New Post: Librem 14 in Pictures

Hardware
55

Okay I’ll admit I was confused as to what post we were referring to. I thought we were referring to the post that actual thread here is referencing. I was wrong. I apologize for that. In any event the pictures from 4/8 don’t have the issue and the pictures from 4/19 absolutely do. Purism is currently claiming however that they didn’t know about the issue until 4/22 which makes no actual sense.

Now that being said, this doesnt change the fact that the hardware has been modified and Purism did not detect it and then proceeded to ship that hardware to customers. That’s just beyond the pale and strikes to the very core of their carefully crafted reputation as a trusted supplier of privacy respecting hardware.

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56

Didn’t you swear some sort of blood oath to not come back here? Or has the reddit bridge lost its new-house smell?

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57

Oh yeah:

Same guy who had “insider knowledge” that Purism was never going to ship a phone. According to him Purism should have been bankrupt by now.

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58

Depending on your perspective, they didn’t. YMMV though.

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Depending upon your perspective, the earth is flat.

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60

Its not flat. Just like the Librem 14 shipping in this state is 100% not acceptable.

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61

I do not understand why they absolutely want to respect the parity of shipments when it is quite normal that those who have ordered for a very long time receive their computers before those who ordered them recently.

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Oh dear! What a mess!

I am sorry… I was away over the weekend so I just got to see this today.

So first up front, we are as disappointed as you that this kind of fix needed to be applied. As has already been pointed out this fix has not been present on the previous board spins we made, the so called EVT and PVT models since these additional components do not affect functionality in any way. Or to put it in other words, if your would take off these parts the main board would continue to work just fine - and that’s what we tested for during development, we tested functionality and stability. Does everything work as expected? Even when we stress test it? And it did.

But there is more to it than just function, we also e.g. have to comply to regulations, like FCC and CE concerning EM interference and a lot of other things that are not related to functionality.

We also talked about another problem before and that is time. Due to the global shortage of parts we really got into trouble concerning time. If there is just a single component missing you can not make the main board, end of story. So you have to wait. This caused a lot of delays compared to the original production plan. And this also meant that the usual sequential development process had to be squeezed together and we had to do things in parallel in order to avoid even further delays. This of course incurred some risk, e.g. that findings from one “branch” might not make it into the other in time.

And that’s exactly what happened here. Please take into account that depending on load it takes four weeks or more to make a production run of such main boards. If you need to change things it takes even a lot longer. Since we were already super late we took the risk and pulled production of PCBs in front of the time line to get a step ahead. Since we tested the EVT and PVT boards thoroughly for function we were pretty sure that we should be pretty fine with them.

Well, sadly on the last mile some issue popped up - not a functional issue, but an issue with the voltage regulators (that’s the area where this fix is applied) that needed to get addressed. Since the boards had already been made and populated there was no other way than to do it this way.

Again, we are also not happy about this and the next spin of PCBs will have this included.

I can assure to you that this fix is totally safe. There is no risk in any way that this will reduce life time or limit functionality. Not at all.

Admittedly the fix does not look very pretty but this is mostly due to the position on the PCB, there was no other way to place these additional parts differently. We do double and triple check the rework spot during assembly to make sure the solder joints are as good as possible given the place / situation.

Again, I am sorry for the stir up this has caused. I hope you can now understand what happened, that we are aware of it and that this will of course also be improved over time.

Cheers
nicole

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63

Will orders placed today (and shipped in June) come with next spin PCBs?

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64

Is it correct to assume that you already knew about this and other employees like Kyle and Matt just hadn’t been made aware of this, hence their surprise when this came up a few days ago?

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65

Because if they knew about it everyone should’ve been informed immediately, but it still doesn’t explain the shoddy work involved.
It’s all very disappointing.
And honestly I would think that if this information had been put out to early purchasers they would’ve rather waited another month or two and gotten it done correctly, or at least given the choice to do this, and this is a great example where transparency probably would’ve been much more helpful to all involved.

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One more question - who applied this fix? Your supplier or Purism?

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They probably also knew that someone would have open their laptop and notice the thingy. It was on the first pictures released too. I really don’t get where you are heading at.

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68

I’m trying to diagnose an obvious communication problem in Purism, duh.

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And from that conclude what?

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I could ask you the very same thing about your line of questioning and you’d have the very same answer: My curiosity is an itch and I desperately want to scratch it. Satisfied?

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Will anyone with a L14 pre-order be given the option to wait for a properly corrected PCB before receiving their laptop? Or will we just get what we get?

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72

Are you? To me it seems like you desperately try get some kind of reaction. I don’t understand why you do it but it is annoying to new customers like me.

As I see it the extra capacitors are there to suppress electrical noise. We need more capacitors here as well.

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73

I get that there are concerns about others acting in good will or not, but I don’t think quizzing people on their intentions ever goes anywhere. Let’s not go there with this thread, and keep it on the topic of the laptop.

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74

Corollary: Notice it was said (3 days later) if they are removed it would still work just fine? Except the spies won’t get their data!

When “Central Services” arrive to fix it, be sure to ask if they have brought their form “27b-stroke-6”!