This topic got me thinking… My Lenovo ThinkPad touch version from 2013 running PureOS has better performance than Librem 5 in OpenGL games I wrote, and has a physical switch to disable WiFi. It’s definitely not as powerful/capable as my newer Librem 14, but it’s still pretty good. Also has an easily removable battery.
Makes the Librem 11 a hard sell for me, given that old machine has a touch screen and pen and can swivel the screen around to become a tablet. Seems like L11 pays a hefty price for being “as flat as an iPad” in my biased eyes, but obviously a Lenovo is a China-based machine and not a privacy conscious type of thing. I think mine might be the generation where the hardware watches for a Windows filesystem on the hard drive, and if it finds one edits the drive contents to emplace its own applications/“firmware.” As a result there was always a hotkey on Windows 8/10 that causes a driver crash and freezes the mouse, then creates a crash dump text file in Documents and shows a ghetto Windows-XP looking popup with an error. (It was built for Win7) No idea if/what it does to Linux systems. They worked mostly without issue for me but it could’ve been hiding something. So this isn’t really an endorsement of Lenovo. But the hardware has some of the advantages of Purism things despite being 11 years old.
True, the same applies to any modern tablet. One argument to be made for the higher price is the software, but any x86 tablet can run pretty much any distro you want.
I do wish you the best of luck in your search. If you end up finding something can you please post an update in case there are others who are looking for something similar?
If you make your whole brand about privacy and security, you should expect to be trashed for not even remotely living up to that.
There is a difference though. Nobody is buying those other tablets specifically for privacy and security. Most of them also cost between $100-$500, some of them a bit more. They don’t cost almost a thousand dollars. So this sounds very much like privacy washing to me.
How many tablets are x68 vs ARM I don’t know, but I don’t think that matters too much these days. If you intend to use Linux, most of the software will probably be open source and/or available for both x86 and ARM.
The Librem phones and laptops have separate physical switches that remove power from the camera(s) and wifi card. The laptops can be ordered without a wifi card installed.
The tablet is a sealed generic that was rushed to market for cash flow purposes so there are not as mant layers to ensure privacy respect.
I think the OP’s criticism is fair for the Librem 11 and off the mark for all other devices - hence why this topic ended up in the Librem 11 category after starting life in the wrong category.
I have my doubts that a tablet without any WiFi at all is around, since tablets are generally expected to be portable devices. For sure, if you were desperate, you could use a USB ethernet dongle to get on the network when you need to be on the network, and stay off the network otherwise. Another option might be a tablet that has mobile network support and no direct LAN support at all - but that certainly wouldn’t suit my use case (it would just be extra hassle to connect to my LAN from outside - and wouldn’t meet my privacy requirements).