It’s like parallel programming with mutexes and things like that: fairness is not guaranteed.
Even if amosbatto was getting it earlier then he should be, I think this is also a fair trade. He spread information about it on many channels and has a great technical understanding. In this way he makes free advertise for Purism and for the project itself and all of this will also help with our all goal. As long as there is no “he made one video, he is next one who get it” and just for very few special people like him, I am fine with that.
You might look at the situation asking yourself if a) Purism wants to build a community for people willing to spend money, time and effort to get and develop a privacy-oriented device (and hardware sales are a happy by-product), or b) wants to foster hardware sales to any people who want to be free to do their own thing with a privacy-oriented device.
Since I consider myself in the second category, if it were true that Purism wanted to follow the first way and get out of chronological order to serve people who contribute back, it would push me away from putting money in their venture.
Anyhow, I guess Purism wouldn’t dare to state it clearly (a behavior strongly pushing away any kind of customer but the desired on), and therefore this reasoning is a pure inference exercise based on the sparce information lurkers might get on this forum.
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All, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about whether Purism is deliberately showing favoritism to some active forum members. I wouldn’t think they would do that…or risk it.
That said, I think some bloggers/reviewers got review units. Not sure if they had to return the phones.
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We are mass-guessing anyhow:
Information is so scarce that they might do it and get away (at least for a while) with it.
Such a behavior could get from the extreme of awarding the few available devices to the contributor/poster/apostle of the month, through 50 shades of “we prioritize X over Y because Y asked for a lot of extras/his device is built of parts sourced in the wrong continent/it is an awful person/oops the mail slipped through we are so sorry” to the other extreme of following exactly the chronological order of order arrival/address confirmation/you-name-it.
No sane person wants to think they are working on the arbitrary extreme, and information on this forum seems to exclude the other strictly chronological extreme. Therefore, they must be working somewhere in between - and I for my self hope they are near to the strictly chronological extreme.
This is, however, only reasoning and inference from what can be read.
If Purism would not want it to happen, I see only two ways out: be radically more transparent and communicative than they have been up to now (yes, we all have seen improvements, but they have still a long road to go; and, yes, it might not be an option because of legal/economical/business/you-name-it reasons, but this can also be a boilerplate excuse), or get a phone into each hand which paid for one. Both of them seem not to be doable now, so people with time on their hands and interest in the matter will keep talking and reasoning and arguing… No information will be added neither from people venting their frustration, neither from supporters defending the company.
This could be the right moment to add another (more than one?) category to the forum regarding shipping infos, frustration vents, company support and whatelsenot, so to keep the other sections clean for relevant information.
I’m guessing from what @SteveC wrote that Purism did send me the phone early, although I have heard from someone who got the L5USA a full month before me, so I’m not sure.
I wrote an email to Purism in late June saying that a friend of mine would be traveling from the US to Bolivia on July 26 and had offered to bring me the phone. (I don’t dare send the phone through Bolivian customs where it can take months of bureaucratic wrangling and things are liable to mysteriously disappear). I asked when Purism would ship the phone, because I wanted to send the phone with my friend. Purism responded saying that it was unlikely that the phone would ship by July 26 and that was the last that I heard until I got an email on July 20 saying that the phone had been shipped. It turned out that my friend had changed her travel plans, and won’t be traveling until October, so there was no advantage in getting the phone earlier.
It is possible that Purism was trying to accommodate my weird shipping situation (and avoid the high cost of shipping to Bolivia), but another possibility is that Purism needs some testers for the first L5USAs, because it has board production issues or software issues that need to be debugged, and it knows that I signed up to get the first dev batches of the L5, so I don’t mind being a tester, whereas @SteveC rejected Dogwood, so he clearly doesn’t want to be a tester.
A third possibility is that Purism wants good documentation/reviews and it knows that I have written documentation (1,2,3,4,5) and blog articles (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) about the Librem 5, so Purism figures that I will add more info on the community wiki and write up a detailed review of the phone (when I get my hands on it). If this is the reason, then I appreciate the gesture on Purism’s part, because it is hard to blog about the phone without having the hardware.
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Oh, one more possibility is that Purism wants to encourage me to write my dictionary app–sorry not good enough to show anyone yet, since I’m having to also learn Qt, so it has been slow going.
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That was what i wrote and what I said “I’m okay with that”. It isn’t like there are hundreds of people who are doing so. And don’t forget all the long corrections under random L5-YouTube videos, where people spoke about false things.
@lemx: Nobody will get there pocket computer later because one or two people get there device earlier. But this work (for free) helps the whole project to become more popular or better reputation and push it forward this way. In general I’m with you, but very few exceptions with good reasons for the project should be okay.
