When Librem 16?

Hardware Librem 16
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My second poor little decrepit L15 is about to kick the bucket. Like its predecessor, the hinge literally exploded into a million plastic fragments. It’s a miracle that the monitor still works well enough for me to type this. I don’t care if the L16 case is made of wood. Just please use something that will last for many years.

I notice that L14v2 is in development. And now that Chinese tariffs are suddenly closer to zero, it seems like L16 should be possible to assemble and ship economically, once again.

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to actual first ship date to customers?

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Christmas.

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You mean if all the stars are aligned, or that’s your maximum probability date? @FranklyFlawless

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This is a guess based on how e-commerce broadly works across multiple industries combined with Purism’s historically sluggish approach to product releases. If you want a maximum probability date, I would say Q3 2026, when other manufacturers have long provided competitive offerings.

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Thanks for being frank, Frank. Depressing but perhaps realistic. 2020 CPU in 2026 or something like that, too.

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It depends on what Purism ultimately decides on:

  1. Use Tiger Lake (11th generation), which presumably does not require proprietary firmware for integrated graphics.
  2. Use any later generation, presumably requiring proprietary firmware for integrated graphics, and/or using AMD CPUs.

I am confident Purism must take the latter option with an increasingly bloated firmware jail in order to stay relevant to their mission and target audience, since the former option would be releasing a product with a discontinued CPU product line of fifteen months and counting.

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Oooh wood, real wood, (verathane finish?), in several tones, mahogany, maple, oak, spruce? (Pine is too splintery.)

I’t be like the wood paneling in fancy antique cars.

Not beyond the realm of possibility, they do laser cuts of wood nowadays.

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This article from Purism ( From the Hackdesk: Librem 16 – Purism ) indicates an availability of Q4 2024 ( “Availability of the Librem 16 is planned for Q4 2024, so stay tuned!” ).

That article was written in May 30, 2024 and was predicting shipping before Dec31, 2024; i.e. 7 months timeline. Using the rule-of-thumb-for-Purism of actual ship date is 3x-to-5x, I’m assuming that it will ship between Feb 2026 and Apr 2027.

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Or maybe the newly advertised “stronger than steel” treated wood. Stronger Than Steel, Able to Stop a Speeding Bullet--It's Super Wood! | Scientific American

Or, perhaps, that’s all disinformation spread by the termite lobby :wink:

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While I never liked CPUs with integrated firmware, e.g. SGX, I think they’re pretty low on the threat ranking. If they’re actually backdoored then we have so many gaping security holes in all the world’s datacenters that my personal data would be the last thing I’d be worried about. More like stocking up on rice and toilet paper. So, yeah, I’m in favor of whatever might be fastest within the constraints of 8-hour battery life or better, and whisper level fan noise.

No GPU is fine with me. The drivers tend to be unstable and take forever to get to desktop, then just suck battery all day. If I wanted to play games, I wouldn’t be looking to buy a Librem.

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