Wait they’ve only shipped one month worth of orders in total? I ordered like somewhere in januari 2019, it’ll take years before i get mine at this rate. man I’ve been patient for a long time, but this is pretty disappointing.
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I don’t understand why it is so difficult for so many people to understand that when 50% of orders are placed in 3 months and the other 50% are spread over 3 years that it will take longer to get through the first 3 months than the following 6 months… Measuring shipping progress based on order date is massively flawed and will result in wildly inaccurate estimates of future shipping and of shipping progress.
With that said, I think it would be easier for people to understand if Purism was transparent about the order shipping progression showing #X/Y progress instead of obfuscating order numbers so that this kind of progress tracking is required to involve some amount of guesswork.
This information is also obfuscated and not published anywhere. Also based on what individual customers have shared it does not appear that A-D batches were 100% First In First Out. This is inferred from incomplete information due to lack of transparency on this front.
And to head off some of the counterarguments, yes I know that Purism is more transparent on this than pretty much every other company, however being more transparent doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable to acknowledge when there is something where there isn’t transparency.
I have also estimated 250/month instead of the 500/month I’ve seen commented elsewhere. There have also been comments on this rate increasing but I haven’t taken the time to try to estimate the increased rate of shipping or month over month shipping rates… Those would be nice numbers to have and would normally provide meaningful insight into shipping estimates.
The big wildcard is of course the chip shortages which mean that at any point shipping may slow/stop due to lack of parts which is mostly beyond purisms control.
At the current estimated shipping rate I’m looking at between 8 and 16 months for delivery, I’m hopeful that shipping rates will improve and that the supply will stay available… But hey it’s at least less time remaining than time passed at this point.
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500 phones/month was the throughout they seemed to have reached at the end of January, not an average. It resulted from their shipping estimates emails.
So, the question is: do they ship according to those reliable estimates given at the end of January for the period until May or delays have occurred?
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And there doesn’t seem to be any shipping delays so far!
This is not difficult to understand per se 
, the problem is just that this is basically all we have to go by.
The information I’ve gotten from purism usually turns out to be wrong when it comes to shipping dates, which is to be expected for a project of this size. But currently though, it has come to the point where it’s become laughable. When I (and i guess the same is true for many other backers) ordered this phone, it was to be the first fully free gnu/linux smartphone, made for consumers to be repairable etc. that’s still a great goal, except it’s hard not to compare it with things like the pinephone, which has beaten the librem 5 at (almost) every front, most notably in terms of availability. It’s a phone you can actually buy and receive.
I wouldn’t want one of those, because of it’s lack of focus on software freedom (I still love the project for what it is), but it kind of makes it apparent that purism just bit of way more than they could chew. The preorder date was literal years ago now, and we are almost at a point now where even though purism works on the software, the librem 5 in itself isn’t going to shape the market for mobile linux software as much as it’s alternatives already are. Purism has created a great set of tools that are already actively in use, but it’s starting to look like they’ve produced too little too late when it comes to the hardware 
/rant apologies for this entire thing in advance. I’ll get over the disapointment of seeing these numbers in a day or so.
What?? … it’s off-topic, but come on! are you kidding?
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“one” referring to the pinephone. The software freedom part is what has drawn me to the librem 5 in the first place open source hardware drivers and operating system are a great selling point for the librem 5.
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You aren’t wrong, but that doesn’t tell us much about future shipments, because this isn’t a linear process. An electronics assembler in China can produce 10k of the Librem 5 in a week.
The unknown variables are:
- whether Purism has the cash on hand to pay for manufacturing in large lots or Purism is waiting for more orders to finance more production,
- whether Purism can get all the required parts due to the current global chip shortages,
- when Purism will get FCC certification (and have the lab testing to assert CE certification),
- when Purism will have solved enough of the software issues so that it can ship in large quantities without overwhelming the support staff with customer support tickets,
- how fast the Fulfillment Center in Carlsbad, California can install modems, then test, package and ship phones,
- whether there are quality control issues with the hardware that need to be resolved before Purism can ship in large quantities.
It is my speculation that variable 1 is the most important, and variable 3 should be solved soon. In my opinion, Purism should ship as soon as it can and ignore variable 4, since the vast majority of customers are early adopters who will be far happier just to get the phone, and can deal with having to use the forum for support. However, there have been enough people reporting on this forum and Reddit that they had to send the phone back to fix a hardware problem, that it seems likely that variable 6 is still an issue.
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Pine64 does not invest a dime into developing drivers or an operating system. I love my pinephones and would not want to part from them. But a big share of the software stack they run has been developed by puri.sm employees on their payroll. The pinephone doesn’t put any hurdles into your way to freedom (in contrast to other vendors) but they are not building the road themselves.
P.S. well, 10$ of the community editions went to the respective OS communities, so “not a dime” is wrong.
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No quite unlike the pinephone, like i said the pinephone does not have a focus on software freedom. They do happen to ship a lot free and open source software, it’s just not their focus. They want to build a linux phone that’s affordable, and user other projects to make it work. which is fine in itself, I’d just prefer companies like purism that actively strive to make the entire thing open from hardware to software. They are both great projects in their own right, the goals are just a bit different.
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The goals are exactly the same and both phones were designed with software freedom in mind - their reason of existence!. But Purism leans towards in-house software development and PINE64 focuses on engaging and supporting the FOSS communities for it and it’s doing an absolutely amazing job at it, not only with the PinePhone but the other products. Please stop spreading misinformation! I’m off-topic and I won’t reply again on this subject again.
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Although we don’t know for sure that this isn’t PEBKAC (PEBPAC?) in at least some cases.
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So, where are they currently at? Are they still working on orders from September of 2017?
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They’re past those, should be around late October 2017 orders now, see:
In summary, we will be providing shipping estimates within the next week to the backers within the original crowdfunding campaign (orders through October 2017), but not all backers yet, based on our confidence in the estimates .
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I ordered mine on September 27th 2017. It is planned to ship this week, but hasn’t been shipped yet.
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Yeah, I’m just going to order a new PinePhone when it’s available because I really don’t think that I’ll be getting my L5 this year.
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I just got a mail (5min ago) that my Librem 5 is now shipping!!! Got tracking number and everything.
Ordered the 27th September 2017 just like @reg.
So they kept their promise that it would be shipped this week
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Hehe I got an email at about the same time too
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Hmmm, my order date is October 7, 2017 and in Feb I got a mail from Purism saying that they expect shipping in April. Until now I have not got the mail for address confirmation and modem selection. When you have got this confirmation mail?