I was debating purchasing the https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/ and I was curious to know if there’s any documentation on how complicated it would be to upgrade or add an additional hard drive?
Some laptop manufacturer tend to make it overly complicated to get to it. I was thinking of buying an NVME SSD off of amazon and installing it later on. Is the process fairly straight forward?
Also, I love what Purism is doing, but the pricing for the hard drive upgrades are pretty crazy. 1TB is $500 or $140 on amazon.
The Librem 14 hasn’t been released yet, so no one outside of Purism can answer with certainty, but Purism’s previous laptops have all been pretty easy to upgrade, which is a core part of Purism’s design goals for them.
The inflated cost helps bolster Purism’s mission by adding some extra funds to their coffers. You can certainly buy it from Amazon or elsewhere and do it yourself for cheaper, but upgrading through Purism helps fund their contributions to the Linux ecosystem
The case can be opened as easily as the L13 or L15 which then gives access to the M.2 slots for the SSDs. We have two M.2 slots in there so you can have max. two M.2 SSD each with either NVME or SATA interface.
The initial batch of L14 will have a larger 4-cell battery (we talked about it in the blog) which will block the second M.2 slot, so there only one SSD can be installed. We are working on a new 3-cell battery battery too, which will have a bit less capacity but will give access to the M.2 slot again.
So then, once we have the 3-cell battery, you have to make a choice: about 30% more battery capacity but one M.2 slot less or two M.2 slots and about 30% less battery capacity.
We also plan (but can not guarantee it yet) to offer batteries so that you swap 3-cell for 4-cell and back. BUT there is more to that then just offering these. Shipping spare batteries has become a serious pain recently! Carriers now charge an extra $100 per international shipment if the shipment contains spare (=not built in) batteries. As much as we want to provide these batteries you see that we have an issue at hand here. We are trying to find a way around this but right now it’s not looking good I’m afraid
I’ve had the same problem, even just ordering a replacement battery for my digital camera when the original battery died. It may be that it is not a government problem but a transport company problem. It is not a new problem.
The battery needs to be shipped in a dummy laptop / phone / digital camera that costs less than $100.
Thanks for all the responses. I’m looking forward to the release of Librem '14. It sounds that it’ll likely be fairly easy to upgrade. Based on what i’ve seen i’m pretty sold on Librem. It looks like a great design. I love the philosophy and mindset of Purism.
Has anyone worked out the business case for this? You’d have to pay import duties on the “dummy” laptop and it would have to be sufficiently non-dummy to avoid being formally viewable as deception. And for batteries like this one, it would have to have the correct shape of internal compartment. Fun idea, but seems way too difficult to make it work.
