Ah OK. So more effort than I thought.
That makes it sound to me like an NXP problem then? If so, I can’t say I care for that.
There are several aspect to address:
- NXP specific firmware
- graphic acceleration (GTK4 or sofware specific)
- usb, modem, wifi, sensor etc power management
- suspend to ram strategy
- …
Thanks, kind of what I was expecting. These are all guesstimates/projections (not even measurements) for artificial “benchmark-style” use cases of course. So hard to tell how accurate that is, and how it translates to real-world usage.
It also mentions they’re aiming for a 24h battery time. Which albeit not on par with some Android phones, is certainly sufficient for most people. Although it’s not mentioned under what conditions: is that real-world usage for an average user, or is that “screen off, everything disconnected” standby-time?
However, right now, they’re not there yet. For someone who hasn’t ordered one yet, I don’t really see the benefits of doing so once the phone starts shipping to actual customers. There are no benefits to buying now as opposed to later, when/if the battery life has improved sufficiently. The price is already final. All you’d achieve is shortening the effective warranty period, as half of it would be over before you can start using the phone. And you’d be taking a risk by trusting Purism to actually deliver on that 24h runtime promise, when so far the L5 is not delivering on time nor on spec. Nor on budget, judging by the price increases and the “fund your app” campaign, for apps we were led to believe were part of the deal when we preordered, and which is nothing more than a “we ran out of money” fundraiser presented as a popularity contest. In the meantime, improvements to the hardware might still be forthcoming, which you’d be missing out on. Zero benefits, non-zero potential risks.
So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how much demand there will be once it ships. Could go both ways, as the phone is attractive because it’s a “first”, a “collector’s item” of sorts. We’ll see.
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Not true, the price is still $50 lower than the final one: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#52-why-does-the-price-of-the-librem-5-keep-changing
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I stand corrected. There’s indeed negligible benefit. At $800 (+ shipping? + import tax, local VAT), I consider $50 a rounding error.
[EDIT] But yeah, you’re correct. There’s still some benefit to order now, to offset a bit of the risk you’d be taking.
I backed way back, when I still believed I would be receiving a phone that would be usable from day one (albeit with a limited ecosystem, which I don’t mind). Had I known then what I know today, I wouldn’t have. Even if I’d known the finished product would be $800 rather than the $600 I paid for it. So if I had to make the same choice today, knowing I’d only be saving 6.26% rather than 25%, I definitely would wait and see when/if the phone would become usable as a daily driver.
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Actually these things will probably increase with the price.
I am sure many people are ready to buy it from you for 600. Actually I would buy too. Or you can wait for batch Fir.
I backed anyway, including the risk of failure. Development of a privacy oriented and independent phone is important enough for me. Purism has proven to provide serious work that is also used (or usable) for other open source systems. I’m exited at the current development and can’t wait to have my L5.
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For me, the benefit is being able to play with a fascinating toy even if it doesn’t yet have the battery life to replace my current phone. Since it will get lifetime software updates and has a replaceable battery, there isn’t much of a downside for me if I buy it now.
However, if you are unsure whether you want the phone or not, then I can see your point. If unsure, then you should wait and see whether it becomes good enough to fulfill your needs, before ordering.
Yes, you do take a risk by preordering the phone. The problem is that if nobody is willing to take a risk, then a phone like the Librem 5 will never be created. Some people have to take a personal risk, in order for society to get the collective benefits.
The early backers of the Librem 5 paid for the creation of Phosh and libhandy, who means that all GTK software now has a path to becoming adaptive to work on any sized screen and all the desktop Linux distros have an easy path to being used on mobile devices. Having looked into it, I’m convinced that mobile Linux wouldn’t become a real alternative to Android/iOS without Phosh, because the other interfaces have serious drawbacks. There is a reason why half of PinePhone users are now using Phosh.
It also means paying Redpine Signals to do firmware development for the RS9116 to get a decent alternative to the crappy ath9k chips, so we have good range, blob-free Bluetooth and energy efficiency. It means helping to get the i.MX 8M platform supported faster in mainline Linux, which will make it possible to build a whole range of future RYF devices. It means introducing the idea of hardware kill switches and OpenPGP cards for phones. It means having the first phone with free/open schematics since the Golden Delicious GTA04 in 2012, which any company can reuse to design other RYF devices.
Purism didn’t specify what it means by 24 hours of battery time, but I assume that means with suspend to RAM and being able to wake up from suspend when a phone call is received. In other words, I would assume that it means something like 6 hours of normal use with everything turned on and 18 hours in suspend to RAM.
