Is it ? It too has kill switches and the baseband is configured as a USB device so it wont have access to the memory .
That was a tongue in cheek comment. The audience it targets are those who donāt have money to fritter away, those who donāt need empty promises
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I dunno . Itās not my company . I couldnāt imagine what the discussion in the board room sounded like when they came to this decision . Who knows , maybe people will pay that kinda money for the L5 .
I will say trying to sell a phone for 750 and 800 respectively that is currently getting 1 hour of runtime and the hopes of increasing it to 3 hours runtime sounds like a challenge to say the least.
That being said I respect Purism for trying to tackle the device many have failed trying to build before.
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I agree, I think it would have been way more successful with a different roadmap (and ceo)
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Iām sorry that it doesnāt work for you. As for me, I bought mine for $499. Itās Evergreen, so I donāt expect it for maybe 5 or 6 months, but thatās OK. Even if I donāt like it, chances are that I will easily be able to sell it for over $700, so it would be a 40% profit. Iād be sad if that happened, and I donāt expect it to, but if it does, it will buy me a matched set PineBook Pro and Pine Phone ā with plenty left over to buy beer!
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If you sell it for like $650 + shipping people would be all over it. I donāt think much higher than that would see any biters, especially when itās been opened already.
Purism has very high development costs that it needs to recover, but I expect the price to come down a little bit after Purism recovers those costs. For the Librem 15, Purism dropped the base price from $1899 for version 1 to $1800 for version 2 to $1599 for version 3, while improving the specs. I expect that the Librem 5 will follow a similar pattern of dropping the price and offering more RAM and more Flash memory in future versions, but it will probably always be focused on the high-end of the market.
If you think about the Librem 5 as a device that you will use for 5 years, rather than 2-3 years like a typical phone, then its costs are a little more justifiable, but there are cheaper options if your goal is privacy:
- Buy an Android phone and install LineageOS or another AOSP derivative and only install apps from the F-Droid repository. I have done this with several phones, but you need to read the comments on the XDA Developers forum for a particular model to make sure that everything works in LineageOS before you buy a phone.
- Buy a Google/LG Nexus 5 and install UBports
- Buy a Sony Xperia 10, 10 Plus, XA2 or X and install SailfishOS
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Yup, it is expensive and at $750 plus shipping/taxes/customs I would not be able of willing to buy it (got mine at 550). I do however see where the price is coming from, this is simply economies of scale at work. All those driver development costs have to be distributed across a few thousand devices. All work which should have been conducted by Wolfson, by NXP and others. Plus they are effectively finally making GNOME mobile ready, a task that has been slowly in the works for a few years but was never a priority due to a lack of mobile devices running it.
As for the Pinephone, it is amazing (I ordered one too :-)), but it does piggy-back on development by others (seen that video of the pinephone running Phosh, the shell developed and paid for by purism?). Not that this is necessarily evil or that sharing should not occur (it should!), but it shows that one organization hires developers to develop a complete OS and the other does not.
I hope that the price will come down once mass-manufacturing of a usable L5 has started. It will never be as cheap as the pinephone, but it might become more affordable (it will never be a mainstream device for the masses).
One thing that could help purism with their European customers (of which there seem to be a few out there) is to have a European base to ship their devices from. The uncertainty of customs payment and the additional hassle/cost for tax handling is a real put-off for me.
@admsjas, in contrast to what you believe, even fans of the L5 effort can reflect on and be critical of the marketing or pricing strategy of puri.sm, we are not that simple-minded :-). What I cannot stand is that groundless bashing in the form of āPuri.sm has a cancer and it is [NAME OF CEO]ā (and that was a nearly literal quote from reddit by one person active here).
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Like everyobe always says: it is hard to make a phone
Couldnāt they possibly do a fundraiser to cover the costs you are refering to or would that damage reputation or something?
They are (Investors Relations ir@puri.sm) and they have a couple of times. Apparently, that is not enough.
wow. So theyāve already done multiple yet still not enough? I thought they had only done one which was initually for their laptops raising I thibk 2 million USD. tbh this doesnāt even seem like that they canāt afford to decrease the price but that they are capitalising on a product nobody else wanted to or could even produce. Like the release of the first touch screen phoje except this phone just meets basic rules of not makingn their customers turn into data mines to make money and expose to the government. Dunno. Maybe Iām just being sceptical.