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Nobody will get there pocket computer later because one or two people…
If I wanted to nitpick, I could correct you and say that these one or two people will shift others backward, and there is always somebody on borderline affected, like some of those people who were between the original backers in the end of September '17/start of October '18 
As I wrote before, facts accessible to me indicate that Purism is slightly favoring some (looks like few) people over others. In the good old times (pre-COVID) such a behaviour might have been hardly noticed, or explained away really well; but if you add the general angst of these times on top of the generalized supply chain problems onto Purisms erratic (biased?) communication, such things obviously get way more resonance.
Surely there are reasons. Without reasons no dog wags his tail.
I don’t know of an official statement of any; and personally… I don’t care for them.
My target is to get a fully functional phone, as it was promised, and in reasonable times. It needs many steps to get there, and facts show many such steps have already been taken against any misplanning, overly optimistic promises, problematic communication, supply disruptions, and whatelsenot - with determination, work and goodwill of many people involved.
Still, in my personal evaluation the probability of not getting anything and having to write off the loss has been nonzero quite for a while and is rising every day. 
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I am curious what your app will do that the existing one doesn’t. Perhaps answer that here: New Post: App Spotlight: Dictionary rather than hijacking further in this topic. The existing app certainly could do with some love last time I looked at it so …
My goal is to create a dictionary app that will work well for American and African indigenous languages, since the existing dictionary programs are mainly designed for Indoeuropean languages. The languages I work with are agglutinative, so the root is found in the middle of the word with prefixes (in the case of Guarani) and suffixes (in the case of Quechua, Aymara and Guarani), so you need the ability to search in the middle of words or at the end of words. Because languages like Aymara have vowel elision and languages like Guarani have changing roots depending on person and number, it is often necessary to do searches with regular expressions, which is not easy to implement as an afterthought, so it is best to create a new app that is based on a database that supports regular expressions.
Another major problem with indigenous languages is that there often isn’t a universally accepted alphabet and there are competing writing systems. In Quechua, they can’t agree whether to write with 3 vowels or 5 vowels. In Aymara, they can’t agree whether to write with vowel elision or not. In Guarani, the Bolivians are using a totally different alphabet than the Paraguayans. On top of that, most people only know how to write in Spanish, so they sound out the native language based on a Spanish writing system, and finally you have a lot of regional variation in pronunciation and there hasn’t been hundreds of years of standardization like with most Indoeuropean languages so everyone agrees how to write a word, even if they pronounce it differently in their region. To illustrate the problem, take the Quechua word qillqay (to write). Someone who knows the Spanish writing system will write quelcay, because Spanish doesn’t have a postvelar K sound. People who believe in the 5 vowel alphabet will write it as qellqay. In some regions, its beginning Q is aspirated as qhillqay. Many people debate whether it it should be written as a single or double L (and some linguists believe that the single L comes from Spanish and didn’t exist in the original Quechua), so some write it as qillqay and others as qilqay. To deal with this madness, I want to be able to define a customizable sounds-like search function for each dictionary, where the user’s search string and all the content in the dictionaries is converted to a more basic set of sounds for matching. For example, it doesn’t matter if someone writes k (velar), kh (velar aspirated), k’ (velar glotallized), q (postvelar), qh (postvelar aspirated), q’ (postvelar glotallized), qu(ei) (Spanish velar) or c(aou) (Spanish velar), the dictionary app will reduce all of this down to a basic k sound and be able to search for that. It is sort of like a simplified soundex() function, but I want the transformation to the more basic representation to be definable for each dictionary, because each language has different confusable letters and dictionaries can use different writing systems.
I also want the app to run in all the major operating systems because realistically most people are going to run it in Windows and Android, but I want it to work in Linux, so I chose Qt, because it works everywhere.
Another thing that I want to include is a morphological analyzer for Quechua, Aymara and Guarani. If you take a root like yacha in Quecha or yati in Aymara (meaning “to know”), then you can create half a million words in each of those languages from one root word, but if you do a search for a word like yachachiqkunalla (yacha-chi-q-kuna-lla) in Quechua or yatichirinakaki (yati-chi-ri-naka-ki) in Aymara (meaning “only teachers”, from the morphemes: to know + to make + person who + plural + limitative), then you will never find the word in the dictionary. We have created basic finite state machines that can break words into their morphemes for the three languages, so I want to include them, so people can enter a word and then touch/click the root and each morpheme to find their definitions. In other words, if the user enters yachachiqkunalla (or the badly spelled yachacheccunala), then the dictionary will return “yacha + chi + q + kuna + lla” and the user can not only discover the proper spelling, but also understand the meaning of each morpheme in the language. You don’t understand why this is important, until you watch a normal person try to search for a word that they heard. They can’t find words in the dictionary, because they don’t know the writing system and they don’t know the morphology of the language, so my hope is to create a dictionary app that can solve these problems.
