Why does the Librem 5 cost so much more than the Pinephone?

[Torrone]

@amosbatto

What I think happened was that Todd Weaver wanted to give us a high-spec phone which is obvious from his interview two weeks before the crowd funding campaign started. Then, Purism did the numbers and decided to be very conservative with the specs, when it launched the campaign, because it knew that all sorts of delays and cost overruns could happen.

There is no indication that this is it.
On the contrary, at the time they were rather purely technical constraints.
The processor considered was i.MX6, which only supports 3GB of RAM.
For the screen resolution, this is explained by the gpu capabilities and power consumption of the SoC.
And so on and so forth.

For comparison, an iPhone XR from 2018 is 3GB of RAM and 64GB of flash memory.
It cannot be said that the Librem5 was designed with low spec option.