As a happy Purism customer/fanboy I can offer you my advice, but it is up to you whether to take it seriously.
Typically I don’t drink but a friend convinced me to drink in 2019 and while under the influence I ordered a Librem 5 from Purism without reading the fine print that it was a preorder. The device actually arrived in my hand in Spring 2023. That was my first transaction with Purism. But I liked the device. It was an enthusiast device and I only succeeded in using it because of my past Linux experience and excessive use of the command line terminal app, but I was very okay with this. In Fall 2023 a decently big YouTuber made a video saying that Purism is evil scum and the only secure phone on Earth is the Google Pixel. Then he made a second video explaining that someone in a nonofficial capacity related to Purism reached out to him asking him what they would need to do to convince him to take down his first video, which made him hate them more. According to his second video there were something like 600 customers waiting on Librem 5 refunds and the only way for Purism to get through that financially is from more product sales, which are directly hindered by guys like this YouTuber telling everyone that Purism is evil and he knows via inside information “but can’t say why to protect his sources.”
For me, that was when I realized that I liked my Librem 5 so much that it shouldn’t have cost $600 and I didn’t want my device to have been made at someone else’s expense so I wanted to buy more Purism products so that they could funnel my money back into maybe helping the 600 folks waiting on refunds if that rumor is true. So in Fall 2023 then, I ordered a Librem 14 and a Liberty Phone, adding $4000+ hopefully to the liquidity of funds of whatever is going on at Purism. Because my Librem 5 felt like everything I could have asked for it to be, and I do not observe any similarly capable competing projects of the same nature to exist, I was okay with this.
The Librem 14 and Liberty phone that I ordered at that time both arrived. In this sense, Purism is not a scam. But they did not arrive in exactly 2 weeks. They arrived in their own time, whenever everything necessary for the order became available at Purism, I assume. The 2 weeks are some kind of rough estimate, and additional circumstances such as which specs you order and what parts are available probably affect the time until the device ships. (I also asked them to hold one of my orders during a vacation somewhere in there, and further slowed down the order myself.)
So, Purism is not Amazon with a billion dollar bankroll to handle refunds, and they are not Google with a warehouse of infinite Pixels to ship immediately on command. Whatever is going on over there, it happens in a certain kind of “Purism time.” But it does happen. However, there are a lot of users here on the forums that report that once they ask for a refund, “Purism time” slows down for them. Maybe it is similar to the theory of relativity, that the faster you go the more time slows down for you. Maybe the sooner you want product or money back, the more “Purism time” slows down for you.
I’m not saying this to make you upset or curdle your blood or anything, but I’m bringing it up to encourage you to consider your options and what exact outcome you want. What if that YouTuber was right!? What if Purism has 600+ people waiting for refunds and has not the bankroll to immediately help them, but has a lot of Librem 5s and Librem 14s and product that they can ship out after a month or two of setup time, as a means to recoup the money to help those 600 people.
If that’s even roughly accurate, then when you ask for a refund you probably get added into a queue from hell and the time until they can help you increases greatly. Presumably, your $3000 might have been used to help someone else earlier in the queue from hell or something, I don’t know. When I think about it, it sort of makes sense that if I were a small company, having a large number of customers:
(1) buy products from me
(2) wait until I was almost ready to ship the product
(3) ask for a refund
… might be an incredibly painful thing that would be difficult to overcome. Purism is not a bank.
So my advice is: don’t be in that situation and don’t do that to Purism. Instead, avoid that situation by knowing that Purism does ship very real, unique products but it does so in its own time.
It sounds like you have four options:
(1) tell Purism you’re serious about wanting a refund, and join the refund queue from hell
(2) sell your Librem 14 order to someone else on this forum to instantly recoup your $3000
(3) decide that you are okay with Purism taking an extra two months longer than expected to ship your device because they operate on “Purism time” and tell them you changed your mind and dont want a refund (if thats possible?)
(4) become aggressive and pursue legal action against Purism, at which point maybe you can do some damage and hurt someone else if that’s what you want but this process would presumably be even slower than “Purism time”
Of these four options, it seems to me that Option #2 is the quickest way to obtain $3000 and Option #3 is the quickest way to obtain a Librem 14, but you have instead chosen Option #1 and are now considering pursuing Option #4.
So, again this all simply my own personal opinion but would you be interested to consider selling your order to someone else instead of fighting for a refund? There are a lot of horror stories about refunds here on the forums. But there are also users like me with a Liberty Phone in their hand, and a Librem 14 in their lap.
Please consider what end result you want to get the most, and the quickest way to get that end result.