That’s probably more info than you wanted. 
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This was VERY interesting, thank you. I did once learn about Turkish (also an agglutinative language though perhaps not as much) and wondered how one would actually construct a dictionary. I imagine it would be a root dictionary with sections (or perhaps even tables) for the suffixes and prefixes.
It looks to me like Purism is not being honest with their potential new pre-order customers and have been dis-honest with their potential new pre-order customers for quite some time now. The business model is to entice uninformed potential customers to place pre-orders without understanding the risks involved, which risks are increasingly more significant as time passes and significant amounts of product have not been shipped yet after several years.
At some point, I would like to see one of the federal governmental agencies here in the US step in and give Purism a choice.
1.) Publish to the public:
a.) How many pre-orders Purism has sold and collected money on in advance.
b.) How many pre-orders Purism has shipped
c.) How many phones Purism could afford to ship right away if the components were available in the market.
Or
2.) They shut Purism down and put those involved in the deception in to prison until everyone who lost money as a result of this decption, has been re-paid in full. Let the Warrant Canary trigger the intended responses. It won’t matter if the key people in the company are in jail anyway.
It’s a free country. So instead of just shutting Purism down now, they should make either of these two options available as a choice.
If anyone at Purism thinks this would be unfair, please tell us why it would be unfair. Please tell us why the change in refund policy is ethical and why not meeting any of your commitments over a course of several years is ok. Why is it OK to continue creating optimistic expectations of your company in your potential customers, when we saw so many excuses, even before the pandemic started?
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What is the average wait time between the address confirmation email and tracking email? I’ve been waiting almost a full month since sending my address confirmation with no tracking info yet. Is this normal, or is it time to send an email to Purism?
L5USA
Order: January 28, 2021
Address/modem email: September 29, 2021
Tracking Email: ???
Arrived: ???
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Wow! And yet they still claim “Place your order now, get in approximately 6 to 8 weeks!” 
Been waiting since the 5th of July.
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I see this is still a thing. They haven’t been breaking commitments (save for one that I’ve seen), they’ve been making bad estimations.
The only thing I’ve seen that was “this will happen” is the email telling everyone where their place in line is (unless I’ve made a mistake and that’s supposed to happen by the end of this month, but I can’t find where that promise was made at the moment).
You can be upset with the way Purism is handling things, but you have to be fair. Otherwise it just becomes a tantrum.
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Tantrum or no, I’m fairly sure it won’t actually achieve anything towards the goal of getting the phone.
If Purism had a magic wand that would solve all of the supply and logistics issues, they would have used it a long time ago.
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I have been patient because I believe in Purism’s mission of providing privacy and secure phones and other hardware from the ground up.
When trying to discern if purism’s dates are promises or estimations, and our responses, complaints or tantrums, I think it’s only fair to acknowledge Purism’s active role in deception. It’s always been easy many times in retrospect, to look back and realize that Purism has known the bad news long before the public knew the bad news and that during a sometimes long interim, Purism did not disclose that bad news until a much later time. Instead, that they chose to wait until the most advantageous point in time for them, to make the disappointing disclosures. Sometimes, the bad news was even blamed on events with a timeline that couldn’t be fully reconsiled when put to scrutiny. In other words, not all of the excuses were credible. It’s also reasonable to expect an estimate to evolve in to a non-truth when the estimate is missed not by days or weeks, but by years, long before the pandemic.
As much as I believe in Purism’s mission, I think they often choose an unethical path with respect to disclosing information to their customers who each in their own small way, are small investors. I think it likely that Todd might take great exception (just my guess based on how pre-orders are treated) at the notion that pre-orderers are actually any kind of investors who are due any accountability by Purism. Pre-order customers seem to be only captive customers in any sence of the concept, nothing more. Purism confirmed that in my mind when they moved Librem 5 USA customers to the front of the line. And it didn’t matter to me at the time that they had yet one more excuse for doing that. The Librem 5 USA didn’t even exist when I placed my pre-order. A commitment is a commitment. If we split some hairs, we can call the Librem 5 USA a different product. But that doesn’t mean to me that Purism is willing to keep their commitments. Purism also broke their commitments to early pre-order customers that they could get their money back at any time before the product shipped. They made the new refund policy retroactive, causing delays in getting your money back by up to years, forcing early pre-order customers to endure a long-term risk that they never agreed to. So Purism does break their commitments. The complaints are valid.
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All Purism (future) dates are estimations, not promises.
Has there been disappointment? You betcha.
They didn’t. It’s a different phone with different hardware.