[cartoonworld]

They reinvest the cash right back into development and production units. There is risk that this company will evaporate, however: https://www.pine64.org/philosophy/

None of us is as smart as all of us ~ Ken H. Blanchard At the core of our philosophy is the notion that PINE64 is a community platform. [...] The goal is to deliver ARM64 devices that you really wish to engage with and a platform that you want to be a part of.

As such, if you can help them source better quality IPS panels, I know a guy you should talk to.

[llimllib]

it sounds like a neat product, I'm just wishing they would charge more to cover the risk/rate of chargebacks rather than simply ask people not to sink them.

[cartoonworld]

Yes of course, it would be nice if a bad batch didn't slow future development to a crawl. Pine64 works in batches, they don't ship promptly, they are also heavily preorder based for in-development projects, and they directly work with developers, as the people who buy them are also the developers of the software which runs on them.

If you get a dead pixel, they will sell you another panel. The laptops are modular, check out how they handled the NVME adapter problems: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8117

I feel quite confident after seeing their work.

[StudentStuff]

Charging more would make this laptop less accessible to the vast majority of people. The Novena, Talos & many other libre hardware projects were always so expensive as to be botique afterthoughts, rather than "I can spend $100 and get a nice netbook".