I really wish I could afford to upgrade to this version. The lifetime updates could make it worthwhile in the long run; if the updates and the repair-friendliness are good enough, the phone could last as long as two or three cheaper phones would have.
I have to wonder though, of all the parts to still have made in China, why the chassis? It seems like that would be the easiest and cheapest part to convert to American manufacturing.
when I saw announcement I was ready to pay 2x tag, thinking I’ve already paid half for actual development so another half for the gear would be adequate. But hell 3x is far beyond my mental threshold, I’d simply melt down if I pay such amount for any kind of it gear 
Don’t over estimate what quantum computing or other secret products can do. Some types of asymmetric encryption can likely be broken sorta quickly, but there is a fair setup time on actually launching the attacks, and they still require enough data transferred to have a working set. Modern encryption renews the session keys reasonably often. If you are concerned about high power attacks, increase the strength of the encryption used and the frequency of key renewals. As for things like guessing passwords, there’s reason PAM takes a while to respond on a bad password: it limits the attack rate. Then you have things like fail2ban. On my setup, the second wrong password gets the source IP banned for a year. If there are multiple wrong passwords from the same /24 subnet, the whole subnet gets banned for a year. This drastically reduces the number of passwords an attacker check against my systems (a single wrong username gets you instabanned too).
Obviously it depends, but the tee shirt under my uniform shirt Iḿ wearing now (just a basic tee shirt, really soft though) was designed in Toronto and cost $30 something so I guess that compared to whatever a basic tee shirt. costs. Local things cost more.
That is a gross over simplification of the matter that is neither factual or accurate.
The price of the Librem 5 USA edition explains a lot about working conditions in chinese factories. I wish more people could realize that.
To be fair though, I’d assume the premium has four parts:
Now, just imagine the price tag if actually all parts (including chips etc.) were US made… 
Another point i haven’t seen mentioned here is that there will probably only be a hand full of orders for the USA version. I would guess <100 per year. So these phones are probably got build in 10 - 100 batches. Which kills most of the savings which could be made by scalling to 10.000 of boards as it is happening for the china version.
So I expect that alone is double or tripple the cost of the components.
Now, just imagine the price tag if actually all parts (including chips etc.) were US made…
That’s the way it should be, outsourcing everything to China has brought us to the current economical situation…
Is anyone here planning on upgrading? Is it worth it? I don’t want to support china and I’m frustrated that paying that much I’d STILL have one component, the chassis, that’s chinese. what gives purism?
The main factor here is not patriotism but increased trust in the supply chain. Also, the chassis is just the most prominent part. The screws, cables and some chips are likely still sourced from Asia.
But it’s the same questions as before:
If it isn’t 100% perfect (like blob-free), why do you even take steps in the right direction, Purism?
And I think all of those steps are pretty awesome.
How do they say? Deblobbed ROMs weren’t built in a day 
side note: not patriotism, i just don’t want to support china. us isn’t great by all means and we should not have closed down our factories and outsourced everything.
The chassis is probably the one part of the phone where trust isn’t an issue. It’s just a piece of metal with maybe some plastic bits. Manufacturing it in the US would jack up the price even more. I think it’s a cost-saving measure, perhaps the only one, that could be taken without compromising supply-chain trust.
I personally believe that pieces should and could be constructed all over the world wherever it makes most sense due to climate, workers, know-how, suppliers, legal security etc.
However there is also a valid interest to produce things local as mentioned above and one of them is to have the supply chain in countries you know that you have your supply chains in your own hands (like western countries).
Producing in a location where the climate, workers, know-how, suppliers, legal security are not ideal is obviously expensive. However if it is a success it will get cheaper as other companies may try to be a supplier for purism or use purism as a supplier. Workers will start working there and know how will be earned. What I mean, the conditions for manufacturing of IT components will improve in that country.
So for every American from the United States: Don’t underestimate what purism is doing. This is a non-hostile move to bring future Industry back to the US. In the end this means that if anyone else starts constructing a phone may (and that’s where I started in this post) choose to settle near to the purism factory because the conditions are better there now. Purism is not putting tariffs on allies or threatening them, they are innovative, honest and brave which is far more sustainable. They are giving you the possibility to grow a whole industry by just buying their products.
In the end - this is something big IT struggles - there are tons of articles where big IT failed because of missing screws.
I also hope that they are not cross financing the Librem 5 USA with other Librems. You should see the potential as the Librem 5 USA could be an audited phone for US officials of the Government, Companies etc. A lot of money could be made in that niche (which is not the community but people who can pay any amount if the product is secure - that’s why I hope that the Librem 5 USA would pay itself alone + a good margin). That’s how I already see other open source projects making its money which is legit to me.
@Richard I’m sorry, I do not fully understand it.
That means you only pay the difference to upgrade from a Librem 5 to Librem 5 USA.
This confused me. So you mean, I basically just replace my current phone with a phone made in the USA? By giving my order number as a coupon?
Also, I just tried applying my order number. The whole “#Purism_5264…” and only the numbers “37657…” Nothing worked? Did I apply anything, it says I have to pay $1,999 still.
Also does the phone ship in Q3? instead of Evergreen Q2, If I chose the USA version?
From what I’ve seen, yes, you replace your current order with the USA version by applying the coupon code. Production of the USA version will ramp up in parallel to standard Evergreen, so you would probably receive it around the same time either way.
Before I could comment on this, I saw 
beat me to it…
I think that price comes down to who do you want to take a chance on having a back-door in your hardware?
I didn’t understand how important “Don’t Care” conditions were in IC’s till I did a painful course on it. Like a single byte on a 4-bit register for displaying a visible base-10 digit can display 16 possibilities but only needs the first 10 bit-patterns. Any unused pattern can be designed to electronically turn the “on-switch” for a whole other subsystem you didn’t know you had. Don’t care conditions can be used to build a back door into your hardware for control or eavesdropping, or whatever.
The engineer designing the logic needed on a symbolic logic drawing can put them in, an engineer that takes the logic drawing and converts it into a plan for doping the silicon could introduce don’t care hacks, the people that turn the plan into a physical object could also put them in. It’s almost impossible for anybody in the chain to detect them, and the Theory of Computation says it’s too hard to try all inputs to see if they all have satisfactory outputs.
So if you are in the USA and you trust the entire chain from Librem planners to the chipmaker, you’ll be satisfied. Maybe the USA will spy on you? Maybe Silicon Valley will? Is that more tolerable than Xi Jinping or Huawei? And is what you are doing worth the extra $1,700? Maybe.
Not me, but I’m not going to scoff at the premium knowing what can happen to hardware. I can easily see how that type of privacy would be worth way the hell more than $1,700. Like what would the Washington Post or Jamal Khashoggi pay for it if they had a do-over? What I do needs nearly no privacy, but I’m getting behind the Librem thing on principal.
I haven’t completely ruled out getting this, but I’m going to think long and hard about it. That’s a steep hike.
As far as I know, people outside the US can buy it, too, if they’d prefer it over the Librem 5 PRC.
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.