I agree that an all USA made phone is important, but is it really wise to start yet another project before the (arguably) more important one is finished? A lot of promises get made, a lot of people have expectations and a lot of frustration seems to be the repeated result.
I do want them to make the Made-in-USA phone, I’m just worried there’s too much on their plate. It’s more important, in my opinion, to get a private phone working now than to continue creating costly supply lines in an industry that doesn’t mesh with open source hardware. The Librem5 is still yet to be proven.
TLDR: small company with big shoes to fill trying to do many things at once is adding more to their plate, I think they should finish what they have already committed to first before taking on more.
Don’t forget that Evergreen is starting to ship Q2 and the Librem 5 USA starts in Q3. We’re just getting our ducks in a row is all and being fair to customers who would be interested in this version of the Librem 5.
Plus this isn’t our first sourcing for a “Made in USA” product. Had the devkit and have the Librem Key. The latter followed a similar trajectory of originally being made elsewhere and is now a Made in USA product.
Thank you for talking the time to hear my concerns. I hadn’t known the devkit and the onekey were/became US made, kudos on that. Your Procurement must be ridiculously good.
there is still the option to pay a local shop to x-ray it for you if you don’t trust Purism to do it for YOU inside the “tamper-evident-services”. this way it seems to me that it’s still OK without the full made-in-USA luxury service.
i mean if i can go and pay an “emergency-tax” to my local teeth-x-ray shop and go prepared to my dentist the next morning … why wouldn’t this be viable with the L5 ? all it takes is an expert and the price you would pay for this doesn’t seem like it will reach as high as 2 grand $.
this is for a PRC L5 i mean … still not that big of an issue for most of us …
Although this version of the phone is way too expensive for most people, its announcement is good news, because it means that Purism must have some corporate or governmental clients with deep pockets who want a phone made in the USA.
I wondered how Purism had the funds to increase its “Core Team” from 34 to 49 since August 8, but this might explain how Purism has been able to hire so many new employees. More programmers will make the Librem 5 a usable phone much faster, so this is good news for all of us. Todd Weaver commented about making 50k of the Librem 5 in his video with Gardiner Bryant (The Linux Gamer), which makes sense if Purism is getting big special orders.
The obvious buyers of this type of phone would be the US intelligence services and all the private companies that have contracts with them. The US spent $162.8 billion on its Intelligence Community budget in 2019. If the US government is helping to develop the Librem 5, then that would be a much better use of taxpayer money than most of the wasteful and morally-questionable things that the US intelligence services do, like running a giant server farm in Utah to collect the personal data of millions of people. The tech behind Tor and SE Linux were both originally financed by US intelligence services, so this wouldn’t be the first time that the US government has helped create more secure tech that we can use.
My only fear is that Purism might fall under the sway of the US intelligence services if it is getting a large portion of its revenue from them. Almost everything that Purism does in the Librem 5 is verifiable by the user, so this is not likely, but let’s imagine a scenario in a couple years when Purism is getting 50% of its revenue from orders from US intelligence services. Then, it gets an large order to build phones needed by CIA agents who both need hardware kill switches, but also need tracking built into the phone for when something happens to the agent in the field. Purism builds this special order because it has nothing to do with its other sales to the general public. Now Purism is getting 80% of its revenue from US intelligence services and then the NSA figures out that a lot of Librem 5s are being used by Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, etc, and they would love to be able to spy with the phones. It will be hard for Purism to resist the NSA’s “request” to add a hidden spy chip to the Librem 5, when the company depends on the US government for its survival. If the US government pulls all its contracts, then Purism will face bankruptcy.
I wonder if the x-ray images that Purism released are an attempt to prevent exactly this kind of scenario from ever happening. It is Purism telling the US government, “look, we will take your money, but there are certain things that you can’t ever ask us to do, because our users will find out.” All of this is based on a lot of speculation on my part, since Purism could be getting these orders from businesses that have nothing to do with the US government. Still it is worth thinking about these scenarios and ask whether releasing the schematics, x-ray images and software’s source code for the Librem 5 are enough to prevent it from ever happening.
I think it has not been brought up yet, but I also thought that the mere existence of two theoretically identical builds makes it even harder to implement (certain kinds of) backdoors.
Every difference in physical components or behavior (timings) would have to have a reasonable explanation or hint at a unwanted difference.
I don’t know how strong this point is, but to some it could be.
This made me laugh and think of what I should do fo most of my posts and replies!
TL:DR Warning | I can speak gibberish latin!
