I think you are confusing "making another fedora fork for a laptop brand" with "porting a booloader to the device" or "writing a driver for the screen". Simply put you would not be able to use the hardware without the software. Outsourcing it to the community makes the hardware cheaper but the sideeffect is that the software will be crappy even after years of development. For some reason people aren't very keen on writing the low level stuff.

If you compare the Espruino smart watch to the Pine64 smartwatch, it's a night and day difference. My guess is that it's because Espruino handles the low level stuff and let community do the fun stuff, while Pine64 leaves everything on the community. Imo you need a fulltime developer who actually spends time looking in the datasheet and figuring out, how to properly put the PineTime to sleep, not just people who peek into the docs every Saturday.

We're talking about low level software that makes the hardware usable here, the reason that Raspberry Pi is the king of this market is because they have the software support that allows their hardware to just work. Pine64 relies on the community to do this for each of the boards they release.

Pine64's most successful products have been the ones they release as full products with working firmware.

for example to make sure you have got drivers.

but then, you need software for less computer-like devices too, like a smart watch or earbuds. do you immediately reflash those too? and who will make the software?

Sure thats true as long as the basic support on compatibility is there, but as I understand it Pine is so hardware-only that they make it hard for other projects to even support their hardware, i.e. with lacking drivers as the other comment addressed.

Especially when software already exists, it prevent duplicating efforts.

Sorry silly me, a Pinephone.

Mobian of course she says.
( She uses Debian on the computer )

It is, but they are talking about the hardware in these last release notes, about a chip that will get replaced in the actual hardware, therefor i don't think they are completely dead! Long lice Pine64

It is the same/similar problem that Nokia/Maemo and Sailfish/merOS have all had.

Some things are binary-blobs + NDAs and many things are still locked, the OSS community can only do so much before they hit the commercial roadblocks.

We need a complete CoreBoot + OSS silicon-chips + OSS firmware + all-community / all-commercial dual production lines.

The open-source-based company should be able to sell both the commercial locked-version and the oss-all-unlocked-version with the ability to switch infinitely between the two models.

But the world of electronics rarely will ever work or reach that level of interoperability , repairability or recycling this way. Not for a long time maybe in some distant future.

I’ve noticed that too. Is it related to covid you think? As in it was like this before and now we’re returning to normal progression as people rebuild social connections and lose time. Or is it that the whole dev economy is changing with layoffs and such that devs are leaving the industry altogether? Or something else even?

To me that just signifies the company has stabilized and no longer needs to put out statements constantly to keep eyes on them for marketing reasons.

Sometimes this can just be that the person driving engagement has moved on or shifted focus. I don't think it's a large company by any means.

Most orgs can't have someone doing marketing full-time.

If its one update per year, they're alive and focusing on the important stuff

I wouldn't; perfectly placed mistake?

I don't have concerns about shipping, more about the community building and support aspect of their products.

If you're happy with a product's current state then fine, but if not you're pretty much on your own.

Other people claim they have ordered and delivery was not happening for half a year etc. Seemed like something was up with supply.

I'm focusing more on the community building and advancing software parts of the work they did/do. Some products are in a pretty good state, but that's not the case for others.