Curious When My Phone Will Ship?

[amosbatto]

@Ratfink

I purchase these 5000 sometimes 10000 at a time. These also can be purchased in singles or anywhere in between. I have had no issues purchasing or out of stock problems. There are several versions of this single board computer/CPU. Purism may use one of these different versions.

Maybe you can get the i.MX 8M Mini, but it is not a good replacement for the i.MX 8M Quad. The Quad has twice as much L2 cache and its RAM runs 100MHz faster than the Mini. The GC320 2D and GC NanoUltra 3D GPU in the Mini is frankly garbage and will provide very limited hardware acceleration. The GC7000Lite GPU in the Quad has 4 times more shaders than the GC NanoUltra 3D GPU in the Mini. The mini only provides USB 2.0, so the USB-C port will be 4 times slower than the USB 3.0 with the Quad. The Mini only has one video port for the internal screen and no support for HDMI and DisplayPort, so there there will be no video out and no convergence. The Quad supports using both of the cameras at the same time, whereas the Mini only supports one camera.

None of the i.MX 8 chips are energy efficient enough to be used in a phone and all the other i.MX 8M chips have disadvantages like the Mini compared to the Quad, and the Plus hasn’t been released yet, so there really wasn’t any option but to wait 6 months for NXP to produce the Quad.

The parts suppliers had the following inventory on April 2, 2021 for the i.MX 8M Quad (MIMX8MQ6DVAJZAB):

• Mouser: 23 in stock, $58.91 for 1, $57.24 in lot of 10, 27 weeks lead time
• Arrow: None in stock, $41.72 in lot of 90, 26 weeks lead time
• Digi-Key: 26 in stock, $78.70 for 1, 26 weeks lead time

The normal price is $35.50, so it was possible to obtain 49 of the chips at double the normal price in early April. Based on that, I assume that Purism was able to buy up a couple hundred of the chips at elevated prices when it planned to start producing the Librem 5 USA, but it was impossible to obtain more. If Purism sent those chips to China, then it could produce a couple hundred more Librem 5’s, but so the people who preordered in Oct. 2017 would get their phones, but everyone else would still be in the same situation waiting for their phones. By the way, it appears that most of the people who preordered the Librem 5 USA are still waiting for their phones as well, and they are also complaining about the delays.

@Ratfink

Dont be afraid of asking for money and why you need it. Whats the worse that can be said? No?

Purism just did that by raising the price $100 on the phone and raising $2.04 million in new investment in the company over the last month.