What are people’s thoughts on the ability to upgrade from the current memory & storage limits upon modem confirmation email. Would you pay more for this when your delivery date is guaranteed (or money back) within a month?
From what I recall, the processor can handle up to 4 GB of RAM from the current 3GB, and 32 GB of storage was small for even a decade ago. PinePhone Pro (1/3 the price) has 4x the storage (128 GB).
For memory, to bridge the gap while native apps are developed & until Mozilla gets its act together to implement PWAs on desktop (or plug your nose to use other browser engines), Android apps (Anbox/Waydroid) & web apps need to fill the void, and they eat RAM for breakfast.
It’s nice to have a microSD for additional storage, though it would be nice if purism or a current Librem 5 owner could post about the performance of using microSD vs eMMC. The Steam Deck managed to achieve near exact speeds on their linux device. Another concern with storage, is there is no easy way to manage it, such as installing apps to external storage like Android, configure LUKS to encrypt both by default from a GUI, or use a better filesystem like BTRFS.
I think they are soldered in, which would make that tricky. If this is offered at all then I think it should be at order time (and with a very limited set of combinations of choices).
Depends how much more but I would be open to considering such an opportunity.
As you say, there is limited scope for more RAM - so significantly more RAM can only really come with a future hardware revision. So we would mainly be talking about a larger eMMC drive.
This has already happened. [MyL5] Australia/New Zealand and the post after it. uSD is disappointingly slow. eMMC is “OK”.
I remember old systems marketed up to 512MB and came shipped with 64MB cards. Then 128MB and 256MB cards came out. Some of us experimented with the new cards and overloaded the system to 768MB.
The systems still worked AND utilized the extra memory.
Albeit the manufacturer set a firmware limit in future models and never allowed that to happen again.
Because the uSD is horribly slow. I mean it’s fine for my media library (which is what I am using it for at the moment) because uSD only needs to deliver the data at the speed that is needed in order to play the media. There is no benefit to delivering the data more quickly. But for apps and general data, you will experience the slowness. (I don’t know whether the uSD support has problems at the moment and it will get better in the future.)