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The market for IC chips is global and pricing is closely the same everywhere. A pick-and-place machine can install the electronic components with the same speed and lack of human labor everywhere. Why not order the unpopulated PCB boards from China? You can’t sneak spy chips in, on unpopulated boards. So the price for assembled phones made in the USA should not be altogether different than phones made in china. If people want to donate money to Purism, that is fine. But the market value of a phone made in the USA is not $2000.00.
i think the point was - pcbs are not etched by crowd fo chinese people vs american people, components are not laid by tweezers by the same crowd and not soldered with a solder gun. All pcb manufacturing is long ago fully automated cycle as with current level of miniaturisation human being has very little to do there except sit in awe and wonder. So it’s just about mass pre-fabrication vs on-demand printing+laying+flowing.
But then there’s assembly line where all needs to be put together - chassis, screen, frame, pcbs, connectors. That’s where the labour counts and that’s where you have high chance to place some rigged component, down to flat ribbon cable with mitm controller on it
Sure? What other phones fabricated in the USA, with GNU/Linux instead of Android and iOS, switchable and separate baseband and killswitches can you buy for less than 2k$?
I am not aware of another phone. So if at least one person is willing to pay 2k$ for that phone that’s it’s price right?
The Librem 5 USA is for corporate and government clients that need extra levels of privacy and security, and when you get into that market, $1999 is not too expensive. Special order phones have very high prices.
If you were thinking of buying this phone for yourself, then I can understand your disappointment at the price. However, if you think about this as a way for Purism to make a lot of profit that will be reinvested in paying for extra programmers for the Librem 5, then the high prices for the Librem 5 USA will be paying for the software development for the normal Librem 5.
Let’s imagine that Purism makes $500 in profit on each Librem 5 USA and $50 in profit on each Librem 5, so you get 10 times the profit per phone. Those extra profits mean that Purism can hire more programmers and engineers, but can also repay any debts it might have incurred and avoid costly Kickfurther campaigns. Once the software support gets better for the Librem 5, then you get more demand, which means larger scale manufacturing and lower costs per phone, which in turn means either better specs (more RAM, more Flash memory, better image sensors) or lower prices to be more competitive with other phones. More profits also means more money to develop other types of RYF hardware, like tablets and routers, and more money to go into projects like Librem One and Libre RISC-V.
There are charity auctions that take place where people pay large amounts of money for things that are not anywhere near in value what the bidded-up prices are that are paid. Typically, the money goes to a good cause which is the main point anyway. The same can be true any time people willingly pay above market rates for some thing that has a much lower instrinsic value than what is paid for them. I think that for the purposes of community oversight, we should focus on the real values in this case and let people donate to the social purpose directly if that is what they want to do. A competitively-made low-volume American-made good will typically cost more, but not nearly three times the price of a low-volume foreign made good. Maybe 1.5x the price is accurate. The Walmart affect happened because any time Walmart could cut a few percentage points off of the cost of something by doing business in volume, they did it. The smaller brick and mortar businesses then lost enough business that they had to raise prices to pay their fixed expenses, which drove more customers away from them, requiring yet higher pricing to keep their doors open. So their prices doubled and tripled as more and more people were driven away and their fixed costs remained the same. Then Amazon did the same thing to Walmart. Why would I choose to buy an $18 phone car charger at Walmart when I can get the same thing on Amazon for $6? I think that until Purism starts shipping in mass (fulfilling their commitments in mass) they should be kept on a short (metaphoric) leash. If they were more open and communicative, maybe then, not so much. Clearly they are getting money from somewhere else these days. Any donor should demand more accountability than we customers here are seeing. In the meantime, there should be clear boundaries and accountabilities made and kept here. A competatively-made American good is worth roughly 1.5x what would cost to make it overseas. Exceptions are found in mass-produced, mass-shipped commodities.
When it comes to paying extra to have a product made in the US for privacy-respect reasons, there is some legitimate value to be found in paranoia. But just how paranoid we need to be is the question. To embed an unpacked integrated circuit in-between layers of a PCB would require a board re-design. Yes, the schematic is open. But would anyone re-design and re-lay out the Librem 5 just to spy on us some open-source proponents in low volume? My employer has many high-value integrated circuit designs that are fabricated in Taiwan at very high volume. They don’t seem overly concerned about this issue. The manufacturer is even trusted to possess the mask set. If you pick the right manufacturer, the manufacturer has a reputation and some very large contracts they want to protect. They can’t put everything on the line just to spy on a few open-source proponents of a low-volume design that is open to the public anyway because they want to know our web browsing habits. Once everything has been fabricated and purchased, how much can it cost to assemble the phone by hand? Pay me $100 per phone and I’ll do it. I live in America so it would still be American made. I just don’t think that everyone should be throwing money at Purism without more accountability from Purism. I’ll invest $700 as a customer. If they want more from me, I want to see in to their financial books. Poor accountability and just throwing money at something leads to bad things, often bankruptcy.
