New Post: Improved Delivery Time for Librem 5 USA: May 2022 Update

Librem Phones (Librem 5)
#1

[Note: This thread is intended to be a discussion thread for the topics in this post. Please keep your replies on topic. Some examples of off-topic replies include:

“I have a support request.” (These are better handled with the Purism support team.)

“I want to air a personal grievance.” (You can do that in your own topic.)
]

We are almost there! We have overcome a number supply chain and manufacturing challenges for the Librem 5 USA and have been steadily shipping through orders this Spring. It’s been really gratifying to hear all of the positive feedback from Librem 5 USA customers who now have their phones. Based on the current backlog of orders we project now we will hit shipping parity (that point where a new order is fulfilled within our standard 10-business-day lead time) some time in June, and as a result we’ve reduced the lead time for new Librem 5 USA orders to a conservative 60 days.

Read the rest of the post here:

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#2

I will confirm that my Librem5USA–which I substituted for a Dogwood Librem 5–did arrive a couple of weeks ago.

I was able to create my own keyboard for it. Imagine doing that on an Android!!! (There are other issues; I am working them with support.)

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#3

I’d love to hear more about that, if you don’t mind sharing.

#4

In a different topic. Hint hint. :wink:

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#5

Will believe it when enough customers who have been waiting on their L5 delivery confirm this is true, in a separate topic of course :smile:

1 Like
#6

Did you mean L5 or L5 USA? I believe that the intention of this topic was specifically to talk about the L5 USA and was not intended to apply to the L5.

As always, no customers are obliged to sign up to the Purism forum, let alone post about the excitement of receiving their L5 USA. :wink: So it is hard to define what “enough” means.

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#7

I was talking about L5 USA.

I know I have choices when signing up for purism forum. Not sure how that has much to do with what I said but, either way, responding and inquiring about my reply is off topic. So feel free to open another thread if you want to discuss.

#8

“conservative” remains to be seen… I think we have all seen many “conservative” estimates come and go. Not to complain too much! I am extremely excited for when shipping parity is reached for L5 USA (and for L5, for that matter). Just, I’ll believe it when I see it.

#9

We really are trying to make conservative estimates. With all the data I currently have, I actually believe the lead time for new orders could be much shorter, but as you allude, each time we try to make an estimate in the past, shortly afterward some new crisis appears that adds delays. Without being able to see the future I do think this time is different and can finally see the finish line from here. It’s hard to account for absolute disasters that can’t be predicted (and would cause unknown delays), so instead we try to add quite a bit of padding when to try to account for minor delays.

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#10

I was on the verge of cancelling my order, to be frank. I received an email very roughly around new years saying you expected to be shipping within a couple of months, so I delayed my request, deciding to give you until the end of March. That came and went, and so I sent an email in mid April to support asking when. If the email had come back saying two months, I’d have asked for a refund then. Instead; I was told it would be two weeks. So I held off.

Two days (not weeks) later, I got the email asking to confirm my shipping address was still good.

So in this case your intent (to be conservative on schedule) actually matched the results; Mr. Murphy must have been busy elsewhere just for once. :smile:

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#11

I ordered mine 4 years ago still nothing

1 Like
#12

Hi Kyle_Rankin, if I naively assume that the same parts are used in the normal Librem 5 “for Europe”, then the supply chain should have improved for the other buyers as well.

Can you also give a more detailed indication of when shipping parity could be achieved for the “normal L5” (or do that in a separate issue)?

Regards

2 Likes
#13

I don’t think that any kind of celebration or kudos to Purism with respect to any version of the Librem 5 should be in order until those who ordered their Librem 5 before the Librem 5 USA existed, have all received their orders.

The Librem 5 (original) must just seem like such a burden to Purism, without their respecting the fact that the early adopters who placed pre-orders before there was a Librem 5 USA, are the ones that made the Librem 5 possible at all. And it’s not fair to suggest that these early adopters can just upgrade at any time now. A deal is a deal, even if Purism does make a lot more profit on the much more expensive (but essentially the same product) USA version.

I see Purusm’s handling of their promoting of the Librem 5 USA now, similar to a highly in-debted consumer. So in this example, you owe many creditors in the world a lot of money. But re-paying the oldest of your loans is not profitable or fun right now. So you spend a lot of money on other things, draw a lot of attention to yourself over your own success of a later version of essentially the same product. But at the same time you’re saying to yourself “Those old creditors, well there are just too many of them. We’ve already spent their money. It’s much more fun and profitable to sell the same product to new people now, with a slightly different product name to the new customers who are paying double now. Some day when we have an abundance of excess, we’ll re-visit the idea of maybe filling some of those older orders. In the meantime, it would be nice if those people just stayed quiet until maybe we get around to them sometime later”.

