Yeah 😑 A very large point of Linux mobile is to get away from vendor specific kernels and non-upstream drivers, so that devices can be run on mainline kernels easily.
It does sound like the situation with the Pinephone Pro is better in that regard, but why does it have to be so darn overpriced? 😒
Original PinePhone is also overpriced. For 200$ you can buy way more powerful Android device :(
I think it's because the production volume is less than other large companies have and because Pine64 don't sell any data.
Sure, but at a 200$ price point you can pay a bit extra for a device to play around with.
A 600$+ device like the Pro, however should better be actually useful as a daily driver, which currently AFAIK it is not. Also the same company sells similar hardware for half the price, which is what makes it especially overpriced.
I could handle an overpriced phone if the device were viable for day-to-day use. Unfortunately the battery life is so compromised that even if we had a totally flawless mobile OS running on it, it still wouldn't work out as a phone.
In this case it's better to think of it as a development platform.
worth noting that Pinephone does boot against unpatched mainline (i.e. kernel.org) kernel. it’ll boot to a DE with graphics and touch working, but you lose WiFi/bluetooth, inherit some quirks with the backlight, proximity sensor, etc. no idea about the modem or audio.
A lot of the blog seems to be focussed on the migration to megi's kernel over Pine64's. I think there's discussion to be had on why that happened, because I can't imagine it was inevitable that everyone would just migrate to a private user's repo without good reason.