I’m not in any of your communities (because I’m not a computer person) but from what I’ve observed the community pressure seems to be not to buy the librem 5. I don’t think anybody bought this phone because of community pressure.
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i better step up my game then 
i meant be a part of the community that already has the dev-kit or one of the Aspen, Birch, Chestnut or will receive one or more L5s in the future … you are a computer person if you like gnu/linux
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Nya, I just don’t like being told what to do 
Ah, I don’t think there’s much pressure to buy from people here either It’s not like it was with the edge and, quite honestly, I think people randomly come here expecting that sort of behaviour(?). Anyhow, we’re generally people who value Freedom and altruism so why wouldn’t that translate to respecting peoples consumer choices
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mimetic behavior is considered by many to be a form of flattery … if developers/manufacturers and gnu/linux users see that their ethical products are being appreciated and encouraged through adoption and best practices then they are in-turn encouraged to keep up the good work … beeing told what to do is not always a bad thing as long as you can see what it is your sticking your head into … 
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Me and you are alot alike ya know hahaha Sometimes it is to my detriment I dont follow directions . But ya know what ? I’ll gladly take that L just so I can do what I want instead of what I was told to do . Haha
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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.
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.
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:
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).
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See that’s the thing. I feel that I will drop the phone into water eventually. Not as ib inside a pool or sea for x amoint of minutes at deep depths but I don’t want my phone to die from a small spill and then also not even to have a chance to self repair it. Also, like all companies, I do not think purism includes water damage inside their warranty so I don’t think my phone will survive even past a year. There isn’t even an IP rating so I’m not sure if the phone is water resistant enough to avoid damage from something so normal like the rain. Yes most repairs are battery and screen but it would have been nice to have other parts too though I understand from the financial side now and will have to resort to a third party seller who would sell me terrible parts that wouldn’t work correctly or throw my phone away. Also, I thought companies like samsung had an authorised distributor for their parts as I had watcheda video from Louis Rossman and he showed a website for genuine parts given by samsung to the third party. I couldn’t find the vvideo again but it should be there still as I doubt he would have taken it down. I understand the software support will be long but that,doesn’t really matter if the hardware can’t survive a spill of water.
Also, the phones you linked to still seemed very poor for standards I would expect for the price of the L5 but as long as it can handle basic games like minesweeper and open my applications fast, boot quick I don’t really care. What concerns me is the price the product is for the hardware. It just doesn’t really make sense to me how it can be that expensive for what they are manufacturing. If you could refer a link to a discussion on why it is so difficult to manufacture, I could understand better. I understand if it is because of the software updating but it still seems high even then as when they release their next model, the software for that phone will be backwards compatible so they will clearly save 100’s from dividing their devs and getting more devs so it seems somewhat unfair.
Here you go, for starters CTO’s presentation: https://media.ccc.de/v/Camp2019-10238-a_mobile_phone_that_respects_your_freedom
This thread: Breaking Ground – Purism
And: Understandig the giant task Purism has achieved
Plus: Librem 5 — Development Chronology
(Edit, about waterproofing: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-phone-quality-feature-waterproofing)
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Thank you very much.
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This was very helpful and showed me reasoning why it was so difficuly and why the cpu they had chosen was the best thing at the time for them to choose. Also the struggle over other companies being A holes to purism. Also, I had no idea the phone had two m.2 slots like actually how. That is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen. A bit depressing how they don’t have dual sim but I guess it’s fine for me to hotswap. I accept to an extent why the price tag is so high now but I guess I will not be there for when it launches because I don’t have that kind of money just lying around. Also, because I’m somewhat clumsy, I know for a fact the phone will die in my hands in under a year from slight water damage from a spill or something. The way the speech described it was for the phone to be a somewhat secondary driver to your main driver which is very annoying and I can accept why there is much un
knowingness of whether this phone will be able to support apk’s. However, for my purposes and what applications I beed, I don’t need apk support for intensive video games or something like that. The sim card I am on has a web version for management of paymebts anyways. The only things I can think of that I know I need is whatsapp and signal abd I know they said it shouldn’t be treated as a main driver but I would really want it to be considering the price I paid and that I don’t want another brand phone in my room that is constantly listening to me and watching me. The price now feels more justified but I still don’t think I will be joining in evergreen as it still seems a bit too weak for me and no promise over very important apps I would need running on the phone that are android apks. Also because I simply do not have that kind of money lying around for the phone. I may be able to buy it which I really hope for but I’m a solid 90 percent sure I will not be 
. oh well. I guess that’s just life. I hope by the second launch that they do not go through as much hard work they had to for the L5 first version so the price can decrease. also, because no water resistance, unless I can find some solution from another company, the phone simply will not last long in my hands.
