Birch Shipping Email Received

You’ve hit the nail on the head. In the past we had decided to lean more on the side of only publishing updates when we knew things for sure. After Aspen the community made it clear that they’d rather us publish more frequent updates even if there was a risk the information would change, so we are trying to lean more on the other side.

It still remains to be seen whether this new approach upsets fewer people. We’ll see.

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And this is right. Haters gonna hate, but supporters deserve to know.

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So I guess I don’t understand what the shipping confirmation has to do with anything.

Here is how I interpreted this (mind you this is how I’ve interpreted this and the purpose of this post to find out where I went wrong here):

First Post: We had all the Birch boards and discovered they were missing a resistor during QA. We can fix them manually and ship the units out on time.

Second Post: The manual fix didn’t work so we are getting new boards shipped to us which are fixed and they won’t arrive in time for us to make our shipping window.

So here is my next question:

At the time the 11/15 post was made, did you guys have all the Birch boards in hand? If not, then would it be correct to assume that you guys addressed the issue with the manufacturer and updated the spec for the rest of the boards that were supposed to ship? Or did you decide to just get new boards instead of manually fixing each and every one of the ones you hand on hand?

The implication in the second post is that the resistor issue somehow resulted in the shipment delay, but it’s not at all clear how the two are actually related. My best guess is that at some point the spec of the board was updated or the manufacturing deficiency was addressed with your vendor which resulted in a delay of the shipment.

Explaining that would be an extremely helpful and appreciated gesture on your part.

I like the frequent updates:
Because guessing at what happened looks like fun:

The USB port did not work. Purism engineers found a manual fix by soldering a resistor on the board. At which point a radioactive asteroid hit the earth. Todd was lucky and ended up with superpowers. Earth was screwed getting sent back into an ice age. This forced Purism to create a time machine and… a meteor diverter, which was possible because of the superpowers of Todd and the engineers at Purism. Sadly,once the asteroid was diverted, not only did Todd lose his superpowers, but the whole world was shifted into a slightly different universe! One where small details in the world were wrong. Like the shipment of parts was delayed, Curious George lost his tail and many small errors passed off as the Mandela effect.
We should all be thankful that the delay is minimal and we do not have to wait for life to re-evolve from bacteria.

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where did you get it from?

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From https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-birchs-10kohm-resistor-fun-devices-prepping-for-shipping/

For instance, with our Birch batch, we sent our hardware engineers the very first phones off of the line ahead of schedule so they could perform quality control testing. We discovered a 10kΩ resistor was missing from the PCBA!

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Its my interpretation. It’s not at all clear how the shipment and the resistor issue are related. Understand? I assumed (and fully admitted as much in my post seeking clarification) that the need for a new shipment of hardware meant that the existing inventory could not in fact be manually fixed.

Ok, the way i read it - manual fix did fix the remaining issues to pass the qa, so they requested the manufacturer to stop the process, correct the mistake and re-start manufacturing, manufacturer confirmed that’s ok and won’t change the schedule, while later he made post-factum update that, well, it actually did.

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Now - if that’s the case - that’s what they needed to tell us in that second post. Thats transparency and honesty. That not only tells us what is happening right now, but it also explains how we got from here to there in a very understandable and clear fashion.

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Is that a less deceptive promise than this


or this?

If you want me to leave you alone, stop mentioning me

I think today noone summoned you.

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I summoned myself. This is a great issue to dig into because it involves two statements made by Purism in very close proximity that on the surface appear to directly contradict one another.

At this point I’m looking at this as a teachable moment. I’m trying hard to not only get clarification on what happened but to help push Purism in the direction of publishing updates that really take the time to explain all the things that need to be explained in the future.

As of right now, I will admit, this Birch shipping delay controversy might be a big misunderstanding driven by their tendency to say things without providing salient background details. On the surface it looks like they told a lie. I’m trying to figure out which and I’m trying to give Purism the benefit of the doubt.

I really do appreciate Kyle’s participation here. He’s being a good sport about it and I’m trying to return the favor.

I was just thinking exactly this… If he’s gonna encourage people to dislike and distrust purism using his personal credibility (‘I have an inside source, but can’t provide any information, yadda yadda yadda’), then he needs to be impeccable in his own behaviour. I think he’s just revealed himself as simply attention seeking.

Am I still worried about the state of the project? Yup. The radio silence on Aspen (and from Lunduke) is concerning. But since then, @Kyle_Rankin and @joao.azevedo have been reasonably forthcoming with information, even when it isn’t good news.

Time to see if there’s a feature similar to Disqus’ to block and filter out a user’s messages. Sad thing is the odds are good someone would have mentioned him today regardless.

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It’s a big misunderstanding driven by your preconceptions. You’re not trying to teach, you’re on a crusade. You made up your mind long ago, and even now, when you’re demonstrated to be wrong, you divert the attention to past misconceptions.

