Pinebook Pro

The majority of ISO and ANSI Pinebook Pros pre-ordered in the past months have either been delivered or are en route to their new owners. Many more are to be shipped, so if you haven’t gotten your tracking number yet please do not worry. Pinebook Pros that will not make this shipping window – mostly units ordered in December – will be shipped out in February, after PinePhones go out to end-users. Shipping at this time of the year is difficult due to the upcoming Chinese New Year. There are various abnormal logistics issues that need to be overcome, including a shortage of staff. We’re doing our best to ship everything in a timely manner and hope for your understanding. You’ll have your Pinebook Pro soon one way or another.

With that out of the way – we’re blown away by the sheer amount of positive feedback we’re getting regarding the ISO and ANSI versions. Thank you – it’s equally important to hear words of encouragement as it is to get constructive criticism. I too have recently received an ANSI Pinebook Pro for testing from the last production run and I admit that the keyboard (despite ANSI not being my thing) turned out rather nicely. I also find that the fit-and-finish has been perfected at this point, and the unit feels very polished. The one thing that end-users will need to do however, is update their keyboard and trackpad firmware – the factory failed to apply the necessary fixes in this production run. Moreover, ANSI users will have to change the keyboard layout to ANSI in the default OS (en_US) as the default OS layout is ISO (en_UK). We’ll see to it that this is the last time end-users need to do the firmware update on their end.

As promised, upgrade kits that convert the original Pinebook into a Pro-esque version are in the works, but we won’t be able to have them ready this month. We know that many OG Pinebook owners are waiting for this upgrade to drop and we’ll make sure that it is ready for production when factories resume operation after Chinese New Year. We apologize for the delay in delivering the pro upgrade kit, but there are still some aspects of this that need to be ironed out and we didn’t want to rush it. Onto the subject of upcoming software.