[chylat]

> Would you rather find, download, and flash a special-purpose, pinebook-specific image onto a microSD card, pop it in, and boot that up to install a distribution, or would you rather it supports a standard UEFI booting interface over USB, netboot, whatever else, like every other laptop can?

It's possible to write Tow-Boot to the eMMC to do exactly this. SPI isn't needed, it's just more convenient. I happen to prefer SPI and Pine64 was willing to go with SPI too.

I think this issue is blown out of proportion.

Pine64 listened to feedback. The problem here was that timeline's didn't match, not bad intention.