I am not sure what “trust of supply chain cost” is. I didn’t see that anywhere in my MBA studies. Integrity of the product is just a part of its features and value that Purism offered in their initial campaign. All that matters when it comes to delivery on a shipping commitment is what it costs to make and ship the product. Even product development costs aren’t included because those costs should have been paid much earlier in the process. Profit is also not relevant at that point because whether or not it is profitable, Purism has a commitment to keep. The actual cost of raw materials and assembly are relatively low because those materials are all commodities. The real value is in the market value of the finished product. But the cost to Purism to get their own product built and shipped to keep their commitment is always a small percentage of the overall value. That is why the company always makes its profits on both margin and volume (both) in the end. Learning to manufacture their product in high volume inexpensively requires yet more development.
No, your MBA course probably called it price premium through product differentiation strategy (M. Porter, 1980) of which Reputation is one dimension, of which trust is a big factor.
But they definitely included what the OP expressed. 
But OTOH Porter would have called this a niche strategy rather than a product differentiation strategy.
Sorry, but firms have to recoup their investments through sales whenever they occured in the process. Tht can be the building employees work in, product development costs or anything else. How else would they pay for it? These are part of the fixed costs that have to be spread among the number of sold units.
The i.MX 8M Quad is a 28nm FD-SOI chip which is fabbed by Samsung in Giheung, South Korea. See:
https://soiconsortium.org/2016/04/07/why-nxps-i-mx-7-and-8-applications-processors-are-taking-on-iot-wearables-automotive-and-other-embedded-markets-with-28nm-fd-soi-part-2-of-2/
The Wi-Fi/BT M.2 card is made at Redpine Signal’s design center in Hyderabad, India. According to this article from 2011, Redpine uses TSMC to fab its chips and ASE for assembly, so it is likely that the RS9116 chip is fabbed in Taiwan.
The NAND Flash memory is from Toshiba, fabbed in Yokkaichi, Japan.
The RAM is from Micron, which fabs RAM in Virginia, Utah, Japan and Taiwan.
I couldn’t find any info on where Gemalto fabs its chips, but considering that it is based on Qualcomm’s tech, it is probably fabbed by TSMC in Taiwan or Samsung in South Korea.
Hi Spaetz, I totally get your translation of terms in to MBA-speak. That makes sense. But although I agree also with the second part of your post, I differ when it comes to the intent in this case. Purism gets a pass routinely in many areas of business where we might otherwise say “hell no”. The promise is basically ‘trust us now and believe us, you will get your phone’s.’ Then they make promises that they don’t keep and find ways of twisting the truth so that they could be said to be keeping agreements. They are doing a tough job. We all get that, and Purism gets yet another pass. At the same time, they stretch everything out as far as they can through lack of transparency and through the tactical disclosure of just enough information to keep us believing. For now against my better judgement, I am going with that. But as Purism continues to make these questionable choices I say something like “hell no, Purism’s profit is not necessarily my concern”. I want them to make a profit. But even at a loss if necessary, I want my phone either way. So I look at Purism’s break even point as the success criteria without any consideration of their profits. After I have my phone and Purism is shipping millions of phones with a healthy profit on each phone, those profits will all belong to Purism, not to me. Before they get to that point, they need to ship my phone to me at either a profit or at a loss if necessary.
Not true. If it were a situation would develop where some entities were willing to have negative gain because the demand for a product at a price was there. In an ideal situation (no monopoly or other perversions), their’s an equilibrium found in a market where the fixed and marginal cost “curve” of the producer meets the demand “curve” of the buyers on a price-quantity chart.
Also, maybe along with the point you were trying to make, and akin to “If a tree falls in the forest but nobody is there to hear it, does it make a noise?”…
Plenty of producers go out of business because their ask for the cost of production is more than anybody is willing to pay, so the market doesn’t happen for that product, therefore the price was never determined, just the ask, and maybe a bid, but without the transaction, it’s not priced. Still, it’s not demand alone that determines price. Demand is necessary, but not sufficient.
I fail to see how sending schematics to another producer is a difficult task. Sure he doubles the number of suppliers from 1 to 2, but come on. Their’s no throwing of resources into the wind in this situation.
Also, I think it’s safe to assume Purism was getting a significant demand for this Pure.USA before they told us about it. I tried to push options that I wanted on Purism then found out my desires were just mine and that’s why they aren’t gonna happen.
For many people, it is a similar thing to PTSD and has a similar cure.
Tee hee, I don’t want to interfere with the medications they’ve got him on right now, but yes, I know my duty 
Purism won’t make a cent in profit until it recovers its development costs. If my back-of-the-envelope calculation is right (which is questionable), Purism won’t start making a profit until it sells over 12k of phones. Considering that Purism now has 20+ employees working on the Librem 5, it will need even more sales going forward to cover its costs.