Even if you were correct, all you’ve demonstrated here is that purism would be guilty of a misunderstanding of their own. Telling a lie requires knowledge of the truth and a willful disregard thereof, not simply changing course.

And, really, how are we supposed to take anything you say seriously, particularly as it pertains to “telling the truth,” after you’ve said multiple times you’d leave here and yet continuously return to voice your ill-conceived opinions?

Go find something to do, man. There are much better ways to waste your (and our) time.

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Have you ordered a librem5 or are you just trollig?

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myself and many other Purism fanboys here will walk through barbed wire with you Purism if it’s the last thing we do before we push this “baby” out into the world … YES this is the Purism forums … let’s leave the trolling for r/Purism

carry on Purism ! don’t waste time with trolls !

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Any other way to block comments from a specific user without using custom styles? I’m getting tired of this… please go write some blogs about a product order you have already cancelled, so that I don’t have to go and visit that. The only thing you are really helping is your own ego trip as you think most people in here are stupid and you are the only who possesses the absolute truth.

Thanks to the above rule… Bye bye jay!

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I had this feeling sometimes that purism is lacking some project management as a lot of things where one gets worried are project management related. Like the time line at the beginning and the communication management afterwards. However as I started once as a project manager doing things wrong and having similar results on my projects I know that the vendor is not lying to you, they do their very best and if you let them they will provide you the best product they can. And one can really see how they try to do all that.

  • Time line was not realistic - they moved it - what other option was there? Present something unfinished or give the money back? That’s what they did with the tablet and I think it’s very clear now that this was the right decision - they had to focus on one minimal viable product.
  • Critics that specs are bad - they were not final and they maxed them out with additional mp on the camera and providing a second choice for a modem
  • Flame wars on the forums about the first delay - they did not want to move again - what’s the trade off? Batches - good idea because it reduces the time to market which gives you feedback while having some few lovers who can have their phones - you can see on the forums that people seemed to be sad not being in the alpha phases

They encountered other problems - that’s normal in a project and I think they found good solutions

  • first alpha phones had problems - they delivered it to internals and provided videos / fotos - they even made a review with TLG - that interview was cool!
  • second batch had a hardware problem - I imagine myself the situation - Hey XYZ we found that there is a problem with the HW - OH DAMN! Will this delay us again? We cannot delay again! - uhmm there is the possibility that we can still deliver on time if we work on the weekend and get the package before the official shipment day - OK let’s do that - we’ll inform our backers directly and show them that we are super transperent!
    Then a week later someone looked over it saw that it was now impossible and the new blog post was released.

That’s how I imagine myself this situation. I mean in the end they are not crafting just another phone - they are handtailoring a new device which they never did before. Look at Nicole’s presentation from CCC.

I want to conclude for those who get worried by folks posting rumors and assumptions about purism lying. Believe me, being a vendor is not always easy and going to your stakeholders telling them that your over ambicious timeline (because stakeholders often don’t want to hear other things or they don’t buy you) don’t match reality, is a hard thing. You cannot sleep because of the things you could have done, or still have to do because you are committed to your goal. Purism will also not lie to us, because it would be easier for them not delivering the phone and stay with their laptops and librem one instead of finalizing some crap phone investing even more money in it developing a whole eco system together with the floss community, striving for an impossible ryf certification if you were not truly believing in your mission. And if you read Todd’s blog posts you can see that this is about a mission. Even if you read the ciritcs from people having left the company you see that Todd’s a visionary playing against the odds and against technically impossibility. However I see him proven by what I see in videos, blog posts, community and everything else here.

So short: I am a beliver and I will dream this dream until Purism tells me otherwise. I invite everyone else to join me and stopping this farce of “bla bla bla” they lie to us.

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100% … this is the Purism forums … why should we be ashamed that we are fanboys … let the r/Purism frag-grenade but not here …

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So please do us a favor and shut up already. By your own account you have received your money back, so you should not have a horse in this race anymore.

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I believe that most of the community appreciate rapid communications, and are OK with some rough edges and inconsistencies over the details. We mostly don’t jump to the conclusion that there is some intention to deceive. The important thing is to see the project moving. The people who aren’t happy with that will write more posts (with a higher word count) than the rest, but in terms of the number of people I think that they are a minority.

An eagerly-expected product launch can bring out a lot of impatience as the delivery target first gets nearer, and then recedes again. Over the last few weeks I have been seeing much the same with the F(x)tec Pro1 - a delay in shipping of a few days here and there brought out accusations of lying and expectations that the product would never ship from a minority of followers. In one forum that I read, other posters (including the CEO) were on the receiving end of such a storm of personal abuse, racism and obscenity from one individual that the the mods had no choice but to ban him and delete his posts. That was a s**tstorm far worse than anything that I have seen here.

I would hate to see the same happen here, and for @Kyle_Rankin and @joao.azevedo to come to the conclusion that posting to these forums isn’t worth it any longer.

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