I just saw a post about purism flashing a picture of what looks like a bunch of librem 5’s ready to ship. Because this has happened many times in the past, and I didn’t want to derail the shipping update post with a “thinking out loud” post like this, i thought I’d create a new thread.
Based on the picture, I wonder if the cpu’s from those phones are from purism’s own stock, because from the looks of it NXP is still facing shortages. If the cpu’s are being provided to purism at all right now, they would most likely be in limited supply. NXP’s own guess was that the shortages would last through 2022, and “stability” would not be achieved before 2023.
reference to this
another reference to this
What surprised me, is that the CEO of NXP publicly stated that in November 2021. That was around the time we should receive the shipping update on our librem 5’s. So at that point it became known that the cpu’s would probably not be readily available untill 2023, yet I have seen no mention of delays from purism indicating this? It was two months after that supposed shipping update in september 2021, which was never sent.
Instead of receiving an update on this, purism stayed mostly silent on the librem 5 compared to the months before, the frequency of librem 5 related articles on their blog after that time dropping significantly.
It seems to me that setting the expectation of shipment “continuing soon” isn’t in line with the actual expectation you can set based off of news from the manufacturer.
Anyone has any thoughts on this?
Purism has a history of being overly optimistic. Whether that is still the case or not remains to be seen.
As a result of that history combined with the historical rate of shipping and what information about orders is available I figure I’m 3 months of shipping out from seeing my order. That doesn’t mean I expect to be contacted about my order in 3 month but rather if there’s a Month of shipping 2 months of delay another week of shipping etc that cumulative shipping time is what I’m estimating on.
There is also a history of people trying to estimate with even less information than Purism has available internally and being even further off than Purism was, so basing any estimates on statements from NXP or any other vendor is likely to be missing context unavailable to us and wildly inaccurate.
Basically until users are sharing information about being contacted directly for shipments going out to them again I see nothing for us to estimate on, and until Purism has some consecutive accurate estimates it’s going to be hard to overcome that historic overly optimistic communication.
CEOs speaks to markets and shareholders. Not related.
Any embedded file date on the picture?
no, twitter probably cleaned up the image metadata.
What’s the difference? This was a general statement concerning the companies ability to fulfill orders, which was estimated to not be stabilized for a certain period of time. Saying it’s not related would imply that this doesn’t affect the situation which I don’t think is accurate.
funny enough some person posted they received their librem 5 a couple of hours after I posted this, so I am excited to see if the predictions are correct.
There’s also an indication of exactly how many librem 5’s are currently being shipped (or at least on that pallet, ready to be shipped), and it’s 1160. Lot’s of useful information appearing, which helps in remaining hopeful 
NXP is talking about when they expect things to be back to normal. Not that they don’t ship anything currently.
It’s likely that Purism ordered these chips a year ago.
Is the picture of Librem 5 devices ready to ship out to customers or Librem 5 devices coming in to Purism from the manufacturer (ready for the next steps in the process, such as modem selection and install)?
But I think it was, wasn’t it? I remember receiving it for my personal order - basically, what it was saying was that there’s an estimated shipping date listed in your order details now when you login to your shop account if your order is supposed to be shipped within batches that we’re already expecting based on CPUs we were able to obtain.
Keep in mind that we don’t necessarily need “stability”, we just need enough CPUs. We continue to obtain limited numbers of them, but it’s not really predictable how that goes in the future - they just show up sometimes in random places and whether we manage to grab them is pretty much a lottery. We have managed to already win some amount of CPUs on that lottery, so we were able to produce this newly received batch of phones and already expect another one, but that’s still not enough to handle all remaining orders and reach shipping parity, so we continue to look for more.
That photo showed the latest batch of phones as they arrived from the factory. Shipping them to customers should start Very Soon Now™.
Is that sooner than Real Soon Now™? 
That makes sense, there’s no information released anywhere that indicates that no cpu’s are shipped at all.
What’s also important,is that it looks like purism updated the lead time for the librem 5 from 120 days, which i think it was before, to 52 weeks. This now matches the expected time for new phones if purism didn’t already order every required cpu for all orders up until today.
Regarding that shipping update though, there was a blog post released by purism somewhere in 2021, that promised a more accurate shipping estimate in September 2021, which should have been sent by email. I never received it, which i think mentioned tagging purism somewhere, who in turn responded by “the emails are being sent out as we speak”, around the start of November. The email that was eventually sent, did not contain that shipping date estimate.
The estimated shipping date in my account just says “to be determined based on CPU availability. Please check back later.”, indicating cpu delays.
Every news is good news though, hearing that at least some cpu’s have been attained gets people closer to receiving their devices ^^
I don’t have anything to add timeline-wise but thank you @vancha 
for splitting this off the main topic that thread get slammed with so much off topic stuff lately.
Yeah, this means your order is likely one of the later ones where there’s no estimate yet. Earlier ones have different messages there (IIRC my own said Q4 2021 and indeed, it reached the top of the queue in Nov 2021).
I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be accurate. They should know exactly the number of people they can ship to based on the exact inventory on-hand or en-route. To me it’s a very simple concept. I can’t imagine they would just say your date is Q1 '22 but not have the inventory in-hand or en-route to fill the orders. That would be not cool.
My order page says “Awaiting Shipment”. I ordered Jan. 11 , 2018
The relevant field is “Estimated Shipping Date”, not “Order Status”.
I didn’t notice an “Estimated Shipping Date”. I’ll have to look again
Estimated Shipping Date: Librem 5 - 1st Quarter 2022