I ordered a Librem 11 several weeks ago and have inquired about an “estimated” delivery time several times with no response. I am considering disputing my CC charge to get refunded the money I paid for the tablet. Does anyone have an email address for someone who is known for quick responses?
Thanks
Thanks for responding, Amarok; I’ll reach out to Jcs. I understand it is on backorder; I just want an estimated time when they expect it to be shipped.
I am not convinced that Purism has particularly meaningful estimates on backordered products. It seems that they ship these products when they themselves get the parts necessary to do so. It seems like a very human, “we get there when we get there” type of system. I’m speaking as someone who enjoys my Purism hardware and bought several things from them to support the company.
My friends and I joke about this being “Purism time.” If you are not aware of this phenomenon, and have not been reading the forums, your time pressure wherein you want to dispute the CC charge and stuff is probably going to put you into a situation where you just get more and more mad and have to dispute the charge, since you’re the one making that decision. There have been numerous forum posts by other people across time, and it seems that once a person starts to escalate this stress in their mind, there isn’t really anything to de-escalate because threatening to dispute your CC charge doesn’t make the humans at Purism work any faster. They have heard it a lot of times before, and are tired of it and know that they can’t help you, so if I had to guess based on other forum posts I’ve seen it’s probably the case that threatening to dispute like that just causes the support employees to start ignoring you until your order actually becomes available, because of how hard it would be for them to help you.
But I mean, I’m literally writing to you from a Purism Librem 14, I use the products and like the company. I’m just saying, I’ve seen some pretty mad people on the forums across time. Purism is not Amazon. I’ve seen my friend order junk on Amazon and expect it to arrive 4 hours later. I guess Jeff Bezos has a lot of money. I think Purism does not have that much money in comparison.
Thank You, @Dlonk. I appreciate your response, and your endorsement of their products helps ease my mind, a bit. I am very excited to know that I will hopefully be able to experience the joy of operating a Purism product. Please understand it from my perspective. I am an amateur Linux enthusiast who, like you, wants to support small companies doing the Lord’s work, spreading the word of Linus. I am simply asking for someone at Purism to click the reply button at the top of an email and craft a 2 minute response opining their best guess regarding when the back order might be filled. Without that simple recognition, I fear that the hopeful joy I have about one day being a Libre11 owner and user might be overruled by the pragmatic side of me that is fearful I will never again see the money I have paid to achieve that joy.
Your Friend
Tromp
I’m not sure how Purism operates. Most stores that I deal with won’t charge the credit card until the device is ready to ship. Given that most CC companies will only allow chargebacks for a limited time, I would be guided by looking at/if your credit card has been debited.
Given how Purism dealt with Librem 5 and (a few initial) Librem 14 cancellations, I would be cautious.
I am sorry to hear that Purism has not been responsive to your inquiry. Please note that the support team is incredibly busy and is working their hardest to reduce the support ticket queue. We are actively hiring and training new staff to resolve this.
Purism uses Stripe as a CC payment processor, combined with WooCommerce payment integrations. Payments via CC appear to process immediately, but there could be TBD configurations which allow payment upon fulfillment.
Fulfillment estimates are published here. We currently estimate that Librem 11 orders will be shipped in March. I notified the online operations team earlier today to update the table with this change.
Most places where I order online “stuff” expect full payment up front before they will even process my order. I think this especially applies if they in turn will be ordering it upstream e.g. I order a specific book, the online store does not actually carry that book, so they have to order it in specially from the publisher or distributor, so they want a guarantee of payment to match the upstream order.
That of course means that if they can only short supply or the item is out of stock, they will have to make a (partial) refund - which is easy if I paid by CC and a bit more tedious if I paid some other way.
It is true that a merchant can reserve part of your CC balance so that they have a guarantee of payment without triggering debt recovery against the customer but without actually receiving the funds (“pre-authorisation”) and I see that Stripe offers it - but this can in many ways be painful for both customer and merchant in equal measure. (Where I work we use this functionality for some customers.)
In the US, Visa will not let vendors finalize a charge until the item is shipped. See 7.6.1.1 or 7.6.1.2 of https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/about-visa/visa-rules-public.pdf. I think that is true for most US credit cards. There is no such rule for debit cards in the US.
