The “Fund Your App” is good. I guess we’re all different when it comes to what motivates us. I figure that the “Fund Your App” will mean a lot more to me after I have my Librem 5. But if Purism waits until after next October to start shipping Librem 5’s again, I see that as an existential threat to them. Too much non-performance, regardless of the excuse, valid or not is really a bad thing.
The social cause is good. But early adopters shouldn’t have to wait that long after production has started, to receive their pre-paid product. This is especially true when there are people with money wanting to see them succeed.
Purism should at least publish exactly which chips they need, along with corresponding quantities of each one. Let us try to help them source the parts. Some of us have connections. Purism should increase funding through donations and pay whatever the market extorts for an ‘I need it now’ price. To some degree, we’re on the same team.
It could be that the manufactory facility has already the lead time until October for other companies, rather than Purism not finding more CPUS. After all, they will be doing a price increase in most products due to the increase of some components. I would assume price would remain the same if no more components were not being bought.
The i.MX 8M Quad is made by Samsung in S. Korea. NXP doesn’t have any fabs capable of 28nm nodes to produce the i.MX 8M Quad. All of its fabs in the US date from the early 1990s and are 8 inch wafers. Oak Hill Fab in Austin, Texas is 250nm, Chandler Fab in Chandler, Arizona is 180nm and ATMC fab in Austin, Texas is 90nm.
As far as we know, the Librem 5 USA uses the same components as the Librem 5 (except that it has the PLS8 cellular modem instead of the BM818), and Kyle Rankin’s last post on the Librem 5 USA basically confirms that. If Purism planned to use only US-sourced components, it would have to release different schematics and it hasn’t.
The difference is that the main PCB, USB PCB and the PLS8 M.2 PCB of the Librem 5 USA is being made in the US. (BTW, its RS9116 WiFi M.2 board is made in India.) A while back Purism said that the Librem 5 USA’s PCBs would be made by the same company that makes the Librem Key and made the DevKit and Purism said that company was located in the San Diego area when the DevKit was shipped. Making the PCBs in the US and doing the assembly in the US is a big achievement. The last company to make a phone in the US was Motorola with the Moto X in 2013 that was made in Fort Worth, TX.
I actually think that the community would be a lot more tolerant and forgiving if Purism was honest and frank about its problems, but it also might dry up orders. I don’t know what is the financial situation, but if Purism said that it was deeply in debt and awaiting more orders to pay for the manufacturing, it would discourage people from ordering.
Do you have any proof to backup your words that shipping resumes in October 2021? And at what throughout that will be (with proof)?
If not - you don’t have any proof or it’s a secret - will you full refund my order now if I ask for it? Or do I need to threaten you to get a refund, like how people wrote they had to do it?
As frustrated as I am with the situation I realize there are likely purchase orders in place for the backordered components but in the strictest of terms that’s a promise by a party up the chain not proof that party will deliver. Even if a PO were sufficient for you, Purism has made clear that they will not share anything like that which could be used to estimate the amount of business they’re doing.
The promise on the current sales page that new orders will be fulfilled between Q4 2021 and Q1 2022 does read as a promise that all preorders will be shipped in that time period as well. There is no way to predict the future and I do think the way it’s worded is that of a promise which either shows confidence by purism or, as my experience with purism cautions me, an abundance of optimism.
As for the refund request, the CSO is not likely in the best position to rule on refunds nor the refund policy, in my experience that falls outside the realm of security and I haven’t seen many (any?) comments from Kyle on the policy/refunds this far.
The more productive path would be to email Purism if cancellation is the path you wish to head down as the community forums aren’t likely to be a binding agreement anyway.
Onther way to support Purism financially could be by buying merchandise. I am not generally a fan of merchandise but in this case I may buy some.
I think there are companies that put Purism’s logo or whatever on a variety of products and maybe even take care of shipping. It may be easy to set this up. I wounder if they take a share of the products sold. Also community could create some cool graphics or letterings. Maybe with L5 pictures, or community compatible variant of the FLOSS & privacy mission which this is all about.
Compared to a donation merchandise would give people something back directly. Of course part of the money spent would go into the merchandise thing and not into Purism’s bank account.
I agree with Amosbatto about the likelihood that Purism may need more pre-orders before they can afford to ship any product to those who pre-paid years ago. I think this appears obvious to many of us here. This is why I suggested that I wouldn’t expect Purism to keep us informed about total number of phones shipped. Let them maintain the illusion that they don’t need new Librem 5 pre-orders to stay in business, for now. They can keep that a secret like no one knows. Donors would only be entitled to information about the number of additional phones shipped as made possible from the new donation money aimed at enabling some shipping to take place over the next six months. Apparently, at least up to this point Purism either doesn’t need this kind of help or no one at Purism has the experience with charitable fund raising to access those kinds of funds effectively. I think that even if the donations may not be tax deductible (they probably wouldn’t be), that people would support the social purpose with donations, regardless, if they had information about just how their donation helped others and the social purpose. I also considered investing in Purism and decided not to do that either, because they don’t publish any information about the terms and conditions of that opportunity. You need to contact them and then they get back to you with the information. Granted that process is appropriate at some point. But there should be a web page with some investment information on it about the class of investment and total amount of funding sought, etc… So once again, the management of the information seemed to be very closed as a trend from the very start, even for investors who know up-front that any profits will take second seat to the social purpose and knowing that product shipping is several years behind schedule. If you can’t expect some level of accountability as either an investor nor as a donor, then Purism’s options wane needlessly.