Whether Purism makes a profit or not is your concern. The company relies heavily on its ongoing sales to pay for its operations, so it can’t run for years without profits like many Silicon Valley startups. We need Purism to stay in business, so it can keep improving the software interface and keep issuing software updates in the future. It is the ongoing software development which will make the Librem 5 valuable and useful. If you get your Librem 5 tomorrow, but Purism disappears, then you are stuck. Maybe the community will take over development, but critical things like figuring out the MIPI CSI interface on the i.MX 8M might never happen and all the power management problems might never get solved. Purism’s ongoing work is critical, because many of the components in the Librem 5 don’t yet have good mainline Linux support.
I get your logic, and I agree that their marketing … ahem… has room for improvement. But they are between a rock and a hard place. Delays will occur, delays of a year are not uncommon (when did Samsung want to bring out their foldable thing originally? And they have unlimited resources). If they say: ‘Everything’s fine’ they have lied and if they say, ‘our phones still don’t do audio’ people will hate, laugh and demand refunds… You have to be somewhat insane to attempt what purism attempts. So that is why I am so lenient towards purism when I am not with other companies.
Sorry to disappoint you or your positive oversight/intention, but, if this is about typical/usual NXT production, i.MX 8M Quad is based on 28nm High Performance Compact for Mobile (HPC) platform (might be by using High-K/Metal Gate option). Links that you provided are related to i.MX 8 QuadMax, i.MX 8QuadXPlus and other upcoming i.MX 8 derivatives that already are or will be based on 28nm FD-SOI process technology. @amosbatto, please take a closer look as I might be wrong.
@quarnero,
Yes, you are right. This presentation shows that the i.MX 8 and i.MX 8X series are FD-SOI, but the i.MX 8M series is HPC.
That means that the i.MX 8M Quad could be made in either Giheung, South Korea or Austin, Texas, USA.
Unfortunately, this means that the i.MX 8M Quad isn’t as power efficient, but it should be a little cheaper to make, and it can more easily be shrunk to 14nm FinFET.
Purchasing the USA model would have twofold reasoning for me: patriotism, and not supporting China. I would gladly pay this if, and only if, exactly 0% of it was sourced from China (nothing against the Chinese people, everything against their government), and preferably was truly 100% US-sourced and assembled, including the cables, literature, and box that ships with it.
What I understood is that 28nm HPC process belongs to TSMC and therefore i.MX 8M might be made in their WaferTech L.L.C., Fab 11, Camas, Washington, U.S.A.
For me at least, the security will only be proven once a number of people have watched the traffic in and out of the phone for a while, looking for unexpected data being sent to unanticipated destinations. However, if the PRC has included spyware components on the phone, I’ve already started to think about ways I’m going to troll them in an attempt to have to lowest social score of anyone on the planet.
that’s hilarious
If you are a high value target then this won’t be anywhere near good enough to “prove” anything. Look at actual publicly known cases of data exfiltration, remote command and control, and the like, and those are just the ones that we know about. Assume that the Chinese government employs thousands of smart people working on this day in day out. For most of us, if the device already contains spyware then we have already lost. Fortunately most of us are not high value targets anyway.
Security is proved by verifying the hardware and the software. There are limits as to what can be achieved today, and some effort doesn’t survive a cost/benefit analysis.
LOL. New topic in Round Table?
Hi,
Are there any informations where the components of the not-USA phone are made/assembled?
I ask because of one aspect of the USA-option isn’t valued in the post and just slightly here in the comments. Its about the ability to choose where your money goes to (or ends up). To a suppressing regime/system that imprisons and fights its own ppl, or to a country where freedom (of people/speech/…) is of high value and protected by a alive concrete constitution. (btw.:I am not american myself nor do I live in USA, so don’t see this post any kind of patriotic)
So if production in the USA replaces production in China/Vietnam I would see it as a bigbig argument.
But if it replaces a production in Taiwan/India/… than there isn’t any advantage at all. As for me, I don’t trust US products more than any other products of real democratic countries. (but definitely less than products made in EU)
Additional wish: even if not so many parts of their products are made in China I would like to ask purism to put some effort into not producing their products in dictator-like countries. But in democratic, free countries. That way buying their product would also support real freedom (by not supporting oppression).
It may be helpful to quote the actual marketing info from Purism.
The Librem 5 USA is designed for individuals or organizations who:
- Have a hard requirement for where components are manufactured and sourced from
- Are concerned about hardware backdoors
- Need a secure supply chain
- Want to trial a USA made smartphone for larger organization adoption
where the first three items are particularly relevant and the second item may be of greatest interest to end consumers.
However that doesn’t stop you from buying for other reasons.
- Where the money ends up, and
- sending a message to a regime, and
- labor standards
are all things that an individual buyer might consider.
Well… they have Ubports working on it already. That’s great. I didn’t jump on the Braveheart because it will be useless for me. There’s no much I can do to help other than ordering in advance and I don’t think they are looking for that kind of help. Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on them. Ubports has my respect and in the end I think I’ll be working on their side. I love that community.