HPR3728: Pinebook Pro review

Summary: Why the PBP? Lately I've been thinking a lot about power consumption when it comes to computing. Intuitively, I know that arm devices pull significantly less power than amd64 machines but I've never really tested this in the real world. So, some preliminary power consumption stats: big amd64 laptops (thinkpad x220 and t490) pull at most 65 watts small arm SOCs typically pull at most 15 watts most android phones pull at most 18 watts Pentium 4 pulls at most 250 watts These numbers are fairly easy to find: just look at the power supply for a MAXIMUM OUTPUT value or something similar. This is the point at which the power supply fails so we can safely assume this is the maximum power draw for any given computer. Of course, this is DC output and not AC output and anyone who knows anything about electricity knows that converting AC to DC is expensive but these values are useful as a general estimate. I wrote something similar about computer power consumption some time ago My goal in all of this was to find a self contained computer that runs UNIX, doesn't take much power, isn't a consumption rectangle (smartphone), and can be charged from both AC with a rectifier and stored DC without an inverter. Charging from existing stored power was probably the most novel consideration. Everything else is a given. A few obvious answers come to mind: Raspberry Pi 4 is not self contained and using a pitop in public is a good way to get the bomb squad called on you beaglebone black is good too but neither self contained nor popular enough for wide OS support Pinebook Pro is self contained and is supported by some of the operating systems I'd like to run The PBP is an obvious choice. It's an open hardware ARM laptop that can be charged via a barrel cable (AC->DC) or via USB-C. Charging from USB-C is a very useful feature because it means I can easily choose between charging from the mains where efficiency loss is acceptable and charging from a DC source where efficiency loss is unacceptable. The actual use case is "what computer can I run off of a old car battery or the alternator in my car without burning power with an inverter?". I'll revisit this use case in a later section. Initial notes I took these notes immediately upon opening the PBP. They remain unedited because I want to be honest on the first impressions. shipping I was worried about DHL dropping my package out of a plane. Or leaving it out in the rain. Or having one of the employees use it as a soccer ball. Or having the thing get stuck in customs. It ended up arriving safely and was packaged well. Two boxes within a padded envelope within another envelope. Surprising for DHL. hardware impressions Touchpad sucks and trackpad scrolling sucks (it's probably just KDE). Installing synaptics drivers allegedly fix this problem. keyboard is comfortable, clickly, full sized despite being a chicklet keyboard. I don't like that the <ctl> and <fn> keys are backwards when compared to a thinkpad. I really like the thinkpad keyboard layout. Shift+enter seems to type the M character. My muscle memory for key chording is now broken. This appears to be a fundamental design flaw with KDE. Passively cooled, gets a bit warm. display is sharp (IPS) and almost too high resolution for my eyes (1920x1080 instead of 1366x768). I can fix this in software. enabling/disabling mic/wifi/came