Itās an expensive process to make something that is FSF endorsed. The hardware for it to run on is hard to find, and as illustrated by the L5, a lot if work has to he done in order to get it to run properly. Then, once itās all said and done, you donāt get to make any more money off of it after itās sold. You canāt sell licenses, canāt sell data, etc. Chromebooks are inexpensive little computers, but how much data do they collect for google to turn around and sell to advertisers? All of it (almost literally). In this day and age, itās not a bad thing to be skeptical, but i do think thereās more to be considered here than just whether or not theyāre gouging us. All linux hardware is expensive. Phones just happen to be harder to make, partially because theyāre so scrutinized, as you yourself have demonstrated here.
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Precisely as @Gavaudan says. In a world where the unethical production of technology has made it cheaper to produce, trying to produce something with a more ethical approach is going to cost more. Using anything from this profitable process as a standard here is going to be disproportionate.
I donāt know what work is being all done with PinePhone, but I doubt as much development work is being done and up-channeled. I donāt know because the barebones specs of the pinephone are an instant turn off to me. Iām not saying that to make it seem like these two products are in competition. I want them both to succeed. Variety is the customers best friend.
However, Iām not interested in a cheap solution. Iām interested in a capable solution. Thus for me, for all the development going on for the L5, and for the superior hardware, I find the cost worth it.
I did pre-order though.
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I understand but companies still make a profit on their phone of high percentage + data mined from their users. Other conpanies donāt lose money on selling a phone and make it back up from data mining and crazy repair options like apple. All librem is doing is asking for a huge profit margin and justifying through software updating and being a one of a kind company. I simply do not this this is justifiable for the price though I understand it and somewhat respect it to an extent. Also, if we are on the topic of ethics, how much do they pay for the people manufacturing the products. Also, on the sell of the device, how high of a profit margin are they aiming to hit because it somehow seems higher than appleās profit margin atm with the cheap hardware. Even if the product does eventually go cheaper, I still donāt think many people will adopt the product so the price will still stay high if if it does go down somewhat. Iām honestly just so fed up right now but I canāt really do much about purismās price tag. Oh well.
I still believe librem 5 will be a capable phone in a few months or a year or so past commercial launch but it really annoys me when people compare the librem 5 to a pinephone which has similar ethics in mind but is clearly a much more budget option. I donāt know why we arenāt comparing to other mainstream phones with hardware that demolishes the L5 and surpasses in software in almost any and every way (except the obvious of privacy and security and freedom of the use of the device etc). If you look at the price of the L5 in comparison to something of similar price, itās very tempting to go with the other phone even though I knowingly sacrifice my data for it unless I install a seperate OS like sailfish OS which I would do though this still isnāt a great option.
I think the phone would have easy repairability but if we are talkking about long term use, does it even have water resistance? An IP rating? I would want this to be a phone I would use for years but I doubt that would be possible as Iām an idiot with how I treat me phone a lot of the time. Also, I am not the type to throw away a phone after 2-3 years. I used an iphone 6s from a few months after launch till around 8 or so months ago. I doubt the L5 will last anywhere near that. FYI: I did multiple self repairs twice for the display and 1 time for the battery and I think I had done one for the loudspeaker as well.
Check the Plasma Mobile OS on the pine phone.
And what you can see?
Gnome desktop looks the same like on the Librem 5.
And that phone for cost 150 Dollar.
400 for the librem 5 would be fair.
-> The good thing: Purism sell there product like they would be for casual users. So like the Librem Notebooks, you will find a lot of people that canāt work with Linux and sell the devices cheap.
So iām waiting for the used one from iPhone users, that canāt leave the eco-system 
You see the reasons why your logic is unfair and yet you persist.
The problem here is that youāve wanted something to drink. Youāve been sold something that tastes like water but isnāt strictly water. Youāve now drank it long enough that you consider it water, even though you still know this isnāt the case.
This āwaterā might be cheaper, more plentiful, better hyped, and a better value in certain lights. However, at the end of the day, it is isnāt water.
This is the L5. It is a piece of technology that the customer can truly own and has the freedom to use. Ignoring these facts and comparing other products to it, is like I said, disproportionate.
I think your perception of the company is biased and your personal feeling, IE: not fact. It might be true, but I doubt it. Look at the cost of getting the L5 made in the US, for example. It just costs more to do things the way that Purism does.
I also think the people working on accomplishing their goals deserve to be paid.
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