That’s right. The Librem 5 USA Edition will likely be most interesting to customers in the US. To customers outside the US, the customer is rightly suspicious of China but the customer is also rightly suspicious of the US.
This is one of the reasons why I wouldn’t pay a 3x premium for the USA Edition.
This isn’t about “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) as such but about sovereignty of backdoor.
@Tatatirci
Nah, that’s a little too much from the prejudice box.
If you get Linux on a computer, you also get an alternative ROM on your phone, as long as the device is supported. This has not been an IT Voodoo anymore for quite some time. Sorry. The Risk of bricking meanwhile is pretty, pretty low, as long as your Phone is supported by the Custom ROM.
If you look at the amount of old Android devices on the market, then a custom ROM most of the time is the ONLY CHANCE to get security updates at all. Phone Companies want and must sell and not expensively update old Stuff.
For me a phone with custom ROM is not a “Tinkerer Toy” but an absolute necessity, as long as my Librem 5 is not yet at home.
Well, saying there’s no point to getting this phone because the US has a bad record, isn’t an argument either. It should be compared to China before making that decision (those being the two alternatives), which is exactly what I was doing.
In the US, by the way, Purism will be much better able to monitor the manufacturing process to audit it, so that’s another reason to favor it. Furthermore, although the post I was responding to (quite accurately) pointed out that the worst surveillance-happy companies are all US companies, that’s actually irrelevant here because they do not have input into the manufacturing process and would have a very difficult time inserting themselves into it (that’s true in both the US and China, which is why it’s irrelevant here). National security/intel organizations have no such constraints in EITHER location, though.
But as I said, Purism can MUCH more readily audit the process here.
Of course, it could be that those orgs have Purism’s heart in a jar, so they won’t do any real auditing, just “auditing theater.” But if so we’re doomed no matter where the phone comes from.
So I see no scenario under which, all other things being equal, a US phone is not to be preferred over a Chinese one.
Of course, all things are not equal and the price differential is…discouraging. I’ve yet to decide if I’m going to bite that bullet.
One obvious scenario is: not all people are of equal interest to the two governments. There may be people who are of far greater interest to the US government than to the Chinese government. In that case, a phone with some Chinese components / assembly, even with a hypothetical Chinese government backdoor, may be preferable.
However it is, I think, recognised by Purism that there are gaps in the anti-interdiction side of things. I expect that that will be a work in progress, to be improved in the future. Maybe they can throw that in for free with the USA Edition. 
After this line of yours I knew I would not waste my time with the rest of your post. People should not talk about what they don’t know. One of the reasons I came to support this project was the promise I would be able to install and run UT on this device when delivered to me. I am not interested in PureOS or Plasma but UT. You telling me I can not discriminate time when using verbs is kind of offensive to me. From now on I stop interacting with people publicly in this forum. Honesty is kind of missing here.
Here you are: https://puri.sm/posts/ubports-ubuntu-touch-on-librem5-collaboration/
Previous to this announcement, Purism’s marketing said when the phone is delivered users would be able to choose their OS of choice from three OSes in the name of FREEDOM. The above announcement came after.
I will keep my support to the project. In the end what Purism does is what counts to me and no what people say here. People are usually uninformed but that doesn’t keep them from talking about what they don’t know.
Bye.
I was referring to flagship devices like Pixel, One Plus, etc. Of course, Most of Android OEMs have terrible support record. And it’s about convenience, having updates silently done in the background , without having to do anything. Again, I’m talking about average Joe, here.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Even that little homework is something that regular folks won’t do. Not to mention warranty concerns people have and so on. once L5 matures (hopefully year or 2 from now) , it’s gonna be true alternative to iOS and Android , which I can comfortably recommend to people around me. Anything else is too much to deal with. I’ve been the go to guy for phone problems for my fam & friends, if you know what I mean tech illiterate ppl have fear delving into the “unknown” and want assurances. They still constitute vast majority of consumers.
Not gonna happen. Chip fabs are incredible expensive to build. 10 billions means you first need to produce 1 billion 10$ chip to even break even (10 is more or less the NXP i.MX entry range). So lets say 500 million mobile phone chipsets. Before.effing.break.even.
That’s the reason why there are only a few chip fabs worldwide. And short transportation to the worlds workbench explains why a lot are around China.
Disclaimer: when new fabs are built, they usually are built for a newer AKA smaller technology, for the top-notch chips. While the older is used for cheaper chips, and after some years eventually sold. So cheap chips are usually made in older, already profitable, fabs.
So you can say the US is in “second place” with no qualification but when someone else says “no” you get to say that’s not an argument?
How do you know this? Do you have any data to back up this claim, or is this just derived from your general “America bad” mentality?
I don’t think you understand what the Patriot Act is, or that it has mostly expired at this point and has been replaced with the USA Freedom Act.
Certainly not China.
Hoo – that’s funny. I used the term “fightin’ words” just last week. I was at Popeye’s Chicken just before closing, near the end of a long line. A guy starts to order and the cashier says that they are out of chicken sandwiches. I nudge the guy next to me and say (sotto voce), “Them’s Fightin’ Words!” The cashier must have heard – she flashed me dagger eyes, so I said, “…but we don’t want no violence, contrary to what we read on the internet news.” Folks in line chuckled, but the cashier was still peeved. 
