Click on his profile picture and you will see exactly that
@dos, Thanks for clarifying what is the situation with the parts. I don’t have the phone, so I am going off pictures. @nicole.faerber said last year that the screen of the Librem 5 would be joined with the case, but that may have changed. Have you tried taking the screen off?
Do you have to solder wires to the test points, or is there some way to do this with pressure contacts?
You can use pogo pins
There are around 4000 people I have to check if I want to know who is dev and who is not. And I have to repeat it since Purism can hire or fire people.
Bump. Would be good to have ifixit repair guides for all products and marketplace for components like battery, screen, etc
None for the Librem 11 I suppose though?
Yes, correct.
The Librem 11 is glued together. Removing the metal back cover is almost certain to permanently deform it.
Yes, that is the case
Keeping the old idea and thread alive (as well as others, like L5 lifetime)…
EU’s legislation for Smartphones and Tablets - European Commission about energy efficiency for products placed on the EU market from June 20th 2025 onwards has some good requirements for phones:
- Durability: resistance to accidental drops or scratches and protection from dust and water
- Battery lifetime: sufficiently durable batteries which can withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while retaining at least 80% of their initial capacity
- Right ro repair: non-discriminatory access for professional repairers to any software or firmware needed for the replacement
- Spare parts: rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
- Software lifetime: availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
- Digital Product Passport (an expanded hw BoM): a digital identity card for products, components, and materials, which will store relevant information to support products’ sustainability, promote their circularity and strengthen legal compliance.
This should lead to some improvements all around as most products are global these days. The imaginary future L4 or L6 phone would need to be well designed as L5 would not pass all the requirements (but would already have the repairability). Energy efficiency comparisons alone would be interesting. I wonder if other new linux phones designs have those incorporated or will they need to go back to drawing-board. The relative downside is that requirements require more from even the smaller products.
Of the listed bullet points, where do you think the Librem 5 would not pass?
My opinions …
The Librem 5 would be strong on right to repair and software lifetime - and is probably OK on battery lifetime.
And should be OK for the hardware BoM since the hardware is fully documented. The Librem 5 may not be able to jump through the precise bureaucratic hoops though.
I myself asked that back in December and reportedly an internal ticket was created to document this. I don’t know whether it has happened yet.
That’s a fairly brutal requirement on any manufacturer, even one who is thousands of times bigger than Purism. My opinion is that this requirement is unreasonable for a consumer item, particularly, say, a $100 Android phone. It would also be quite a task keeping spare batteries in usable condition for 7 years.
I guess it depends on the EU’s definition of “critical”. What is a critical spare part as distinct from a non-critical spare part? I think there is a bit of a lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of global supply chains. I guess that does tie in though with having a well-documented hardware BoM, so that the EU government could at least assess any “critical” exposures.
Since Librem 5 is no smartphone, those things should not count. However, even as ppc it has an awesome energy management compared to laptops and software lifetime already passes the 5 years. Spare parts are still available an can be reproduced since everything is open. CPU will be produced even after 2030. Even if it would count for this device, I guess L5 can check everything (maybe except battery quality, which can be changed easily).
But I still hope for energy improvements. Even computer should save energy when possible.
No, especially for a 100€ phone … especially cheap ones produce a lot of e-waste which EU wants to fight (one of the things I’m really happy about). They don’t need to replace with exactly the same components. They can use more modern ones, but need to keep some standards to do so. It’s not that hard. I replaced some parts on my desktop PC while keeping my 7 years old motherboard - thanks to the same standards for the processor (Zen1 to Zen3) and PCIe slots.
I think there would be room to improve on the first two and last two. In part, it’s also that there is probably now going to be some standards in measuring and defining those (more customer friendly way to compare etc.) - but I have no idea if those are still worked on and negotiated somewhere (including that criticality definition).
Well… maybe not But the main reason that L5 is not required to adhere to those is that it has already been introduced before that June date (devices can’t be required afterwards).
That’s right, but also speaking about further iterations (as Fir or v2).
That’s actually a good point: would v.2 (of L5) be required to adhere to those or would it still count as a version of the old product…? I have no clue how they make those distinctions.
