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.