Purisms intention is to get through the backlog this year. With some exceptions, all 2017 orders seem to have shipped, and that year had more orders than all the following combined (probably).
At the moment, it probably doesn’t matter much whether you order now or in 4-6 months, in terms of delivery date. It only matters in showing your support in their work.
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My recommendation is to make a list of the things you need to do with your phone, and then ask us how well the L5 does those things. Also keep in mind that Purism says that it will take 12 months to get the phone if you order today, and many of the current limitations like the lack of suspend will be solved by then. If you want the L5 sooner, you can buy it used–there are regular postings on this forum from people who want to sell their L5.
Also it helps to indicate how much you have used Linux and whether you like using the Linux command line.
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Plan on a three to four year wait for your Librem 5, regardless of whether you order it now or later. You might just as well get in line now if you’ve already made the decision to buy a Librem 5.
Apparently, Purism isn’t so experienced at large production runs. It looks like all of the phones will be made-up and tested by hand in small batches, regardless of what the supply chain does. I hope I am wrong about this. But it’s reasonable to base future expectations on past performance. If you plan on a four-year wait and Purism delivers in two years, then you can be pleasantly surprised.
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Correct me If I am wrong, but from where I am sitting I see a competitor making Pinephones and getting their chips for said phones. I think it goes something like this: Pro version has reached equivalency, not too far off on the product aim, a more respectable thickness, no years and years and years of waiting and anyone who looks at the price will be on the floor laughing. Purism’s customers are feeling the pain. In fact we are waiting remarkably patiently. Something has to start changing towards a favorable assessment or guess who is going to be dominant.
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Okay, I should be more precise: buying CPUs from NXP is not easy. When we started the project, those were pretty much the obvious choice.
As for equivalency, I might be wrong, but I’m not aware of Pine pushing millions of dollars into software development.
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Based on what @amarok explained above, some people do not need their already reserved place in Librem 5 purchase line. Therefore you might want to send private message to @JKO, and even search for another post of similar offer within this Forum. Please visit this thread and rethink about such offers as well:
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Sure
Do you know if Pinephone Pro or Pinephone has M.2 E socket too like Librem 5 does to prevent the obsolescence and to improve the gnu+linux experience?
Do you know that PP and PPP do not have real kill switches?
Do you know that PP and PPP it based on Librem 5 devkit Scheme?
To dcz, you are not aware of Pinephone pushing millions of dollars in to software development because they are almost assuredly not pushing millions of dollars in to software development. Why should they? Everything they need in the way of software comes free to them, courtesy of Purism. I didn’t pre-order a Librem 5 to help fund some crusade for Purism to be the only company doing software development. I want the hardware I paid for with whatever the latest version the software is at right now. To justify the non-delivery of product over a period of years by doing free software development to help Purism’s competitors, is a weak and even aggravating arguement. Every day that my hardware that I paid for is delayed now just aggravates my expectations. Stop the software development if necessary. Then do whatever it takes to reach shipping parity. After that, start working on the software again.
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Thank goodness I never did that then.
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Yes but we all are in some kind of the same boat. And without 2.300.000.000 Humans buy and use that device we are in a bad position. Right now Surveillance Capitalism create mouch more Money and Information through a whole single Humans life. And it may be the highest level of hardness for evolution to compete with. Because we are few, and we have no better power, just to know about source Code and Devices, or software behavior.
And with everything you say about Purism. You will have no other Option if you had inspect china Devices running with Linux and F a c b … o o k Code or some kind of a popular search Engine’s Linux/OSS Code. You know how this will end.
Like digging for minerals and kind of like slavery on human Workers in China/Taiwan facto… to produce Chips for low money? They will right know sleep there to avoid a Connection with Humans… to rule out a Infection with kinda popular Virus. It is not sure that this Minerals or Workers… have that kind of a Experience. But it could be more likely than we all like it. Because its some kind of the Price we all have to pay in Abstract high level Societies. If we are willing to pay for a Librem 5 USA that extra money, or to have Privacy and free Apps. The World would be a better place. But really - most Humans can not offer that extra charge, right know for Privacy, Sustainability and good Payed and health Insurance for workers.
But we can and have to work on a Solution in our daily Life, and with source Code we will contribute.
Rebecca Henderson wrote a good Book about that kind of future.
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That is an input, not an output. It is a very noble thing and quite commendable, but at the end of the day - most People will look at the final deal. PinePhone can copy. They get same benefits. That is an output. The real world works a bit different to intentions sometimes.
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I think there is a flaw in the expectation that things will always run smoothly or get increasingly better. Like expecting simple system behavior in a complex system. The component shortage and leadtimes have become worse again. As a happenstance, I note that Broadcom gets mentioned, which may particularly effect L5 (and set it apart from PP). Of course, that is a general report, and based on averages, so reality varies (by size as well, as has been argued - and likely not for better), so fluctuations have to be expected. These do not explain everything away, but do give a more realistic base and some explanation for current situation.