Sure but that can only mean that $100 Android phones disappear and become the same phone but costing $200 (or whatever). EU consumers may not be totally happy about that. (If I were the manufacturer, I would just send a new phone back and tell the customer that I repaired it. .)
However my real concern was that 7 years is just too much when you don’t control your entire supply chain - almost no company does.
And the lack of definition for what is critical v. non-critical. Maybe for a phone they can pin that down to mean “screen” and “battery”, only (as screens get broken by clumsy users and as batteries lose condition). Who knows?
It’s not only about interface standards but, in the case of a phone, whether the replacement physically fits. With a desktop PC you get more space to play with.
Interface standards don’t always work well either over long periods of time e.g. sure, the new Gen 4 component claims to still support Gen 1, 7 years down the track, but actually it has some nasty bugs / interoperability problems with the legacy support that need to be worked around.
I guess at least v2 would be a new product, while Fir could count as the same device - like Amber to Evergreen. But I do not know.
And I would complain not to find my scratches anymore. The idea behind “right to repair” is that companies do not just send a new device, but are forced to repair it and I guess people who want to repair are mainly people who don’t want to destroy the earth for no gain.
But you can use it 7 years instead of 2, so it is effective a 30€/year device instead of a 50€/year. (btw I’m writing as € because it will be sold in Europe).
There is maybe a more detailed description we do not know. The law-text is not the only relevant thing, but also the description what politician had in mind when creating those texts. Otherwise the court will make a decision at some point and I’m sure it would decide something like “all components that are important to keep the device alive” or similar … so including modem, at least one USB-Port etc. A second USB-port, a second SIM-tray or the 3.5mm Jack etc would be non-critical. Something in this direction I guess.
That’s true, but there is also a possibility of backwards-compatibility. Creating adapters for this purpose or something could be a cheap solution. Or do you want to tell me “the best ecosystem we ever had” (at least what many people think about) is not able to be that flexible?
Maybe the repairer damaged the case trying to get it open, in order to repair it, so they provided a replacement case as part of the repair.
I was just messing with your head but the real challenge with that would be some kind of in-silico security module (similar to an iSIM), where it may be impossible to extract the security information in order to propagate it to the new (fake repaired) phone and impossible to physically remove the module in order to move it to the new phone.
(With the Librem 5, it’s a separate OpenPGP card, so if you are silly enough to send the card in with the phone to be repaired, the card can just get moved across to the new phone.)
Yeah, I know. I just couldn’t remember the compose sequence for the euro sign and don’t know its Unicode number off the top of my head. But OK, I looked it up. It’s 20AC. So there you go. A €100 phone. One can of course also use € in Discourse (or anything else that recognises HTML entity names).
Are those numbers realistic though? What if the current throwaway mentality means that a €100 currently lasts 3 years and the cost of holding spare parts inventory for 7+ years etc. pushes the cost of the phone to €250? Or the current lifetime is 4 years and let’s keep the cost of phone pushed out to €200?
Depending on how the numbers play out, the annualised financial cost for the manufacturing of the phone may go up or down.
Then you have to factor in the exorbitant fines for when the manufacturer fails to live up to the regulations, which pushes the cost of the phone higher still. (I didn’t see anything in the original link about fines but you would have to assume that the regulations would need to be backed up with fines or some other kind of enforcement.)
Note that the 7 years is more brutal than 7 years of repairability because it is (per the text above) counting years from EOL of the product. So if you buy the product as an early adopter, and the model is sold (in the EU) for 3 years, and then goes EOL (in the EU), then you yourself end up getting 10 years of repairability.
Then there’s the nasty trade-off between keeping an old device alive (reduced materials cost, reduced waste management cost, potentially reduced cost to the consumer) v. vastly reduced power consumption of a new device (which has both environmental and cost considerations).
As I think @JR-Fi implies, if there were a Librem 5 v2, we can speculate that it is much better in power consumption … but to buy one, you may be effectively sending an old phone to waste management.
It’s definitely a balancing act, optimization of how to get most out of it - when are the new features really worth the change. Longer lifespans overall help with the wasteful nature of the current consumerist trend-phone system. @amosbatto had same good data a few years ago that I used to do an estimative chart about how the impact cumulates over time - it’s not straight forward.