I think the discussion is a bit hypocritical. People buy overprised iPhones and spent much money in Starbucks. They want fancy cars and extraordinary holiday trips. Buying a phone means one-time charge, but you can use this phone for many years. Librem 5 maybe longer than others.
I think the real problem here is that people do not really understand the added value of free software and (mostly) free hardware. People that complain about price do not see or care what happens to their data. As long this is the case, these price discussions will never end. The effort to create such a phone is high, simply because it was never done like this before. What else to say? Right.
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But I don’t just want an idea. I want a phone. I don’t do any of the things you listed in your first paragraph. I already said why the L5 will most likely not last long as a phone for me (water resistance). I do understand the value of less use of propriatary software. I do care strongly abbout my data. My family literally think I am hyper paranoid about my fear of use of my data. I’ve addressed that this phone is one of a kind and the company as a whole fights the norm of selling user data. Even if we are considering all the hard work the team did, the price then makes more sense but I can’t say it is easily affordable or cheap even if it is cheap for what you are getting from a phone, as it is still a phone, it is still not that cheap for the power of the hardware though thwy have awesome security and privacy and 2 god damn m.2 slots in a phone somehow and an unlocked bootloader. These price discussions will always stay as long as a product exists but that is simply how it is.
The price discussion will stay in this case because you are fixated on the hardware and seem to willfully ignore the fact that developing the software is also an expense that has to be paid for. Additionally you’ve already defeated for yourself any argument towards buying the phone because you’ve already decided that you’re going to drown it and it thus isn’t worth your investment.
And that’s fine. You’re free to choose not to by the L5. I just don’t understand what information or solution it is you’re looking for at this point.
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A bit exaggerated with drown. I don’t know what you mean by me willfully ignoring the software either as I appreciate their dedication on developing an entire linux phone on ARM64 though it doesn’t have apk emulation and purism has had trouble with power usage with the phone. I’m not really looking for a solution anymore. I feel like I have already recieved my answer. I will wait for evergreen launch, look at what it is capable of doing, search for any third party companies that can supply water resistant solutions for the phone and if the price hasn’t somehow increased again, I will buy it when I am able to.
Yes, Samsung does sell some parts though its authorized dealer samsungparts.com (which isn’t part of Samsung), but it is doesn’t provide parts for recent Galaxy phones. For example, if you look at what parts it has for the Galaxy Note9, all it has is the external charger and some manuals.
I did find more parts listed for Galaxy phones from 5 years ago, but most of the parts are individual chips and they say that they require 4-6 weeks before shipping, meaning that they aren’t stocking the parts, and no repair person is going to wait that long. They will go out find the chip and order it online if available or buy a junked phone and desolder the chip from the board. The price for a 16GB eMMC Flash memory chip on samsungparts.com is $115, which is ridiculous. When I look for the entire assembled PCB, it isn’t offered, so samsungparts.com is basically worthless for Galaxy phones.
There isn’t a single phone currently on the market that is both easy to repair and water resistant. You can find some from 5 years ago. If you don’t care about repairability, but you want water resistance and a long lifespan, then buy an iPhone that gives you 5 years of software support. If you go with an Android phone, the best option is with water resistance and a long lifespan is the Pixel which guarantees 3 years of security updates and 2 years of OS updates. OnePlus and the Android One phones offer the same length of software support, but I don’t know of any that offer water resistance. The best that you can do is buy an Android phone with water resistance and install LineageOS, but there is no guarantee that everything will work correctly in future versions of LineageOS, so it is a crap shoot.