So my question Kyle is this: I am one of those bothersome minions from the masses who pre-ordered my ordinary (made in China) Librem 5 in Late 2019. When do you plan to ship a Librem 5 to myself and to others like me, who didn’t choose to pay a lot extra for essentially the same product and made in the USA for close to double the price?

It looks to me like Purism is walking on very thin ice right now. It might be different if Purism released their sales and back-order numbers. But they are not. So it’s fair to assume that there is something to hide as Purism leaves their earlier supporters behind in their quest to fulfill more profitable orders, accolades over their more recent successes, and no information to earlier adopters who made it all possible.

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#14

They’re two different queues.

#15

This post is about Librem 5 USA and its availability. It has different supply chains and different order numbers from Librem 5. We are currently shipping through both queues right now actually, but it takes longer to get through the Librem 5 queue because there are many more orders and it has sometimes been harder to get components in the quantities we need for it (a mass-produced product like that generally has a minimum you have to hit to start up the production line, much higher than we have for the Librem 5 USA). Missing a single component is enough to pause production.

The situation is improving, however, and we hope to get through all the Librem 5 backorders by the end of the year as long as components arrive when they are supposed to and manufacturing runs aren’t delayed. Some components (such as CPUs) had long lead times. We’ll be sure to post news about Librem 5 when there is something newsworthy. At the moment it’s just “we are still shipping through the last manufacturing run” which isn’t anything new.

Let’s please try to keep this thread on the topic of Librem 5 USA. As we mentioned in a past post about our change from “Just in Time” for the Librem 14, the Librem 14 was first to take advantage of our massive investment in supply and pivot over to maintaining much larger inventories, and the Librem 5 USA is the latest to be close to moving over to this new model. We just need to get through the backorders first.

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#16

FWIW the referenced Librem 14 announcement claimed the Librem 14 would be shipping from that stock starting the first week of January.

Based on other similar self set and unmet timelines I do think it’s reasonable to be very skeptical of the is current Librem 5USA announcement and not expect the Librem 5 USA to actually start shipping from that style of stock in the near future but rather be mentally prepared for 6 months before that is met.

I make that 6 month assessment based on the consistent missed expectations and the referenced librem 14 miss, that estimate was in December for the first week of January, this is a similar few weeks away based on the announcement so using past experiences to influence the current estimate, 6 months seems like a reasonable estimate to actually hit the desired goal.

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#17

And we started shipping from that stock the second or third week of January instead (if not sooner than that), due to a shipping delay over the holidays, and an office shutdown we do the last two weeks of the year that meant some catch-up when we opened back up. I know we even published a picture of one of the pallets of laptops that arrived in mid-Jan.

We are trying to make conservative estimates based on the information we have, and in a challenging and constantly-changing environment.

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#18

My understanding now is that, after some correspondence from Purism, that stock of V14 is now plentiful and shipping. Things like anti-interdiction would slow things up, but I now hear there is stock.

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#19

For reference on where I was coming from.

Seeing things like this: Why can't the company provide a refund for a product never received

This:

And this:

Which make it look like refunds are being delayed until their point in the queue which hasn’t reached and December orders shipping in very late January or early February.

(Those each have their own threads so I’m not looking to have those conversations here, just showing examples of the information I was working with when making my previous post)

If we accept these as exceptions then Maybe the Librem 5 USA will be shipping from stock that arrives in June or July after all.

Though with the Librem 14 example of shipping backorders “from stock” by shipping from the pallet that arrived in the third week of January… that implies that Librem 5 orders may not ship out quickly from that stock, only that once the backorders ship from that stock they will continue to catch up while shipping from stock.

I agree that anti-interdiction related delays should not be used in the context of shipping JIT vs from stock as that would be a dishonest argument to make. The anti-interdiction service should be expected to cause delays all it’s own.

I wasn’t meaning to imply that now they aren’t but rather they missed the timeline of the first week of January that they set for themselves. I did think they missed it by more but it may just be that my limited information was the exceptions rather than missing by some small number of weeks.

#20

Well now that we all understand each other, hopefully we can get back to the topic of Librem 5 USA.