My patience is growing thin. Clearly Purism don’t need my help nor that of anyone else for that matter. I’ll give it until the end of 2021 and re-assess what to do about my pre-order then. I sincerely hope that Purusm sees this disruption to the supply chain as a problem and not as another opportunity to justify their inability to ship product while pre-orders stack up to pay for another small amount of product to be shipped eventually. At some point, the Securities and Exchange Commission might feel the need to get involved and make some unfortunate decisions, especially if Purism pre-order customers start calling them. Despite Todd’s best intentions, there may be a limit to how long you can continue accepting pre-orders under certain conditions that may already exist.
Based on the number of excuses made for non-performance by Purism over the past few years since I placed my pre-order, I anticipate many more delays and more excuses to be made before I receive my phone, if the company can entice enough people to make new pre-orders for Purism to survive that long in the mean time.
All makes sense, and everyone I talk to, reads these forums, here and elsewhere, and at the end of the day, most people are telling me that it’s “while I love what Purism is attempting, they won’t get my money until they start shipping regularly in their 10 days goal with a phone that can come close to being a daily driver. THEN they will order, and not before.”
Which, more and more, is the rock and the hard place they are at, if what people are guessing, that they need preorders to continue, and maybe they are not going to get them, at least not in big numbers. Their reputation seems to be getting worse by the day out there.
I feel like I’ve been pretty understanding with Purism over the past couple of years regarding their delays, but this one has started to test my patience too. This article talks about “just-in-time manufacturing” like it’s a good thing, but really all it means is you have no safety net when a single link in your supply chain fails for several months. Having extra stock of parts isn’t “cash sitting on the shelves,” it’s a buffer against an unstable supply chain that would have prevented this delay and would have prevented yet another price increase.
I get that Purism has probably had to spend most of the Librem 5 pre-order money on software development and hardware testing. The progress they’ve made is amazing. But at $900 after yet another price increase, and then maybe even more after another in Q3, it’s going to be really hard to convince more people to pre-order. Sure, flagship phones now cost (an astounding) $1,000+, but most people are accustomed to paying for that in increments of ~$40/mo built in to their phone plan over the course of two years.
The link has “Current CPUs (unavailable until October), RAM, ICs” under “Parts Blocker” and “Parity after October 2021, possibly into 2022 as demand continues to increase.” under “Shipping Parity”. This is the language of estimations, not promises. They have also not mentioned anything about moving away from “just-in-time manufacturing”, which will continue to trade efficiency for supply security. Note that “Future CPUs, future RAM” appears in most rows that do not have a current parts blocker listed, so one can assume that once the current parts are available, that there is still the possibility of future parts being unavailable. Unfortunately, sales departments everywhere like to over simplify and present things in a more attractive way. This is more of an industry wide problem, just like the supply shortages. At least the supply shortages will be temporary, but sales will still be sales. The other option, which is what will probably happen if people keep trying to take estimations and assume it to be legally binding somehow is to not communicate anything about dates or where things are at. In other words, all questions of “when?” will be answered with “we are not releasing internal estimates.”
I expect a lot of inflation. It is a byproduct of governments spending from new debt, but if there is low velocity of money, the effect can be delayed for a while. While preorders may be delayed for quite a bit, you would have to be a fairly good investor to get returns on investment equal to the price increase.
I’m an on-again/off-again customer of HEB, currently off-again, and they are the only supplier of my addiction to marranito pig-shaped cookies. I buy TP about monthly, and when the shortage hit, I was OK on supply as I overbuy on storable products like that, so I didn’t panic and try to stuff my vehicle full of TP like some other customers I saw (chuckle). I only had to buy a different product than I usually buy once during the shortage. No matter how much a company predicts and hedges bets (or try to game as you mention), things can go wrong. I don’t know if I learned it from my parents or Star Wars, “patience, young padawan”, but doing nothing in times of chaos can be rewarding or maybe relaxing.
Maybe you need a de-stresser. First, stop reading the news if you are doing that. Second, take a walk in a park and look at Nature. When I ordered by Librem 5, I wasn’t certain it would reach the real world, but it WAS a great idea, so I threw my money down to support it. I did get a laptop from them also (which I’m posting this from), but the phone is a completely different realm of product, much harder to accomplish. I figured I waste a lot of money on other stuff, I may as well invest in something that, even if it only ends up making a statement of what I would like to see in the future, was worth it. If I actually get a phone, COOL!!!
