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 Iâve seen. A bit depressing how they donât have dual sim but I guess itâs 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 donât have that kind of money just lying around. Also, because Iâm 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 apkâs. However, for my purposes and what applications I beed, I donât 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 shouldnât be treated as a main driver but I would really want it to be considering the price I paid and that I donât 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 donât 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 Iâm a solid 90 percent sure I will not be 
. oh well. I guess thatâs 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 donât just want an idea. I want a phone. I donât 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. Iâve 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 canât 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 youâve already defeated for yourself any argument towards buying the phone because youâve already decided that youâre going to drown it and it thus isnât worth your investment.
And thatâs fine. Youâre free to choose not to by the L5. I just donât understand what information or solution it is youâre looking for at this point.
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A bit exaggerated with drown. I donât 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 doesnât have apk emulation and purism has had trouble with power usage with the phone. Iâm 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 hasnât 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 isnât part of Samsung), but it is doesnât 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 arenât 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 isnât offered, so samsungparts.com is basically worthless for Galaxy phones.
There isnât 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 donât 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 donât 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? Iâll 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 wouldnât 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 wouldnât 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 werenât 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 canât 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?
Iâm done here though, and Iâd 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. Thatâs fine.
We all hope the price will be lower eventually.
Btw, my personal take is âlowering the price is easier after making it higherâ 
I would expect some kind of deals when v2 is around the corner.
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I donât 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. Iâm 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.
Itâs been my experience that, barring a few exceptions, the Linux community embraceâs decentralization so much thereâs no centralization of information and in turn someone new is looking for something they get told âlook in location aâ then when they look for something else and say âwhy doesnât this existâ they get told âwhy didnât you look in location bâ and so on. Purism currently has information in blog posts, information on these forums, information on each of two wikiâs (that Iâm aware of) information shared on librem.one, information shared via the bug tracker, and likely several other places Iâve either forgotten or just donât 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 itâs mostly left to the community to keep track of whatâs where and point each other to the different pieces, which isnât 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, itâs just scattered and not easy for newcomerâs to find nor to be pointed to a single location for review.
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This makes me think: Maybe upgrades will be cheaper than they would otherwise be because they wonât need to include the wireless cards, assuming that upgrading can be done incrementally through individual parts? That would be nice.
It certainly feels expensive compared to my OnePlus One, which has almost identical (and in some cases superior) specs and still has an unlocked boot loader which can load Linux, yet which cost nearly a third of half the price 5 years ago⌠The Librem 5 certainly has itâs advantages, including an SD card slot, much more modularity and upgradability, having a newer battery, USB-C, and much better driver support in a Linux OS which wonât try to load 4 launchers other than the one I am using for no reason in addition to lots of other software I would rather leave dorment, which is why I asked for it for my birthday (and will get eventually), but in terms of specs per price, the Librem 5 does come at a huge premium, which, even for someone like me who loves supporting freedom and isnât paying for it myself, is still pretty steep.
Edit: After fact checking, my OnePlus One cost $349 at launch, not $250.
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those 1100+ phones arent worth anywhere near that . No new innovation just garbage gimmicks . They just get the sheeple to blow the kids college fund on them so they can show off at work and get self esteem confirmation from their peers .
note 10 + removed microSD port and 3.5mm headphone jack the 2 things left on it that even made it worth it .
its a slave phone that makes you buy more galaxy gear garbage . So comparing the L5 to ANY 900+ phone is really apples to porta potty imho .
The L5 is too much at 799 I think , that being said it is worth LEAPS AND BOUNDS more than ANY android or IOS phone in existence with the exception of the Cat s61 . That has air quality monitor , real time onboard FLIR camera , laser measuring capabilities + more and I saw it get run over by a 2500HD truck and survived .
That is the only android phone Iâve seen in recent years worth its price.
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Iâve rarely seen a second version of the phone cheaper than the first. When you have a successful v1, I let you imagine the business point of view. Anyway, I really hope youâre right and that we can get a cheaper v2.
Concerning @user1 , I advise you to look at the Pinephone: in the past, I was very suspicious myself thinking that it was just a Linux OS on âandroid hardwareâ, but the more I read and follow this phone, the more I think it has the best price-quality ratio on the Linux phone market.
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I didnât suggest the v2 will be introduced at a lower price. Rather, they can keep the v1 at a discount to have more options. Like
$699 v1 3GB RAM 32GB eMMC
$799 v2 4GB RAM 64GB eMMC
$899 v2 8GB RAM 128GB eMMC
Preferrably, each $100 less. At least during sales
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Ah, if you mean leading by example, well, itâs up to the individual if they choose to follow. I was more speaking of the ridiculous emotional appeals and guilt trips happening at that time. Agreed, and I am good at following orders, but a computer or phone does not outrank me.
Oh I still do a lot of stuff I donât want to do! âŚbut if I can see itâs validity I donât mind (i.e. bring my little brother a hot cocoa and treats from 7-11 after work because the hospital is close to where I work but Iâm so tired Iâd really rather just go home and go to bed.) I have no problem being told what to do if the order/request is valid and the authority / motivation in which is ordered is valid. What I canât stand though is I swear to gawd Samsung is just making shit up for users to do now (check charging port for moisture, etc.). I guess Iâm supposed to be appreciative for the âcareââŚI dunnoâŚbut I do know Iâve got better shit to do. I havenât run windows in over a decade but I still do appreciate it when things screw up in GNU/Linux because I screwed them up and Iâm not helpless to sort it outâŚeventually. I just donât want to be nannyed or condescended byâŚohâŚmaybe Iâm machineaphobic ?!? Nyyyya, and f*ck those boston dynamics dogs too!
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NSA says that it doesnât have to ⌠your ârankâ will suffice ⌠
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Iâm not an American.
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