My feelings are at critical hurt hurt now 
but fair enough. I’m just very sceptical of its performance.
Remember, prices are artificially low as it concern electronics. The reason is China. Not ironically, prices will return to real due to China. It’s our frame of reference which is skewed.
Moreover, markets in general are illusory. Just look at the commodities market. I’ve watched gold and notably silver be manipulated for YEARS. Meanwhile, here in modernity, we have supercomputers plugged into the exchanges, manipulating markets with AI/quasi-AI. You also have companies like Google, who boast they’re able to predict the future within 15 minutes of it happening. Human action it self can, and is most likely being manipulated too.
Is the Librem 5 expensive? Yes, I’d say so, as subjective as that is. Though, how much has it cost us, societally and otherwise, to do business with Google and Apple, etc.?
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You guys and this forum is pretty cool. I am Linux stupid(lazy) but I have a friend who convinced me to switch to Linux. I use Mint 19.3 on my desktop and I love it. I just want to get free of Google and the data harvestors/trackers. I am poor but I would have paid more just to do that by itself. The desktop to mobile convergance thing I’ll get figured out with my Linux friend. Between him and you folks it will be my daily driver. I want this phone more than about anything else. I got a feeling it is going to be really cool!
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#tackling-one-impossible-task-at-a-time
I hope it will be cool too. Pretty sure everybody does except the men in suits inside google HQ.
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Eh, I dropped 2k for a L5USA, so 1,200 don’t seem so bad. Better than giving my money to Apple or Google.
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It is not expensive, because it a device made especially for US and purely GNU+Linux, it protects you and gives you privacy more libre.
This high price also include Phosh development, L5 development, L5 machine, Purism survival.
Peoples pay high price for Iphone devices or Android devices which they don’t even own their machines, worse they are watched and controlled over, and finally in a short time their borrowed machines become obsolete. With L5 it is the complete opposite of the typical and bad things.
Librem 5 for Elite. 
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Companies are giving away those cheap spy phones for such low prices - that must be an indicator of how much the spy industry values our data (and you can bet that they’re making more off it than the difference in price here). Just another sign something is fishy with this “phone” market.
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I totally agree with the philosophy but I don’t think your bank / credit card issuer is going to accept that argument. At the end of the day, Purism expects to be paid in currency and your bank / credit card issuer is going to expect you to have those funds available. In that sense it is expensive.
I really do think that the new price will limit the market for the Librem 5. I probably wouldn’t buy a second phone at that price e.g. when Mrs Wade’s current phone needs replacement.
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I don’t care if a phone like this gets RYF even because I will not spend so much money for a mobile phone that is very early and not powerful in comparison to libre computers. I appreciate that purism has put loads of work in but I simply will not pay so much for a phone. The cost is desktop territory. Some are willing to pay still but I don’t really like throwing money around.
Other phones being cheap garbage that makes back money from spying is relevant to the price of the L5 but it doesn’t change the fact that it is far too costly for a mobile phone. I remember laughing when I saw iphones going pay 1.5K because it is just stupid. Mobile phones are devices prone to damage and usually very difficult to do any sort of repair on. Even if the maker of the phone makes it easy to replace some parts such as display or battery, water damage is painful and being a device you take outside, this L5 doesn’t have almost any water protection means that the device won’t last so long.
I don’t really get the point of this discussion.
We’ve established that everyone has different priorities. Millions of people are buying $1200 walled-garden phones nowadays because they feel it’s worth it to them. But it’s equally ok to choose not to.
You can buy a Librem or a Pinephone Pro. Either is a decent choice for an experimental Linux phone. So why not celebrate the fact that we have options, and embrace that we’re a diverse crowd, and that anything that’s important for me might be completely irrelevant for you, and vice versa?
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It’s price feedback from the market.
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But it is a desktop!
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I guess it is. Pretty cool though I imagine desktops in my mind to be far more powerful. Anyways companies usually start to get a high level of maturity by a third revision. I hope that purism can decrease their prices for the phone in the future once most of the software is out of the way and they made back a majority of their investment in this section.
Yeah I get it, I can see how it’ll be out of range for a lot of people even if they do value privacy.
Years from now I hope they can get the price down somehow… and I do mean years. With the speed at which this stuff apparently moves, it’s going to take years of work and investment into Linux phones before they have the quality and ecosystem people expect.
Even 5 years from now I’ll be surprised if Linux phones start getting competitive in the broader market, so I hope Purism is in this for the long haul. For now and a while, I think it’s going to be a niche market for enthusiasts and privacy advocates. Hopefully that’s fine, as long as it keeps the gears moving for the companies working on the problem.
Right now with the supply chain screw ups and governments only making things worse (as they usually do), it’s almost the worst possible climate for L5. The only thing L5 has going for it is the fact that governments are also destroying privacy at the same time as everything else, so at least there is that.
I see a higher price on many things where consumers pay to avoid some grief, and improve privacy.
IMO, the high price is the cost of not seeing ads, and not being SMIRC’ed, Spied-on, Stalked or our rights to privacy not pimped out. I don’t like it, but it’s the Internet way. I believe the phone companies did this way back when if you didn’t want to be listed in the white pages, you paid extra for the privacy. 
s
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… and what an absolute ‘scamdal’ that is.
You say “desktop territory”, its kind of fitting for different reasons than you stated on price, but on what the device sort of is. It isn’t like a mobile phone as we know it, its more like a desktop/laptop with developing software that admittedly is not daily driver ready yet, but I think when you are buying this device, you are buying into the early development of this device. I mean one can just as easily wait and see and not commit $1200 to a device that is still really in beta form. RIght now its more a linux tinkerer’s device, but it can be used as a phone with a lot of limitations as of writing this. SOmething like Pinephone I cannot even get by as a limited phone under any of the many distros it can technically run. Pinephone right now is more like a distro hopping beta iPod Touch.
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