That’s not likely to be sufficient. Even without the Google Apps. Starting with the Wifi portal caption detection page which is a google hosted address (even in LineageOS), over the LocationServices which send data to Google, Qualcomm and whatnot… to a variety of low-level things using and connecting to remote stuff.
@joadri @gavaudan I’m having trouble keeping up with such big brained boys over here, but I’ll throw my two cents in the ring:
J, you are right to point out that Purism does not provide the transparency that counts, however I feel the blame is misplaced. Purism, no matter how noble, is a company and as such are limited by the regulations all companies are and furthermore as stipulated by contracts signed with manufacturers and suppliers. My perspective is they release all that they legally can, and they hint at what they cannot outright say (ex. Warrant Canary). It is also my belief that Purism has signed a contract to another company for x amount of Librem5USA earlier this year, and they’ve made it public without mentioning the contract by offering it to the average consumer as well. I believe it was a well-intentioned mistake.
I think we agree on the basic premise that “we don’t know everything going on with Purism,” which is more or less what I was trying to get at. That, and that what I do see (or don’t see, sometimes) has good implications versus what I observed to be negative assumptions.
According to Deputy Attorney General James Cole, even if the Freedom Act becomes law, the NSA could continue its bulk collection of American’s phone records. He explained that “it’s going to depend on how the [FISA] court interprets any number of the provisions” contained within the legislation.[8] Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at Stanford Law School, stated:
The Administration and the intelligence community believe they can do whatever they want, regardless of the laws Congress passes, so long they can convince one of the judges appointed to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to agree. This isn't the rule of law. This is a coup d'etat.[8]International human rights groups remain somewhat skeptical of specific provisions of the bill. For example, Human Rights Watch expressed its concern that the “bill would do little to increase protections for the right to privacy for people outside the United States, a key problem that plagues U.S. surveillance activities. Nor would the bill address mass surveillance or bulk collection practices that may be occurring under other laws or regulations, such as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act or Executive Order 12333. These practices affect many more people and include the collection of the actual content of internet communications and phone calls, not just metadata”.[83] Zeke Johnson, Director of Amnesty International’s Security and Human Rights Program, agreed that “any proposal that fails to ban mass surveillance, end blanket secrecy, or stop discrimination against people outside the U.S. will be a false fix”.[11]
On August 14, 2019, the outgoing Director of National Intelligence sent a letter[89] to Congress stating the Trump Administration’s intention to seek permanent extension of the provisions of FISA that under the terms of the USA FREEDOM Act are scheduled to expire on December 15, 2019, namely the “lone wolf” authority allowing surveillance of a suspected terrorist who is inspired by foreign ideology but is not acting at the direction of a foreign party, the roving wiretap authority regarding surveillance of a terrorist who enters the United States and the authority to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain certain business records in a national security investigation, as well as the call detail records program undertaken by the NSA.[90]
No, it is extended for another three months. I find this reading interesting: “The History and Future of Mass Metadata Surveillance”. Same author recently said: “Any reauthorization bill has to include a broad set of serious reforms. You don’t get a five star restaurant review just by taking arsenic off the menu.”
May we all be reminded that Motorola was building the Moto X in Fort Worth, TX and retailing them for $199 - even before Lenovo bought them!! I see absolutely no reason why this phone is more than $100 premium to an already expensive phone with very out of date hardware specs.
You can’t compare the price of a phone that probably sold a million units worldwide to the Librem 5 USA, whose sales will probably be somewhere between 200 and 2000.
The Moto X was the only smartphone ever assembled in the US and it was a failed experiment. $199 was the price with a two year contract, but the unlocked Moto X cost $379. Flextronics manufactured it in Fort Worth for less than a year, and at the time Google was losing massive amounts of money per quarter, which is why it decided to sell Motorola to Lenovo. Google was basically subsidizing the Moto X to gain market share and its Motorola division lost $384 million in Q4 of 2013.
I wouldn’t pay $1400 extra for Librem 5 USA, but I wish Purism luck on this experiment. There aren’t many phones still assembled in high-wage countries. From what I found by searching, Asus and HTC still assemble some phones in Taiwan, and Sony and Kyocera assemble some phones in Japan. Samsung and LG assemble a tiny percentage of their phones in South Korea, but LG just announced that it is shutting down its South Korean plant, and Samsung only assembled 8% of its phones in South Korea in 2016 and has scaled back since then. Right now, most mobile phones are assembled in China (~70%), India (~11%, mostly for the Indian market) and Vietnam (~10%), with the rest assembled in Brazil (mostly for the Brazilian market), Indonesia, Ethiopia and Bangladesh.
So I assume you haven’t bought either the standard Edition or the USA Edition??
Which is fine. Noone is forced to. The consumer decides what something is worth, and whether to buy it.
