A nice upgrade, I must say! Congrats for the launch.
Why.
Why, why, why, why, why,
Did they have to call it the Liberty Phone.
Short rant
Alright, I know it’s the July 4 launch so maybe people are feeling a bit patriotic in ways they arguably shouldn’t be, but…
Everything is so repressive and cynical that no one thinks that anyone who says “freedom” or “liberty” is doing anything besides pulling some kind of politically charged scam.
I know that’s not what it is, but I really would prefer a device that I can name without people laughing in my face, and so would everyone else you’d want to buy this thing.
Please, if you want this to sell, just rename it to Librem 5 USA+ or something.
Rant out of the way, now I have a question.
If I were to get a motherboard for a hopefully soon to be renamed Librem 5 USA+, could I put that into my Librem 5?
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I would like this feature to the final Librem 5 Fir batch, as the Evergreen batch still need to polish the body to REDUCE Weight and Thickness plus a Luxurious Desing.
Make the Librem 5 Fir the best gnu device yet.
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I agree. Silly name. It should be “Librem 5 USA something” like “+” or “ultra mega edition” or whatever.
Do you think there is a different motherboard? I would have guessed that Purism simply replaces the two components in question, the RAM and the eMMC storage, changing to larger sizes of those, with everything else being identical to a regular Librem 5 (USA). Would that not be possible?
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I have no inside knowledge, but my gut tells me that Liberty is Fir. I wish my gut also told me that when shipping parity is reached, Purism will ship a non-USA Fir for $1499 and that prices will come down a bit over time. I would buy one if it were available, but I am pretty sure that I can happily use my Evergreen for years if not.
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This seems more like Evergreen to me. I thought Fir was planned to have a more up-to-date CPU.
While it is nice to have more RAM and eMMC, I want more processing power. That would give me full justification to spend over $2,000 USD again.
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The Ultra Phone for Ultra Man. 
Not so much better. And most people wont think “that’s ulta powered”, but “that should have been default from beginning”.
Nope.
This is a Librem 5 USA with 4GB RAM instead of 3GB RAM and a 128GB eMMC instead of 32GB eMMC. https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/#tech-specs .
This is is clear if, on the “Liberty Phone” product page, you note the button that says “Buy 3/32GB” it refers to the old Librem 5 USA page. It’s basically an incremental spec upgrade and price of $2,300. Everything is the same except for more RAM/eMMC.
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Until software optimisation is useless!
Why even put in the effort and resources into making this? Honestly. You haven’t even finished shipping the last batch.
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Of course that’s what it is – I don’t dispute that. What I am saying is that (my hunch) Purism has grabbed the low-hanging fruit for Fir, and will have a completely different phone for v2. I even think that it is the right thing to do. The L5 was designed over 5 years ago. After they sell out of the 3GB Evergreens, the should discontinue them and sell only the 4GB Fir… until something new is ready.
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Well pretty soon the Librem 11 and 16 will be released, so the Liberty Phone will be available for quite a while yet. I am highly confident Fir and v2 are synonymous, and that the Liberty Phone is just a stop-gap measure between Evergreen and Fir iterations.
The Liberty phone is just a minor iteration on what Purism already has. I can imagine that this requires relatively little additional technical research and development effort. Besides, they produce it in small batches anyway, just like the Librem USA. It seems to me that the Liberty phone is a rather small and low-risk investment.
So, from the company’s point of view, why not? If my speculation is correct, then it’s going to be cheap money if it works, and limited loss if it doesn’t.
It’s approximately six more weeks until shipping parity for the non-US batch. How would deferring the Liberty launch have helped?
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Better than the name they thought of for the early teenage crowd (rhymes with).
Lol. I’d bet my left nut we don’t hit parity in 6 weeks. Not once have they ever been transparent or truthful about that. I’ve heard this probably 4 times now. Sure R&D might be low on this but it honestly makes me mad that they even dare come out with a newer version without even beginning shipping on Fir and not completing shipping on evergreen. Does not give confidence that the company knows how to prioritize resources. It also pisses me off that they probably did this cause “hey its easy”, but not easy enough to automatically upgrade all those who have been waiting 2+ years for even the base model. I’m using the term base model lightly because this new phone just feels like the phone that actually should be shipping right now as the primary model. I love how after they’ve started this shipping spree and potentially reaching shipping parity soon, they decided to release a slightly better version at 2.5x the cost what most people paid without even offering an upgrade deal. Just to piss people off I guess. If my 7 year old phone I just got 3 weeks ago didn’t feel obsolete already, it certainly does now.
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While there has been no official commitment that I’m aware of from Purism, I recall that Faerber suggested that Fir would come with a newer NXP SoC and would contain design changes learned
from evergreen.
But speculation is fruitless at this point.
I recall at a minimum Fir would come with a better processor.
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Released??? “Pretty soon”??? It might be announced (with specs) pretty soon, but a Librem tablet won’t be released for at least a year.
I see your point. Fulfilling their end of a deal hasn’t been top priority for Purism. I especially despise their blatant disregard of refund agreements and the fact that they even seem to be getting away with that.
On the other hand, it’s the fifth production batch already. From my sweet-summer-child point of view, Purism shouldn’t be facing the same degrees of uncertainty today as they did twelve months ago, nor five years. So I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt with their six-weeks prediction, but I can totally see why one wouldn’t.
Have you considered contacting the support folks and asking for an upgrade deal?
I do actually believe 6 weeks is possible given the rate they have been shipping out phones the past few months. But Purism has made me cynical on any sort of promises from them.
No, I’ve had my phone for over 4 weeks. The upgrade isnt that major to me. The most I would have paid maybe would have been 100$ at the time they asked for the shipping info. Also looks like the new one is a USA production only while I didnt order the USA model as you may have guessed.
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