Well, I’m not gonna lie here when I say I’ll wait for the 4th version of Librem 14. Probably this post will be shut down soon for “innapropriate” comments.
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Yep, they don’t sound very impressed, to put it lightly lol. But, what is worse, is the added negative public opinion growing because of this that will continue to spread unless Purism acts in a favorable manner to the customer base. It’s crucial that Purism fix this ASAP and honestly, I’d rather have my board fixed properly, if not a clean production board with this “whatever it is” rectified correctly, and wait another month or two than this.
Hopefully it wasn’t a case of Purism now rushing things, and gave the staff a quickie lesson in soldering, then everyone take a dozen or two laptops and let’s all have a soldering party! 
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I’m betting that’s exactly what happened. It seemed strange to me that Rankin kept saying that Purism staff members would have to work overtime just to prep and ship out a few laptops. You’d think that this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But if they are ripping apart each unit and soldering on a ton of extra components to work around some kind of design flaw, that totally explains those statements.
At this point, as a Purism ex-customer I’m less mad than I am disappointed. Best of luck to those of you who put your hard earned money towards these laptops. If you haven’t taken delivery yet my suggestion would be to ask Purism for a refund as these sort of antics should absolutely be met with a unified front of customer skepticism and refusal to participate.
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I agree with you.
Purism must at least make a post/thread adressing the problem we are seeing here. At least to assure their customers who have been waiting for months. Idk how to feel after waiting for so long (ik, the pandemic etc) just to be met with those capacitors staring at me.
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It’s been 4 days and without a good answer I’m becoming increasingly concerned
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MrChromebox said what matters here:
“I just became aware of this on Thurs when my production L14 arrived and I checked it based on the comments in this thread. This “fix” is not present on my PVT units. And it’s not being done by Purism staff, it’s coming that way from our supplier.”
I can empathize with this. If the supplier did this and Purism was not explicitly told about this (as they are not all computer engineers), then it is plausible that this could happen. My hope is that they have the leverage to demand things be amended.
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Then you’d lose your bet and you folks really do have to be careful with how easily you jump to conclusions.
As I already mentioned when discussing the overtime originally, we are doing that simply to get people their laptops as soon as possible so we can hit shipping parity. I’m referring to our fulfillment/operations team which does the final testing, flashing, and configuration of individual laptops and ships them to customers, not manufacturing.
It’s been less than a day since we’ve started investigating this.
As I said before, we are looking into this and I’ll report back once I find out why these initial boards had these hotfixes. As I mentioned, after looking into this with the team I found out that hotfixes at this phase were unexpected and other production boards (like the one pictured in Nicole’s post) didn’t have them. Clearly my own minimal experience with the devkits doesn’t really apply when we are talking about production laptop manufacturing.
So I need a little time to get to the bottom of things. Reasons could range anywhere from fixing an manufacturing issue (not a design issue, otherwise we’d probably see the hotfix in the production board Nicole took pictures of) during the first batch of board production, to responding to electronics components shortages to something else entirely.
Beyond getting to the bottom of that, there is also the matter of investigating whether that hotfix (outside of the aesthetics) actually affects the longevity or stability of the laptop or not.
In the mean time I’d strongly encourage folks to resist the urge to jump to conclusions.
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The board Nicole took pictures of does in fact have some custom soldering work done on it as pointed out in /r/purism:
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I am (and the community in general is) eagerly awaiting any new information about this problem, and would appreciate an answer, even if it not final information, specially about:
1: Is this issue going to keep happening in the subsequent batches of production?
2: How will this impact shipping times? (I believe most customers are ok with waiting a couple more weeks for this issue to be fixed, but we need to be in the loop)
I am not a computer hardware engineer, but this sounds like excuses. The hotfix looks awful and totally unsafe - or at the very least unreliable. No other manufacturer would ship a board like that and then claim it’s ok because it doesn’t affect longevity or stability. I believe all customers that got the (badly) hotfixed motherboard should be offered the possibility to return their device for a new one if they choose so.
As NineX pointed out:
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I believe he is mentioning the photos in the Librem 14 Rave post, where it does not seem to be any hotfix
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I believe he is referring to: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-14-rave/
I don’t see the same hot-fix on that board. So I would assume this is an issue with some units and not others.
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I don’t know if that’s worse or not? That the first shipment of units came in and some had issues on the board and some did not? What kind of consistency is that? What kind of quality controls in place?
And then even the folks at Purism didn’t even notice it until it was pointed out by folks on the forum after seeing the pictures?
This is all quite worrisome.
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The picture I linked is from that post.
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Except it’s obviously not, since there’s no such photo in that post. The one you’re talking about is https://puri.sm/posts/librem-14-in-pictures, which’s photos were taken on a different continent than the ones in Nicole’s post…
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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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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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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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Depending on your perspective, they didn’t. YMMV though.
Depending upon your perspective, the earth is flat.
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Its not flat. Just like the Librem 14 shipping in this state is 100% not acceptable.
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