Has anyone who ordered Oct 2017 or earlier received their shipping date emails? The blog post said we’d hear last week or this week and I haven’t seen any emails.
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Haven’t received any emails yet. Ordered Sept. 30, 2017.
I’m expecting something by Friday.
Ordered mine on September 27th 2017 and I haven’t received the email yet.
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They are apparently going out tomorrow (Friday). This week we were also sending out notifications to Librem 14 backers and that had to complete first before we could focus on Librem 5 emails.
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Have not yet…i also ordered in Oct 2017.
Received Email today (1/29/2021). “We estimate your Librem 5 will ship in May 2021”
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Well, at least I can play with the Atari VCS I ordered in 2018 (and got for Christmas this year) while I wait for my Librem 5 
Ordered mine on 23rd October. No email as yet.
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Update: it looks like the Librem 14 notifications took longer to get out than expected, so we weren’t able to get to the Librem 5 shipping estimates this week. So now they should be going out next week.
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Thanks for the update !
The last days of wait are always the longest
Last months.
Are you serious?
Honestly, this is more than ridiculous. This is close to slapstick.
You (not personally, but your company) is not able to keep 9 day old a promise?
After delaying a delay that has already been delayed you were wondering some time ago why people (like me) are frustrated about your communication.
And now with an update 1 day ago …
… you are not able to keep this promise for one day?
I know, now people (especially the Purism advocates in this forum) will react on my post the same way they always do like “what’s one more week of delay of information in comparison to waiting for 3 years, bla bla, bla”.
But my point is: PLEASE! Never ever complain about criticism concerning your (again, not you in person but your company’s) communication skills and ability to keep promises.
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Maybe you are right.
Over a year ago the community asked us to improve our communication and transparency by changing our policy of only announcing things we knew 100% for sure. Instead the community assured us that posting news frequently, based on the best information we had at the time, was preferred, even if there was a risk it could change in the future.
This is a great example of one of the problems with that approach. At the time we published the blog post, it seemed like it will be no problem to get the emails out this week. While the Librem 14 email updates we were sending out (among other obligations) were delaying it, as recently as yesterday it looked like they could still go out today and I updated the thread based on that information. Then I found out that wasn’t going to be possible and immediately came here and updated the thread again today.
Contrast that to if we wrote the post based on our previous policy, where in addition to other changes (such as not having a section devoted to the potential for a future CPU supply chain issue, since there was no issue affecting us so far), we would have substituted the estimate for when we’d send the emails out with “soon.”
You certainly make a strong case against the current approach. Other companies solve this kind of PR problem by reducing transparency and only announcing things when they are done. Perhaps it would have been even better just to wait to announce the estimate emails until they were actually going out. After all, any time you make an estimate for a future outcome based on the information you have at the time, there is always the risk that something (or multiple things) will come up to then delay it, and then that delay cascades through the system.
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yes, but then you should have also had postponed announcements like “NOW SHIPPING!!!111”. which is the main problem here. it’s ok to keep to the principles. It’s not ok to keep telling half-truth and then finding excuses.
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Well they are shipping. Just not to everyone yet… I think there’s maybe a gap in expectations here between the people working on this (to whom it’s presumably obvious that they were never going to fulfil all orders in a single production run in the space of a couple of weeks) and people who are less familiar with this kind of manufacturing who perhaps did expect that?
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The question that I would as is: is it an efficient use of your time to answer angry posts such as the one by @aircan etc. I suspect it is not. If that is the case, transparency and engagement should be adjusted appropriately.
The simplest solution I’ve seen in business the last 35 years has been this…
Under promise, over deliver.
If you really think something will take two months, announce 2 1/2 or 3 months. When the unplanned occurs you have that extra month or whatever to deal with it and you look smart, AND you establish a expectation for the customers that you then actually meet. No one complains when you do better than expected.
If nothing happens, you can opt to deliver early and customers rejoice.
And it’s not lying, because you really can’t predict what MIGHT happen out there, so you play it safe, smart business planning, and planning for the unexpected.
It can also buy your team time to further test for bugs, etc.
Just a thought.
I’m guessing that you would rather have a rep for Purism that says “oh they always say 6 months and it’s usually 4-5” rather than “they never deliver on time”.
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I can only refer again to the mntre project and Lukas’s comms. When he’s saying - I’m making pilot batches - he’s clear it goes about 5 devices. When he says - ‘I’m finishing production’ he’s clear which batch and which stage it is in now. And when he says ‘I’m shipping’ he’s clear about number of devices being shipped.
I do question it. Frequently. Overall it seems the community has appreciated having folks like myself from the company engage and try to answer questions both in here and in our community Matrix rooms. Like writing posts and collecting all the information from disparate teams so you can write updates, it does take a lot of time though that could be spent elsewhere. There has definitely been times when the negativity in the forums has affected me enough that I took a step back and refocused on other things.
At the moment (like with our policy with publishing more frequently/transparently) the trade-off seems worth it. But that doesn’t mean it always will so it’s worth questioning it from time to time.
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Honestly, @Kyle_Rankin I commiserate with you personally somehow, because I have the feeling that you are (in your role inside the company) only the messenger of bad news. The root cause for these delays are not in your hands. But looking with my eyes on that.
I did barely get E-Mails from Purism concerning delays. I had to proactively seach them here or in the news section. And after final shipping announcement (Nov 20) which is 2 months ago I still do not know when my device arrives.
Again, when I ordered I was promised to be delivered within 3 months. That what was stated on your homepage at that time. Now it is 2 years after and still no information when to receive it and still no phone.
This is very dissapointing.
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I really do appreciate that. That is why I was not talking to you as a person but to your company.
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