To be frank, I find concerns about the phone being “outdated” because of delays a bit weird for a product that during its initial crowdfunding campaign in 2017 was specified to have a CPU from 2011 and only later switched to one from 2017 
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Damn right I’m outdated
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Lol! Let’s say rather that you and all of us are improving with age.
They could’ve been better with the communication but also put it into perspective. A modern cell phone by Apple/Google is tens of billions of dollars to develop. It’s basically a few notches down from UFO technology. It’s amazing. So I’m glad others stepped in.
I emailed them to tell them I was still alive and they said the 2018 orders are going out in a few months.
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Because it is a scam. They have kept the money of many people without delivering the product. As simple as this. I am considering whether to take it to court.
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Hi Joan58,
I understand your frustration. I’ve been waiting since January 2018 and finally got the L5 some days ago.
The waiting was a roller coaster of emotions (will I ever receive the phone or not).
However I never had the feeling that it all was a scam.
Please be patient you will soon receive your phone.
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I also waited since 2018 and got it a few days ago.
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When In 2018?
I just looked it up, it was October 22, 2017
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What I don’t like about this whole journey of waiting for my Librem 5 is that Purism isn’t operating with common fairness and honesty.
If they say “well, the operating system isn’t complete yet”, I say, “so deliver the hardware now and I’ll start with whatever is available now, and update at the appropriate times”. If they say “well, there is a parts shortage now due to the pandemic”, I say “you mean that you were sitting on thousands of orders before the pandemic started, and that you didn’t think to plan ahead to ship the product that I paid for in advance?”.
Most if us here were gullible and Purism took advantage of that. We assumed that like any other crowdsourcing project, that the company would make it a priority to ship us our product at the first available opportunity. Instead, Purism strings us along for several years as they perfect the operating system through several iterations, in a mission to pay for software development and give it out to the world for free, without delivering the hardware product to most of those who are paying for that development until maybe sometime years later. I never agreed to finance such a crusade. Just stop with the excuses and give me the damned hardware that I paid for three years ago, now that the hardware development is complete. That is how crowdsourcing of pre-ordered hardware is supposed to work. No one expected everything to work perfectly right out of the box. I will be cynical and dis-trusting of all future crowdsourced hardware projects going forward because of how Todd and company strung me along this time. Thanks Purism. So this is how you finance your social purpose? I’ll be wiser the next time.
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What makes you think this is not a priority? Being an insider, it surely does seem so. If the hardware was not unobtanium due to circumstances outside of our control, you’d have your hardware delivered on a silver-lined cushion.
Regardless that, it’s good advice to be aware of risks associated with crowdfounding. Those risks are no fun on either side of the buyer-seller relationship.
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Would have been nice if Purism had spent more time focusing on a phone and phone OS and less time trying to make a phone that doubles as a desktop computer, or has cloud services and it’s own phone company.
I ended up requesting a credit and putting it towards a Librem 14.
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What makes me think that this (shipping Librem 5’s to pre-order customers) is not a priority? Let’s get real here. A production ramp-up is no small endeavor. It’s like bring a freight train from a full stop up to full speed. It takes lots of commitment. You have to order large amounts of supplies (ie: CPUs and other electronic components in this case) way in advance, just to gain the initial inertia that will be needed to start the ball rolling, so that you can continue shipping in large volumes of product after the initial push, until you reach shipping parity. There was plenty of time for this to have occurred BEFORE the pandemic even started or could have been predicted. We didn’t see a large production ramp followed by a disruption to the supply chain. We saw a small trickle of shipping followed by a disruption of the supply chain. Those are two very different conditions.
When Purism wrote that “Ball and Supply Chain” article, I complained on this forum vigerously. Too much time had passed after the Librem 5 had started trickling out the door at Purism and when the pandemic first started (much less the actual supply shortages that followed months later). So the pandemic put the pinch on production. But why was there no significant production ramp when there should have been a production ramp, well before anyone saw the pandemic coming? Purchasing five or ten thousand CPUs in preparation for a production ramp could have lasted a long time and filled a lot of orders if Purism had planned on ramping-up production at a time long before the pandemic hit. With thousands of pre-paid orders waiting to be shipped, there is just no excuse; lies to blame the pandemic - yes. But valid excuses - no.
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Uhm… because the phone was still being developed? I have only received my Birch in Dec 2019, right before the pandemic started, and we still had several revisions (including one with full board relayout) to go before casting molds and being able to ramp up. Evergreen was only finished late 2020, and then there was FCC certification still ongoing. Only after all of that you could even start thinking about ramping up.
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So are you telling me that the FCC certification and the casting of molds can not take place at the same time (in parallel) with procuring CPU’s? There was a window of several months there during which the core components could have been purchased and received by Purism in large quantities, even if it might be necessary later to change the board layout. A production ramp preparation happens a lot in parallel. That is how it is supposed to work, whenever possible. Buying critical components is not a last step that you can’t even think of doing until everything else has been completed. It should be the first step after committing fully to a given choice of CPUs. If Purism didn’t know which CPU they intended to use until after late 2020, then there are more significant problems yet. Tell me, if the CPUs could ship to Purism tomorrow in unlimited quantities, would Purism have enough money available to purchase a large batch of them?
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I can absolutely agree that part inventory should have been procured much earlier, but the reality is that it didn’t happen early enough, so now we are where we are. I don’t work on procurement and I don’t know exactly why and when things were being done there, but I can bet that the fact that the pandemic has unexpectedly put us into a place where we had no products to sell anymore cause the old line got sold out and the new one was getting delayed because of lockdowns in China probably didn’t help
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Fair enough. The pandemic put a big slow down to the shipping of Librem 5’s. Typically, a new product has a Team Leader assigned to it. Everyone on the new product team reports to the Team Leader on their part of the project. The Team Leader drives the project, anticipates road blocks, and removes road blocks as soon as they appear if they weren’t anticipated and dealt with in advance. With a team, many things can happen in parallel. As a Former Team Leader myself and as a team member on several new product teams in the past, I just can’t see how anyone could drop such a big ball and not pick it back up for so long. Most mistakes are made in lack of anticipation of the unexpected, not in such critical areas as procuring parts, without which there can be no ramp-up. The product ramp typically happens right before a big pay day for the manufacturer. It’s hard to ignore things that can ruin that pay day. That “Ball and Supply Chain” article didn’t tell the whole story. Somebody screwed-up really badly also.
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I guess that to pass the FCC, it needed too that camera sensor working…
I just thanks to Purism for survive the death valley curve and for creating the best gnu phone from scratch and massively complex.
To me Purism team it doing very good work overall.
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I don’t think anyone expected that, of all things, i.MX 8M Quad could become so unobtainable. It was supposed to be a stable platform with very long term support and availability. I know that we have procured large amounts of several other components far in advance, so I guess the SoC was probably deemed low risk and left somewhere at the end of the list. And, well, hindsight is always 20/20. In any case, as far as I know we’re currently buying any amount of those CPUs that we manage to get hold of, often at significant markup, which is how we were able to get a fresh batch produced recently.
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It probably came down to meney, like with the refund fiasco. The company didn’t have enough money to buy the parts it needed ahead of time, so it didn’t buy them. When the supply chain blew up, there was a legitimate reason preventing Purism from buying parts. Of course, we don’t know how it would have played out had the supply chain issues never happened. I suspect things would have been much the same, but that’s only speculation, of corse.
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