In all these years I’ve been waiting for this phone, it must have been at least the 15th “expected” date. None of them have turned out to be accurate. The lack of availability of parts is of course no fault of purism, but the fact that they don´t even offer a regular refund for a device that’s 4(!) years too late is inexcusable. (telling people they’ll get a refund when their “place in the queue” has questionable at best).
There’s at least two sides to this:
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On the one hand purism made some decisions that they shouldn’t have: could not get the parts, with no indication of availability, but instead of being up front about their inability to manufacture devices people have paid for they tell their customers their orders will be postponed. I think there’s nothing I can say about this that hasn’t already been said.
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On the other hand, if it wasn’t for this somewhat misleading move, no one would have ever gotten a fully libre linux phone.
Since i do feel a necessity for such devices, i have strong opinions for both sides of the coin here.
All in all, because no one knows how many devices are sold, the previous update about a container of librem 5’s lined up for shipping was pretty meaningless to anyone wanting to know if they could expect their phone or not. The current update, again, does not list any concrete information regarding the availability of parts, just that “the cpu is available” again. And everyone just needs to hope there’s enough to fulfill the entire backlog.
in the first few months I was excited about every update i got, hoping that I would see the device any time soon, so that it would allow me early entry in to the market of adaptive linux applications. That plan didn’t work out, and for two years I’ve already felt that “i’ve waited too long to cancel it now”.
At some point I had enough, I asked for a refund. The first response was quick, but in it, i was told that a refund will only be submitted when my place in the queue has been reached (as mentioned above). When I asked about an estimate(which i think was a reasonable question to ask), my e-mail was flat-out ignored. twice! Now, after all this time, I know I’ll get a device that still doesn’t last a day on a battery, still has issues with basic calling functionality, still has overheating issues when charging and does not have a functional gps.
That’s been my experience with purism, a company that prides itself on having sold many devices for some time, and therefore has “experience” in manufacturing and distribution.
Personally I would not recommend anyone to ever buy something from purism for these reasons, I couldn’t do that in good conscience. Their goal however of building a fully libre phone is still great, the hardware itself is still best in class, I just wish things would have transpired a little more “professionally” so to say. But i guess it is what it is.
