It is based on the platform of Pine64's existing Pine A64 single board computer,[1] costing US$89 or $99 for the 11.6" and 14" model respectively.

It uses the Allwinner Technology A64 SoC, containing quad ARM 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 cores and Mali-400 MP2 GPU, together with 2 GB RAM LPDDR3 and a 10,000mAh battery.

As of 2019, the Pinebook can be run on free software in the form of RISC OS and Linux.

Common choices include Manjaro, Arch, Debian, Armbian, BSD, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Q4OS.

[7] Support for most hardware has been merged into the kernel mainline as of 4.19,[8] with other drivers slowly trickling in.