Price of phone is so high :(

[amosbatto]

@user1

The price of this phone isn’t lux but definately is high end but the hardware ie mid range at best.

The CPU performance on Librem 5 is comparable to a Snapdragon 425 or 427 (see these phones), but the GPU and RAM performance is a little better.

@user1

If there was an option like monthly payment scheme for the phone, I might take it but probably not as I’m not sure if the phobe will last the payment period

The Librem 5 should have the longest software support of any phone that you can buy today, including the iPhone and Fairphone which offer 5 years of software updates, because NXP will be manufacturing the SoC until January 2028 and NXP is contributing to the mainline Linux drivers, plus Purism says it will provide “lifetime support”. Considering that the Linux kernel still supports the 486, and many distros still support 586/Pentium I, the Librem 5 and PinePhone are the best phones that you can buy in terms of longevity.

@user1

there haven’t even really been plans set out for purism to sell replacement parts for the L5 which is very depressing as some of the most scum companies at least do this.

Very few phone makers sell replacement parts. As far as I know, only Fairphone, SHIFT and PINE64 do. Motorola sells some parts through iFixit in Europe and North America. For all the rest, you are relying on sellers on eBay and Alibaba and you have no idea if you are getting parts from the original manufacturer or not, so it is often better to buy used parts taken off old phones.

Purism’s CTO, Nicole Faerber, promised:

@nicole.faerber

We will definitely sell separate batteries. Concerning screens, I see the point and we need to see how we can include this in the mechanical design (MD). Most commonly these screens get glued into the case and removing could become a major effort and pain. But since we are in direct contact with the factory we can (and will) stock spare parts and will try find ways to make most of the parts replaceable. But I can not promise this for all and everything since making it replaceable often also requires additional mechanics or requires more space or both.

Roughly 60% of phone repairs are replacing the screen and 20% are replacing the battery, and those parts aren’t hard to source, since there are many suppliers. The problem is the assembled logic boards, because it is expensive to do small production runs and there is no guarantee that all the chip companies will still be producing the same chips in the future. Fairphone had so many problems getting replacement parts for the Fairphone 1, that it decided to simply produce extra parts for the Fairphone 2 during the initial production and store them to sell later as replacement parts, but this is a risky outlay of money for a business, because there is no guarantee that the parts will ever be sold.

In summary, you should be able to buy replacement batteries and the screen + case, which represent 80% of likely repairs. Given the economics of providing replacement logic boards, I’m less hopeful, because Purism is already over budget on this project and can’t afford to spend extra on parts it may never sell. However, the probability that you will need to replace a logic board is low (as long as you don’t drop your phone in water).