I doubt that that is correct. It wasn’t sold to somebody else. It was shipped to somebody else, no doubt somebody who ordered at around the same time in 2017 as you did, someone like me for example.
I’m not seeing what part of what I wrote you are actually disagreeing with. All good though.
That is the current stated refund policy i.e. once you are at the front of the queue, you can then choose either to take an actual phone or change your mind and get refunded.
That of course forces you to think about why you would choose a refund rather than a phone.
I wouldn’t take that figure of “30 days” as gospel though. I will believe that phones have resumed shipping when phones have actually resumed shipping. There have been too many obstacles over the journey to assume that there won’t be further obstacles.
While I can live without the money and I get their situation (small company, low margins, chip shortage…etc), I don’t think this makes me a bad person for asking questions.
Just curious, how long would you expect a company to hold a product in stock before sending it to someone else? There are others in the queue too, so to me it does not sound too strange that they sent it to someone else if you did not respond within a couple of weeks. The email I got was sent March 11 and it said that they needed a reply latest the 15th, which is a bit short though in my opinion. In principle i think the reason was fair, since what good would a device sitting in a box do?
Also, I don’t find it fair to call that an “upsell” email, when I read that email I found it very clear that it was primarily for modem and address confirmation, but also allowed paying for a sd-card, extra battery, PGP card or an extra charger which it was simply not possible to buy during the crowdfunding. If it would be an “upsell” they would push people to buy an extra monitor or expensive stuff like that like they did during the crowdfunding, but that was not even available. It was mostly cheap accessories which I considered just to be good customer service.
Importantly, it also benefits the customer to combine the orders and avoid separate postage (since the Librem 5 itself included free postage but if you ordered extra bits 6 months down the track then you are going to have to pay postage for those extra bits).
Also, for legal (safety compliance) reasons, if you want a spare battery then it may be that the only way to do that is to order it at the same time as the original phone. (May only apply to international orders and may vary from country to country, carrier to carrier.)
FWIW, Purism have updated their refund policy (one can speculate why - possibly consumer law advice/decisions played out) and mine is now being processed.
Please read through our policy in detail. If you would like us to go ahead with refund, we can now allocate your parts to another order and refund your Librem 5 product in accordance with the policy.
It’s going to take ‘a few weeks’ (I’ll believe it when I see it) but I’m not encouraging a mass exodus away from the Librem 5 just because the policy’s changed. More just sharing so that everybody’s aware of the current state of play.
