly, South Korea (SK Hynix and Samsung) and Japan (Kioxia + SanDisk) have gone along with it since it is their companies making the profits, but ideally governments would regard electronics as a strategic resource whose supply needs to be stabilized, so they wouldn’t allow the world’s DRAM and Flash memory supply to be monopolized by the AI boom.
Sadly, when the AI bubble bursts, it will cause a global recession, but staying in the AI bubble is arguably worse for the world in my opinion.
There is a club of people with the resources for that, you are not in that club.
I went for my MBA after the .com bubble to fully understand how the were able to take everything away form my startup. It is so much worse in '08 and so so much worse now.
