I want to welcome you to the World of capitalism and inform you that the price of a product does not need to have any relation to the manufacturing costs.
I am amazed that people refuse to accept this and seek some justification in the costs that Purism might have or might not have for the production of Librem 5.
I don’t want to imply anything. I have no inside information and no idea how the Librem 5 price gets calculated. I just have a capitalistic mindset and for me the price is not necessarily related to the manufacturing costs.
The price represents what people are prepared to pay for a product.
The price helps achieve a balance between the supply and demand.
When it comes to Purism, obviously they had a demand higher than the supply.
People want Librem 5.
People order Librem 5.
And they ordered more units of Librem 5 than Purism was able to manufacture.
The number of orders was higher than the number of shipped devices which led to a huge backlog of unfulfilled orders.
This lead to many many extremely angry customers who were very angry for having delays in their orders.
What does a company need to do in such situation? Either increase the manufacturing capacity or decrease the demand. How do you decrease the demand? You increase the price. And this is exactly what Purism did.
Apart from that, I personally see huge risk for our society that a huge percent of the manufacturing of electronics is concentrated in China (or around China). It is like putting all data centers of the whole World in one single geographic zone. And with the Taiwan tensions, the zone is like an earthquake zone. It is just irresponsible to put all eggs in one basket.
We need diversification for the electronics industry. Putting a high price tag for the made in China Librem 5, makes the made in USA Librem 5 more attractive to the customers and it is easier to opt for Librem 5 USA when Librem 5 China is expensive. So I fully support Purism on that one.
Took the words right out of my mouth. If you want to have a Librem 5 phone or similar to purchase in the future, then you need to make sure a company like Purism survives.
Not enough sales volume! (Imagine however if they had their HQ in North Carolina instead of Kalifornia, they could lower all their salaries, live at the same comfort, level and charge less for the product.)
Phosh and Chatty are the most visible. Also squeekboard, feedbackd, and we have full time developers who are turning GNOME into a phone-friendly environment. I can recall contributions to at least Fractal, Gnome Web, Settings, Nautilus, and a bit deeper, GTK, wlroots and Wayland in general, but there are so many contributions it’s impossible to remember them all (even my own).
Quality? A Computer in your Hands without 3erd Party interests on Daily Database?
If you run your App** or Goo*** one you are under surveillance by Artificial Code, Drivers and every Step (like GPS) is linked to Advertisers in your Area. For Example. Every Photograph every visited Web Page. If you get a Message with your End to End encryption Messager, it will memorize the Milliseconds you are watching it and your Voice Messages go to some other AI, learning your Speak, temper and Mood.
Purism will try to build a modern Smartphone like a Computer in the 1990th with a modern Linux, open Source and where you have the Control over the Software and the Data, collected about you*.
*On your Phone, not on visited Websites, or 3erd Party Applications.
It would be Cheaper if there are five or six or more Hardware sellers out there… but right now its like Organic food in the past, nearly no competition just strange bad quality on the rest of the Marked.
Pinephone is ok, but looks like just another Android-Hardware-Phone specialized on one Hardware and using Linux on that one Hardware Distributor.
Which is already fine, cause we need every support we can get on that huge mine field before us, as Society.
A big difference I haven’t seen mentioned is the Librem5 is marketed as a functional phone for daily use.
The PinePhone and PinePhonePro are both marketed as low cost devices for developers to reduce the barrier to entry for learning software development on a mobile platform.
Sure you can use either for purposes other than their advertised purpose, but the support you get post purchase will likely reflect the intended use case and that support has to be paid for. Also, it’s been a minute since I’ve looked at the pine* warranty but, as I recall it the Pine* warranty is lesser, having a longer more comprehensive warranty costs money.
These add to the software development and other points previously raised.
I’m thinking the officers and execs can trade in their S.F. studio apartments for waterside colonial houses on Albermarle sound (with a smal yacht) and pay the same amount of property tax. Developers can have a 2nd job in a call center in Mumbai for all I know.
Yes, the basic Librem 5 is made in China.
And there is a version which is as made in the USA (as far as feasible). https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
P.S. There is no functional difference between the 2 versions.
As far as i can tell this is IT, do a whole lot of marketing , whether or not you deliver a working product 🤷, eh who cares, you can then just let the forum fanboyz, the true believers, and devs run cover for the fact you didn’t actually deliver what you claimed to. You can deliver a still defective product years later, only for it to fail within a week while testing features that were marketed as killer features. The devs can claim, but ma software yada yada yada. Well, in the 1 week I got to test run the L5, the native software were surprisingly slim and still pretty glitchy when used as a phone-like device. The best review I’ve got is that i was both somewhat impressed yet incredibly dismayed at the same time. I would not pay more than the $600 i did pay for this product, then, today I’m not even sure I’d enter into this ecosystem unless i was a dev who had spent time with, knowledge of the device, and plenty of time to spare.
As you say, you’re no software developer. And when I read your post it feels like you have no idea how hard software developing can be. I myself know >a little bit< about software developing since I’m running unreal engine editor for some years and learned a lot of issues with coding. And I also followed the issues Purism had with developing camera drivers. It was really interesting, but also showed the difficult process until the first picture where pixels where not in place etc.
And what you have to know is, that development doesn’t always mean making software better, it also means that something that works can get broken. Last weak my unreal project had a functional user interface, today half of it (like drag and drop) is broken, because I totally rewrote my input system. And I didn’t do it because my old system was bad, I did it because the new system makes something in future possible, even if I have no benefits right now.
And from this point they did very well, even with all the current bugs. People who bought that device through marketing without informing further (like here in forum) shouldn’t blame others for being dismayed. You can’t compare it with an android or iOS, where companies have so much more money to put into the mouth of their systems. It needs time and I personally never expected same quality in such short time. However, I’m already impressed what they did and see where’s the road going on. And I love to see how it’s going to improve from time to time (something I never felt for Windows or Android, but for some open source projects).
People have no concept of the size of the teams that say Samsung has working on phones. Like they will have an entire team dedicated to just the power system of the phone, or one particular aspect of the OS, whereas Purism does not have the budget to have that luxury. Also they do not have the development history in which to draw on like a bigger/older company would have.
You want a phone that goes up against Goliath you’d better be prepared to deal with all the challenges that supporting David entails.
Well, we do pride ourselves in drawing on the history of Linux, GNOME, and the entire libre software movement
The real challenge is that doing something new requires lots of up front money, and that the samsungs of the world are selling millions of units, driving the costs down, and increasing opportunities. Also, they don’t care about the openness of hardware, so they can get cheaper alternatives we wouldn’t be able to work with.
so that where HQ is need bear little relationship with where the developers are.
As far as i can tell this is IT, do a whole lot of marketing , whether or not you deliver a working product 🤷, eh who cares, you can then just let the forum fanboyz, the true believers, and devs run cover for the fact you didn’t actually deliver what you claimed to. You can deliver a still defective product years later, only for it to fail within a week while testing features that were marketed as killer features. The devs can claim, but ma software yada yada yada. Well, in the 1 week I got to test run the L5, the native software were surprisingly slim and still pretty glitchy when used as a phone-like device. The best review I’ve got is that i was both somewhat impressed yet incredibly dismayed at the same time. I would not pay more than the $600 i did pay for this product, then, today I’m not even sure I’d enter into this ecosystem unless i was a dev who had spent time with, knowledge of the device, and plenty of time to spare.
| Thanks.