Librem 5 sales now (coupon) and the next-gen model

Hi there fans of the Librem 5!

I just saw the latest sales campaign on LinkedIn. It’s intriguing, tbh.

Any Plans For The Next-Gen Phone?

As someone truly hoping for a better future, I’m just wondering what the plans are for “the next model” before I buy this one. My point is, I’m happy to take advantage of a coupon but I’d rather pay (and wait) a bit more than find out that there’s a new model coming out after Christmas having dual-SIM and 8 GiB of RAM (or something similar). I’d prefer to make a long(er)-lasting investment.

Dual-SIM or e-SIM?

Not sure if this has been asked before in this forum: Can we take advantage of e-SIM or is this a tracking feature of Big Tech and its industry not available to Purism? – I need to use two carriers on a daily basis (Italy and Switzerland) and I’d rather switch to the Librem 5 entirely than having to carry around a surveillance device for my second phone number.

More RAM

I’m aware that the Liberty Phone has 4 GiB of RAM. I’m still not sure how good of an option this is given that GNOME (GNOME shell, specifically) seems memory-hungry from time to time. I’d be more in a peace of mind knowing I could upgrade to larger RAM easily, when needed.

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This is a risk with any product from any company. There’s always newer things coming eventually, whether from that company or a competing company or a new company. Delaying decision making based on this only increases the probability it will happen.

Also Purism has stopped announcing timelines for new products so there’s no way to know a timeline of upcoming products/revisions, which is probably for the best given how notoriously inaccurate they’ve been in the past with regard to timelines.

I saw one person comment on a desire for replacement mainboards with increased CPU/RAM since those are soldered to the board. Beyond that theres no feasible memory upgrade path. If this ever happens it would be similar to how framework does mainboard upgrades.

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As the previous reply points out, this is inevitable and unknowable with all technology. But Christmas might not mean Christmas this year. :wink:

We are just humble customers, with no inside knowledge, so we can only offer speculation.

My speculation is that none of the following will be available any time soon: dual SIM, e-SIM, 8 GB of RAM.

From a surveillance point of view, e-SIM is not worse than SIM. From a user control point of view e-SIM is worse. (I like the fact that I can quickly and easily move a SIM from one of my phones to another - and back again - instead of having to go cap in hand and ask a provider to remote provision an e-SIM.)

In terms of “dual SIM”, it might be that Purism never offers “dual physical SIM” and hence if going “dual SIM” at all, they might go: 1 x physical SIM + 1 x e-SIM (or of course they could go 2 x e-SIM).

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  1. I have not heard any new information of Fir since 2019.
  2. No idea.
  3. Removable RAM is still not a reality for phones as far as I am aware.
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