Probably not, but sometime soon is the way I would interpret it (after almost 3 years of watching Librem 5 development), but problems like what happened in Aspen can turn days into months.
Such is the nature of real hardware development vs slapping Android on a Snapdragon or MediaTek Helio reference design, which is what almost every phone maker does except the few giants who create their own mobile SoC’s (Samsung, Huawei and Apple), but you have to sell 200-300 million phones per year to do that.
Since the moment I pre-ordered the phone (a long time ago), there has been exactly one e-mail from purism regarding a status update on the development process. This is after two years of promised delivery dates, and equally many delays. That in itself is no an issue (as mentioned, this happens with such ambitious projects), but there is something else: why send this email, so late in the development stage, with only the promise of a release for a development batch?
I’d be happy receiving waaay more emails, or any other kind of status updates. It’s one of the things purism could have done a muh better job of: keeping backers up to date on whats going on in development.
It’s just that today is the 6th… tomorrow will be the 7th, and if dogwood does not ship either today or tomorrow it wouldn’t have made sense to send that single email in two years time (three for some).
Having said all that, I am kind of expecting to see a release for dogwood today or tomorrow. If not, there’s not much credibility in any of purisms expected release dates.
Since the moment I pre-ordered the phone (a long time ago), there has been exactly one e-mail from purism regarding a status update on the development process.
When I pre-ordered the phone I opted into Purism’s “Announce Digest” which caused me to receive an email summary of Purism’s updates approximately monthly. The digest includes news about all Purism products, but until the recent announcements for the Librem Mini and Librem 14 most of the posts were about the Librem 5. I believe you can sign up for this mailing list here if you want future updates.
I don’t have much to say on Purism’s multiple delays, and the poor communication around them. I guess we’ll have to wait and see when dogwood shows up in people’s hands.
Thank you for the suggestion
I haven’t missed a blog article on puri.sm, and usually keep up to date on various social platform. I didn’t mean that I personally wasn’t updated, I just meant purism didn’t update backers. Anyone can always keep themselves updated reading up on the individual applications being developed for pureos (like i do on gitlab), following blog posts, following purism on mastodon or other platforms, or like you said, sign up for the mailing list.
Apparently the mail is a way of communication for purism as well, and it’s just weird to me that they’ve used that exactly once in three years time.
Those delays are probably unavoidable. I just hope that three years into development, with so many failed deadlines, they learn from that. And above all, not make the single email they’ve sent contain a false promise/unattainable deadline. We’ll see after tomorrow
And thus is the difference between opt in and opt out. Purism made the conscious choice to make their communications opt in meaning that with very few exceptions they won’t provide automated/systematic updates unless you actively request them.
I think if enough companies switched to opt in people would adapt pretty quickly, but with so few doing things this way they’re not providing the expected experience so it causes confusion for some and frustration for others, not because it is good/bad, but because it is different.
That’s all good, but what was that single email about then? That was kind of the point of my post, instead of keeping people up to date (by email) for this whole period, they’ve sent a single email. But why?
That would be the exception (though I’ve gotten 2 not one so that’s why I said very few exceptions instead of a single exception). Why there’s this exception? I don’t know, I could try and guess, but I’d probably guess wrong. I’m just pointing out the overall logic not trying to account for exceptions. Hopefully that adds some clarity.