And, just give some perspective and as a reminder, we’ve had this same and similar argument and argumentation on this forum a few times now over the years. You can search the forum. Comes and goes as new people start queuing and go through the pretty similar and fairly predictable pattern (something like excitement, hope, frustration, anger, bargaining, rationalization, re-contextualization… inner balance either via renewed hope through changing expectations or giving up / moving on - very broadly speaking).
Welcome to the support group. We should have jackets or something 
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I wish more of us acknowledged exactly that, and stopped comparing a phone that depends on an automotive SoC to a phone that doesn’t.
A more reasonable interpretation is that when Purism started shipping Evergreen in Nov. 2020, it deliberately limited its production, because it didn’t yet have working cameras, which was necessary for FCC certification. By the time it got FCC certification in July 2021 and was ready to do mass production, it was facing a 6 month lead time to get the i.MX 8M Quad processor and the automotive-grade Micron RAM it was using, because it had the bad luck to select components which are heavily used by the automotive industry that has huge shortages and long lead times. Getting the i.MX 8M Quad got even harder and that lead time turned into 12 months in Q3 2021, so Purism is only able produce in small batches. Purism recently got a new production batch of 1160 phones that it just started to ship, and it shipped out a similar sized batch in Sep-Nov 2021.
Based on that info, a 12 month wait time to get a new L5 order looks more likely than the 3-4 years that you are predicting.
I think that Purism planned to do exactly what you are advocating (ship the hardware then provide software updates to make it functional), but it first had to get FCC certification before it could start ordering a lot of production batches, and once it got that certification, it got caught by the global parts shortage, so it couldn’t do the frequent production batches that it planned. At least, that is my interpretation of what happened, but it would be nice if Purism would tell us if that is what happened.
I doubt that stopping the software dev work would make any difference in how fast Purism can deliver the phones, since this is a parts supply problem. The software developers have nothing to do with the assembly of the L5’s in China or the shipping of the phones from Carlsbad, California. They do help the support team to solve customer problems, but that is after the phones are shipped.
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If you folks want another data point, I ordered mine on 2017-11-09 and was told that my place in the queue was ready on 2020-12-23. I chose to wait for FCC/CE certification and was then told on 2022-04-12 that it was being shipped. It arrived today (2022-04-18) and thus begins the task of shovelling KDE into my phone. Because I hate Gnome.
So that’s a 3 year lag time for a “normal” order or a ~4.5 year lag time after having chosen to wait for it to pass tests (plus get whatever bugfixes would have arisen in the meantime). Take that how you will.
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I decided to post too for 1st time more as a way to organize my thoughts than anything else.
- HW gets obsolete. What Purism is doing in offering long term support etc is great and commendable but there are so many things beyond their control. Very simple example - one of the things I use my phone for most these days is browsing internet and this is the single biggest driver for me personally to upgrade HW (besides gaming of course ) . Web gets heavier and pretty fast - maybe it’s the ads, new technologies or something else I have no idea, but it’s why my old devices I love are gathering dust now (N900, Pocket Chip…)
L5 specs were let’s say acceptable 4 years ago when I placed my order but are quite pitiful today. This is not complaining about its price performance or anything I’m just afraid that when I finally get it will already be an impractical toy for me.
Also I understand they cannot just re-spec and make it faster mid-production, but bumping up RAM? That should be pretty easy and have minimal impact on price - I’m guessing with this kind of device the BOM is actually not the primary factor impacting price… - Communication from Purism is pretty bad. I would love them to be much more transparent. Somebody said here maybe they don’t communicate much because they don’t want to spam people - then why am I getting like 5th email about investment opportunity? I always see email from Purism and get my hopes up and then… plus the investment topic itself - do they have money issues and are desperately trying to get some funding? If so I would love to know upfront because it is/would be completely understandable and I would consider it as a means to HELP not investment as I couldn’t care less about investing…
I’ll just keep patiently waiting now because I’m interested in the device and want to tinker with it finally. Also I’m not entertaining the notion of this ever becoming my main phone my needs are too mainstream for that so no rush…
But yes I’m convinced Purism has made many mistakes over the course of the campaign so let’s not deny that. They’re still a company taking our money for a product, not our favorite football club after all…
PS: one more thing if I may - I myself am not an English native speaker, but reading some of the posts here is literally painful. Guys, please there is no point in posting if you cannot articulate your thoughts…
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An earlier topic - specifically about this funding - said that they managed to raise plenty of cash. So it doesn’t seem likely that they are desperate for funding.
Because you didn’t action:
If you are not interested and don’t want any more emails from us, please let us know and we will be happy to remove you from this private mailing list.
after the 1st email about investment opportunity?
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Ok, fair enough on the investment emails.
Btw I hate writing on onscreen keyboards - any sign of plans on Librem Pro with a HW one? 
I guess you mean a phone with an integrated keyboard because you can easily add a USB or Bluetooth keyboard to the Librem 5.
Because the Librem 5 is already relatively thick, I have my doubts that they would be adding an integrated keyboard but I have no inside knowledge of future plans.
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This is mostly ads and crappy JS. Try noscript addon and the web will get back on track. See also: The Website Obesity Crisis (discussion). AFAIK there is no such problem with free-software websites like Mastodon or this one.
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