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Thanks a lot for the info, Torrone, Caliga and Kieran. From afar it looks strangely familiar, i.e. similar to the dogwood release process. I would already be happy if and cross my fingers that it doesn’t turn out that way again, i.e. that the ‘very early backers’ turns into ‘very very very…early backers’ to end up with ‘to our own employees and reviewers and because of <enter your pick of issues/Covid here>…’.
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Wait, so I ordered in June 2019, and have no way of knowing my place in the queue.
But, it’s fair to say that it won’t be this year or even early next.
However, I ordered before the USA edition came available for pre order, but people who ordered those will get theirs pretty quick.
Is that right?
Doesn’t seem right to me; either I need to upgrade or wait, my feeling is you should be putting your resources into delivering phones that were ordered by date, not by location.
If the USA side doesn’t take away capacity to ship non-USA then that’s great.
With a small company like Purism I very much doubt that’s the case.
Not quite. Almost. As the blog post explained, your exact position can not yet be determined until after a few weeks of production and shipping, then there is data about throughput. It probably gets incrementally more accurate as time goes on. And the USA edition is not based on location of the buyer but is a separate assembly version, done in USA. I’d think it’s operationally inconvenient to do those every now and then (as per order queue) and so it makes sense to get them out of the way as a batch. Not ideal but understandable from efficiency and logistics standpoint.
I wouldn’t bet on that even if you’d upgrade now, you’d get one that is assembled sooner - at some point a line has to be drawn how big of a batch that is and it would be very poor PR for Purism to create now a shortcut past backers that have been waiting for years. They’ll have to do more of the USA edition at some point later on too (Purely speculative: however, probably before parity is actually reached, so a slight speed advantage versus someone making a regular order now is possible, I’d imagine).
You seem to be misunderstanding what Purism will do. Location has nothing to do with it. The Librem 5 is assembled in China and the Librem 5 USA is assembled in California, but both phones are shipped worldwide. Purism isn’t giving priority to people in any location.
Purism probably has several hundred Librem 5 USA preorders, whereas it probably has 5k-10k preorders for the Librem 5. Purism is manufacturing and shipping both models in parallel, but it will take a lot longer for Purism to get through the entire queue of Librem 5 preorders.
If you decide to order today, you will get the Librem 5 USA sooner than a Librem 5, but I don’t think that is unfair. If you think that it is unfair, then you are demanding that Purism shut down its California assembly and wait until its China assembly finish processing all the thousands of Librem 5 preorders.
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Actually, the word missing in my post was ‘manufacturing’ as in, manufacturing location.
If the phones are made fully in China, with no additional work done in the US then sure, the argument is null and void, to quote me:
“If the USA side doesn’t take away capacity to ship non-USA then that’s great.”
If however, the phones are made in China and then shipped to the US for any configuration etc and then shipped out that would mean they’re competing for resource.
Also, regarding things getting more accurate as they go along, that’s correct to an extent - but any manufacturer will be able to estimate this extremely well; i’ve spent years in factories in Asia and there’s no way they don’t know their own capacity… if they don’t, well, that’s not great.
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Peabody’s Improbable History-The Wayback Machine. Other than tech stuff this forum helps me stay focused on my primary purpose , to get my L5 ! I am extremely anxious but definitely not miserable. I will be at one with the Universe very soon and maybe on the mothership headed back home
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To all of you wondering which position in queue they are.
In this post Purism wrote:
The Purism factory is ready to ship thousands of Librem 5s to backers over the coming months.
This was at the “start of shipping” Aspen. Btw this post is 13 months old. So where are all those thousand phones? Even if you knew which position you are in for Evergreen, that would bring you absolutely nothing, because the volatility of information is still high and the fulfillment of promises still low. I am very keen on your believes, therefore:
- I believe to receive my Evergreen phone within next 6 months
- I believe this will take more than 6 months from now to have my phone
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I believe the statement you quoted was accurate before covid showed up.
The company I work for heavily depends on produced parts delivered from China. Two suppliers directly in Wuhan. We did not suffer one single day of production stop due to missing parts from China. Most effect was general Shutdown for 4 weeks. So Covid should not serve as a general excuse.
See also
Where is Covid in this explanation?
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I’ve still got a flip phone too I’m waiting to upgrade.
How long has the company you work for been using the same hardware, though? The pandemic showed up right in the middle of tweaking and adjusting and improving hardware. If Purism had a solid design set in stone already, it’d be one thing, but that wasn’t the case back in March.
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Agree. That’s true.
Nonetheless no justification for a shift from 17 to 39 months. And 39 are not the end, since this is only “start of shipping”.
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