Clearly as the USA Edition is a new product, requiring the procurement and set up in the US, unless that is amortised over a large number of sales, the unit cost is going to be high.
I bought 5 of them. 1 for me and the rest for those who respected my opinion in mobile world I was amazed with the feel in hand, snappiness and smoothness of the phone, all accomplished with midrange specs. Seeing that for the first time we had a tech giant make an effort to assemble the phones in US , made me believe that it may be just a beginning of a major shift as long as we supported it. So, I preached even more
But what really happened is that it was a marketing gimmick which Google used to get some fresh exposure. Also, the whole acquisition of Motorola was just to get ahold of some patents hoping it would get them leverage in ongoing legal battle with Apple. Of course , it was just another fail and waste of money - billions.
Again, to clarify, this phone was only assembled (not manufactured) in US with all Major components imported and it’s price was heavily subsidized by Google (like Nexus series) and by Verizon if purchased through them.
And there is scale. Through very exclusive relationship Motorola had with Verizon, they had millions of orders ahead of the time. And exactly the same hardware components were used for VZW exclusive device - Droid Max, making the manufacturing even cheaper (largeer order number for parts).
It’s really impossible to compare that with L5.
Hello @paulwilson05 welcome aboard! I hope you find the heated debates that some posts get in the best light and not as acts of aggression. 
People have different ways of sounding on here despite their true intentions being fair and ethical.
Speaking personally from fourth-hand evidence, I believe some of the reason phones in the market are priced the way they are is subsidized pricing, and in this case, I am specifically referring to spy tech features. I often see the term “spy-brick” on this forum and other places like Mastodon and Friendica. Some podcasts I listen to delve into the type of data information leaks their devices are doing by passing the data through a logging device as it leaves the phone and even the Apple products who “respect user privacy” are pouring out data useful to advertising companies. I’m convinced that the operating systems and hardware were adjusted to do that for financial gain.
Also, the more people (a scarce resource to the surveillance economy competitors) a company can get mind control over, the more profitable they will become, so artificially lowering the cost to gain market share is a major contributing factor as to why non-Librem phones cost what they do.
Even the decision to make a carrier-specific device that has carrier-specific permanent apps is a sell-out of us by the makers. That’s another subsidy that artificially lowers the buyer’s price.
If we can believe the industry analysts at Canaccord Genuity and Strategy Analytics, Apple has about a 40% profit margin on its phones and it used to take about 80% of the total profits in smartphone industry. Now that demand for iPhones is falling, it probably has a smaller share of total profits. Samsung used to have about a 15% profit margin on its phones, but Samsung was losing so much market share to Oppo,Vivo, Realme, Xiaomi and Huawei at the mid-range that it slashed prices with its 2019 A-series and M-series, so it probably isn’t making much profit any more except on its high-end S-series. Huawei took 6% of the total profits in the industry in 2017. BBK Electronics (owner of Oppo, Vivo, Realmi & OnePlus) and Xiaomi basically just break even and all the rest of the phone makers (LG, HTC, Sony, Motorola, Google, ZTE, TCL) lose money, but they keep producing phones for strategic reasons.
In 2016, the phone makers, who weren’t in the top five producers, lost an average of $4.8 per smartphone. I suspect that it is the same situation today for most phone makers. Sony makes money on image sensors, and it thinks that it needs to be in the phone business because it is important for the future of the company to be in the most important tech market in the world. LG makes money on its screens, so its phones are a way to show off its screens, plus it is important for its image as a tech company. Google makes huge profits on Android through targeted advertising, so it can afford to lose money to demonstrate the tech and show off its cutting edge ideas and stock Android. HTC is a train wreck, and the only thing keeping it afloat are virtual reality goggles and Google giving it cash by buying its employees. Motorola is doing better now, but it gave up competing for market share in 2015 and ceded the market to BBK Electronics, Huawei and Xiaomi. Xiaomi makes money on its products in its stores and online advertising, so the phones are the vehicle to profits through other means. BBK Electronics seems to want to grow market share at any cost, which is why it undercuts everyone. Its Realmi is now undercutting Xiaomi, so it is hard to see how it can make any profits, but as the second largest smartphone maker in the world, it must have amazing economies of scale. Huawei makes some profits, but it gives cellular network providers discounts on its telecom equipment if they offer its phones to their customers. ZTE lost massive amounts of money from the US embargo, but it managed to essentially bribe Trump to get back into the US market. TCL (which sells the Alcatel and Blackberry brands) has been doing horribly in recent years. Transsion Holdings makes money in Africa, but it is losing money trying to expand into India and the Asian markets. I haven’t checked what is happening in HDM Global (Nokia brand).
Here are some charts that I made about profits in the smartphone industry:
Looking at these numbers is why I worry about Purism. As I said at the beginning of this thread, I hope that Purism makes good profits on the Librem 5 USA, because it needs them. It is very, very hard to make a profit on smartphones, but at least Purism has the right strategy of following Apple’s model of controlling both the hardware and software and catering to niche markets that no other company serves, so it can charge more, and isn’t stuck in a cut-throat race to the bottom like all the companies making commoditized Android devices.
