this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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I'm sure it's a decent product, but only 30 days warranty?? They must not have a lot of faith in their product. That's not even legal in a lot of countries (at least the EU, Australia, New Zealand, and some Asian countries).
The 30 day warranty seems to be default for them, all their products are only given 30 day warranty. Super shitty and like you mention illegal many places.
Basically all their products are essentially dev kits. They are not meant for normal consumers. At least thwts how it has been for the phone, laptop, watch, etc.
The PineTime works great as a regular device as well! I did do a little dev'ing to get the weather to show in a watchface that hadn't been updated to include it yet, but other than that it's a solid device imo.
Which I guess is a nice way to avoid legislation...
Sure, but they wouldnt exist without that. Making micro batches of specialized hardware is not profitable at all. If they sold more than a few thousand devices per model then i would care, but meanwhile big manufacturers get away with so much worse.
@ExcessShiv
In europe there is a big difference between the manufacturers waranty that is up to the manufacturer to offer or not to offer as he likes and the legal waranty that is an obligation for the seller that he cannot escape.
So in europe the customer always holds the reseller responsible and not the manufacturer.
When the manufacturer is the seller, they're still bound to the legal minimum requirements of warranty though.
It makes total sense for Pine64, it's worth looking into how the company operates before passing judgment.
(Re)pebble smartwatches also have only 30 days long warranties... https://repebble.com/warranty
Here's a quote from one of their blog posts: https://repebble.com/blog/pebble-time-2-is-in-mass-production
I find that disappointing and I'm honestly confused about how that checks out legally in EU.
E: I like how AirGradient approached this where you get parts for DIY kit (which is practically almost fully assembled and it's just formality to do the finishing screws) where you get no warranty but at a much cheaper price in return and the risk is on you: https://www.airgradient.com/indoor/
The monitor with warranty is 230 USD and the kit without warranty is 138 USD.
Hmm. Well I have classic pebbles that have been in service for 10 years so they should be pretty robust. I had an original time round have issues but I can't remember what, it was close to the end of pebble and at the time support was great. They couldn't let on what was happening but pretty much said send the broken one back today and we will send a new one. The replacement still works.
I'm pretty sure you just get a 30 day return period in the EU, regardless of your reason.
While I don't fully agree with this (online shopping should not be encouraged, especially multiple round-trips for some clothes that you ordered in the wrong size), it is the law.
they most certainly do, or will when you threaten to report them.
When shopping online, you have 14 days after receiving without having to specify any reason. In store it depends on if the customer had the chance to look at the product. If yes, there's no requirement to accept intact and functional goods.
I think it may be a question of how involved the EU really is, are they even technically 'selling' an item in the EU? Yeah, obviously, people are buying and having it shipped to the EU, but if a product ships straight from a factory in China designed by a business in the US with no real presence in the EU, I'd imagine there's likely just not a lot they could do to hold them to EU law.
Feels like the worst they could do would be to just not let them ship their product into the country anymore.
Pine64 does not sell consumer products. These are for development and testing. They're also sold at cost or subsidized. Pine64 does not make any profit.
They sell directly B2C, which is the deciding factor.
US consumer rights standard, I believe. Some freedom they have over there. Should be US only warranty, as it is illegal for all of the rest of the western world at the minimum. Norwegian law is minimum 3 years - 5 if it's expected to last for a long time. Less than a month is a liability parody.
There's no enforced warranty for products in the USA (you can sell a product with no warranty at all!) but the standard for tech products is at least one year, and credit cards often provide an extra year as one of their benefits.