Did you bother reading my article, that explains why the Librem 5 costs more? I’ll give you another one that explains it in a different way:
In that article I probably guesstimated the costs too low. I have no idea what Redpine Signals is charging to mount its Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip on a custom M.2 board for Purism, but Nicole Faerber told us that Purism had to work with Redpine Signals so no binary blobs were required in Linux. It sounds like Redpine Signals did extra work, and it can charge much higher prices for the M.2 boards since they are a custom order, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they cost around $40 each. BroadMobi already offered its cellular modem on an M.2 card as a standard option, but I bet that Purism is its only client asking for an M.2 card, since most laptop makers use mPCIe cards which take up more space. A client who only wants 4k of the BLM818-E1 and 4k of the BLM818-A1 on M.2 is going to pay high prices, so again I wouldn’t be surprised if BroadMobi is charging over $40 for each M.2 card. We know the i.MX 8M Quad costs $20 each in large quantities and Purism only needs 10k, so it is probably paying more than that, because Purism has to ask the NXP engineers a lot of hard questions about things like how to use DCSS over the MIPI DSI interface and high resolution cameras over the MIPI CSI-2 interface.
In comparison, all that functionality is rolled into a single Snapdragon 425 that only costs a giant phone maker like Huawei $15 each. It is silly to say that the Librem 5 should have costs like the Huawei Y6 Prime just because their CPU performance, LCD, RAM and NAND Flash are similar.
If you add up the size of the 4 boards (main, daughter with USB port, M.2 with BLM818, M.2 with RS9116) in the Librem 5, they are probably 3 to 4 times larger than the size of the circuit board in the Y6 Prime. The fixed costs for developing the Y6 Prime were spread over millions of units, and those fixed costs weren’t very high because Huawei already had created its custom skin and custom apps for Android and it is just using the standard Snapdragon reference design.
You need to be prepared to pay a lot if you want a phone that has special security features, and the Librem 5 is arguably the most innovative phone to be produced since the iPhone:
- First phone with hardware kill switches
- First phone with replaceable cellular baseband and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth
- First phone with replaceable hardware ID for encryption (OpenPGP 2FF card)
- Closest phone to true convergence with the same apps running on both desktop and phone interfaces.
- Second free/open hardware phone (after OpenMoko)
- First phone to run on 100% free software in Linux and U-Boot (although there are binary blobs in components)
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This seems like a troll thread and nothing more. Reading how each new response has some new reason why he can’t get the phone, despite the reasonable discussion on why things are the way they are.
Also user1, are you aware that you can edit your posts? This means that if you realize you want to say more, that you can just edit your post instead of making another quick succession post?
I’m done here though, and I’d suggest every one else wrap it up as well.
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Calm down everybody 
User1 reacted very reasonable IMO to learning new background details, but still considers it pricey. That’s fine.
We all hope the price will be lower eventually.
Btw, my personal take is “lowering the price is easier after making it higher”
I would expect some kind of deals when v2 is around the corner.
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I don’t mind user1 asking these questions, because we now have a thread where we can send anyone who asks why the Librem 5 costs so much.
I think that Purism could address these questions much better by explaining its high development costs and by explaining why separated components that can be turned off with hardware kill switches have higher costs and consume more energy. That way potential customers will understand why the high price tag is necessary and not feel like they are getting ripped off.
I also think Purism has done a poor job advertising how unique the features on the phone are. Everyone buying the phone should know that it is the first in so many categories.
In my opinion Purism should write articles explaining the hard choices it had to make in selecting each component, and why they ended up costing more in price and labor than in a standard phone. I’m guessing that component prices are confidential, but Purism should be able to give people an idea that getting BroadMobi to mount the BL818 on an M.2 card is far more expensive than just soldering a Quectel EG-25G on the PCB. People would be more accepting of the idea that they have to pay extra for the Gemalto PLS8, if Purism wrote an article explaining how it had to design and manufacture the M.2 card holding the PLS8.
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Some of this is out there already amosbatto. I think the bigger thing is to have a searchable index of these useful articles and a way to concert things like the timeline post into an article.
It’s been my experience that, barring a few exceptions, the Linux community embrace’s decentralization so much there’s no centralization of information and in turn someone new is looking for something they get told “look in location a” then when they look for something else and say “why doesn’t this exist” they get told “why didn’t you look in location b” and so on. Purism currently has information in blog posts, information on these forums, information on each of two wiki’s (that I’m aware of) information shared on librem.one, information shared via the bug tracker, and likely several other places I’ve either forgotten or just don’t know about.
A searchable indexed central repository of information on your products is a very good and useful thing and is something I would love to see Purism embrace. For right now it’s mostly left to the community to keep track of what’s where and point each other to the different pieces, which isn’t the best customer experience in my opinion.
As you can see from this thread, the majority of the information is out there, maybe not in as much detail as some would like, it’s just scattered and not easy for newcomer’s to find nor to be pointed to a single location for review.
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