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?