Partially for that reason (the complication of dealing with delayed charging) many online retailers that I deal with simply label goods as out-of-stock and won’t process backorders (they can’t be added to the cart). For example IKEA and, I think, Home Depot. Amazon only finalizes charges at the time of shipping.
[Edit: Also, importantly, if one is looking at companies with similar issues to Purism in regard to supply: Pine64 doesn’t charge until it is in the processing-for-shipping stage. Terms & Conditions - PINE STORE
… At the time your order is placed, Pine store obtains a pre-approval from “PayPal” for the amount of the order. Your PayPal billing occurs when your order is being processed for shipping …
… At the time your order is placed, Pine Store obtains a pre-approval from the credit card company with PayPal Services for the amount of the order. Your Credit Card billing occurs when your order is being processed for shipping. …
]
I’m pretty sure Stallman is better than Linus, but maybe I feel that way from personal biases and things I happened to encounter.
Unfortunately, to be totally honest, if I had to guess I would be guessing that Librem 11 is probably one of Purism’s worse products. I do not own one. My first Purism product was a Librem 5, which I liked so much that then I bought a Librem 14 hoping to support the Purism company and because I was getting tired of my previous laptop. My Librem 14 has just been really beautiful and does everything I want while also giving me peace of mind that Intel ME is shut down and the device is RYF certified. Originally I felt the L14 was a sort of frivolous buy but it completely became my daily driver laptop and eliminated most of my desire to even use the L5 as a convergent PC-alike thing.
But from what I gather the Librem 11 doesn’t have a removable battery or a switch to turn off wifi radios. Sometimes I personally enjoy offline compute and the sense that I won’t have the invisible waves going through me while I do stuff (Yes I was raised a bit paranoid). So for these two reasons, I will probably not buy a Librem 11 because of the sense that skipping out on two of my favorite Purism device features is a negative direction for the company.
But I have a 12 year old tablet – which does have a wifi kill switch – where I sometimes run PureOS Linux. If the Librem 11 experience is similar but way better specs, that’s probably still going to be a great experience. And Purism has a blog post about how to 3D print a custom part and mod the Librem 11 so that the back comes off and the battery is replaceable, if I recall, so it’s not as if they want to prevent users from having the good features. I think they were just saving money by using a tablet shell that had already been invented and didn’t have extra switches & such in the case/shell.
Best of luck,
Dlonk
The Librem 14 executes Intel ME on hardware initialization even with the HAP bit disabled and is not RYF-certified either.
Hmm, okay. But it runs RYF certified PureOS, doesn’t it? I suppose I was thinking of the software certification, given that I’ve spent a lot of time on PCs tainted by nVidia cards and such things.
PureOS is an FSF-recommended/endorsed GNU/Linux distribution:
RYF certification only applies to hardware:
Related:
Using past experiences to estimate probably future behavior I would suggest setting that mental preparedness for April, and be pleasantly surprised with a March shipping date.
Why not integrate shipping estimates on the store with the warehouse/inventory management system to have dynamically updated shipping estimates? This seems to be a much better solution for all parties involved compared to manually updated estimates that are often not updated until there is considerable complaining from forum users.
A RYF is only for Hardware. RYF is a device that is Libre of BLOBs for booting as minimun requirement that the BLOB not run the on Gnu CPU. So by this minimunRequirement it meaning that either L14 or L5 can be a RYF device but this need work to be done via Gnu Pirate. Ridiculously on L5 it need a HDMI-BLOBs too for booting.
Via Opensource do not expect Libremientos in L5, L14. IMHO.
Librem 5 still best Gnu Phone.
Pixel still best Linux Phone. 
Thank you for the suggestion; it was previously documented in our internal issue tracker for future implementation. The table currently requires manual entry, because: the system is not currently configured this way; it would require some back-end development; all available staff is working on other priorities at the moment.
Careful now, I think HP is noting Purism and tried to emulate your process: HP forced callers to wait 15 minutes before connecting to support staff | PCWorld
(nah, that didn’t last - just like with Purism) 
