There are some reviewers like Anandtech that take the time to understand the hardware that they review, but most reviewers are lazy and they will see “4x Cortex-A53” in the A64 and i.MX 8M Quad and decide that they are the same.
They won’t realize that the A64 is 20% (0.3GHz) slower, because it is built on a 40nm node, whereas the i.MX 8M uses a 28nm node. The Mali-400 MP2 in the A64 is an outdated GPU from 2008. They won’t realize that the A64 only supports up to 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and is 32 bit for everything outside its CPU cores, whereas the i.MX 8M supports up to 8GB LPDDR4 RAM and is a true 64 bit SoC.
These differences are important because the i.MX 8M provides Purism with an upgrade path for version 2, with more RAM and a better camera and a 14nm node, whereas PINE64 is stuck with a maximum of 3GB of RAM and a 5MP camera and no upgrading because Allwinner hasn’t provided any information to the Linux community on the A80 and isn’t a Linux-friendly company like NXP.
PINE64 is basically stuck, because it has no upgrade path. It will probably have to switch to Rockchip RK3588 or NXP i.MX 8M in any future phones. I’m really happy that we will have economical Linux phones from PINE64, but I’m worried that the company is locked into a low-quality SoC for the next 5 years, and we really need mobile Linux to take off at both the high end of the market where Purism operates and at the low end where PINE64 operates.