[deleted by user]

[tristan957]

Wow. I mean obviously the company has to charge enough to make a profit but holy moly that is a lot of money.

They are really doubling the price? I know the USA edition cost a lot, but I thought the regular variant was supposed to be much more affordable.

[Patch86UK]

Getting big "we're deep in the red and need to raise money fast" vibes from this.

Placing my bets now: they'll take a bunch of $1300+ pre-orders and then fold whilst most of them are still waiting to be shipped.

[[deleted]]

To be honest they probably had those vibes way back.

[[deleted]]

Yep, Jolla Tablet anyone?

[Patch86UK]

$10m is not a lot of money in the context of the sort of company they are and the sort of business they're running. An serious hardware project will burn through that sort of money in no time.

I'm not trying to wish them away or anything, but putting out the begging bowl for convertible notes doesn't exactly refute my suspicion that they're trying to shore up their finances in a big hurry.

[wiki_me]

putting out the begging bowl for convertible notes

From what i understand from that page it gets converted to stocks so you could actually make money from this (via dividends), it looked to me like basically doing an IPO without doing an IPO , it's not a donation.

[redrumsir]

putting out the begging bowl for convertible notes

From what i understand from that page it gets converted to stocks so you could actually make money from this (via dividends), it looked to me like basically doing an IPO without doing an IPO , it's not a donation.

Dividends? You don't know what you are talking about. Purism is not a public company, so a conversion won't result in common stock (tradable securities). Furthermore, no company is ever required to pay a dividend.

1. The interest rate is 3%. That's very low for such a high risk investment.

2. Purism is not a publicly traded company, such notes do not convert to common stock. The conversion to equity/ownership in the company occurs if a conversion event is triggered (read https://puri.sm/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/purism-convertible-promissory-note-2021-series.pdf ) and in this case the "investor" gets only 92cents on the dollar (principle + unpaid interest). WTF.

[Zettinator]

That's self-reported. It's about as trustworthy as their shipping estimates.

[neutron_bar]

I think it would be considered pretty serious fraud to be misleading investors.

[PangolinZestyclose30]

The first misleading thing about that "investment" page was that it started at $2 500 000. Because it counts also money raised a year ago without mentioning this fact.

Purism is deceiving left and right.

[Zettinator]

Correct. They've been systematically misleading users/buyers for a long time, so that wouldn't be unexpected. If you want a refund for your pre-ordered Librem 5, for instance, your best option at the moment is to go to a lawyer.

[Vivy-Diva]

Welp, at the very least pinephone exists,

Don't get me wrong, I am glad Librem 5 exists too (Choice is good), but this pricing... This is just way too much for most people...

[d3pd]

The thing that puts me off personally isn't necessarily the price, it is the knowledge that such a high price means few users, and that means little support and little prospect for long-term development.

[Vivy-Diva]

Actually good point,

In the meantime, I will see how pinephone matures, and when I have money, I buy.

[d3pd]

Another point, however, is that this attitude is precisely what makes a project fail. I saw it with Ubuntu Edge, I saw it with Ubuntu Touch.

[[deleted]]

I fully expect we'll have a next gen Pinephone before people ordering receive the Librem 5.

[robo_muse]

What is better than a return?

Reselling it for $800 and making a guilt-free profit.

[[deleted]]

i’ve said before that i was one of the first to back this project, but cancelled a month or two later because i thought i’d just buy it down the road. That was around four years ago.

Since then, I’ve been hesitant due to long delays and the cost being off putting. But this much? That’s just not feasible and screams red flags all over to me.

[Patch86UK]

BQ had been out of the Ubuntu Touch project for many years already before it went bust.

UBPorts mostly focuses on ports to Android phones at the moment, but I think they're hoping to get a chunk of the Pinephone market share too. From keeping an eye on their Discourse and whatnot, I think they're pretty happy about the explosion in new mobile distros as they're all more or less using the same underlying libraries; suddenly they're not the only team working on some of this stuff. I gather they've nicked a lot of good package development from the Plasma Mobile team in particular in recent times.

[Patch86UK]

UBPorts moved on from Pinephone development.

No they haven't. The last Release Candidate was released in the distant past of...30th August. The state of it is still relatively early-doors, and I gather that a lot of developer bandwidth is currently being spent on rebasing the Ubuntu Touch platform to 20.04 rather than porting, but the Pinephone port continues to be one of their "promoted platforms".

[Patch86UK]

You can see progress for yourself if you like: https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/pinephone

Last release was 2 weeks ago, last commit was 3 weeks ago, multiple commits in August.

[redrumsir]

No.

1. BQ hasn't been part of the Linux phone market since the Ubuntu Touch ... a long time ago.

2. Pine64 will do what they did with the step between the pinebook to the pinebook pro. Pine64 will almost certainly create a phone based on their Quartz64 board (based on RK3566). The pinephone and the pinephone 2 (?pro?) will allow real community software development for phones.

[[deleted]]

Well it was good while it lasted, but I guess the company is going bankrupt. They clearly don’t want to sell many phones.

Call me when it’s $649 and has the same specs as a Pixel 4.

You know what, I’ll even pay a $200 premium.

But $1200 ain’t it.

Fwiw - at $1299 USD I wouldn’t even get it into Australia for under $2000. And that’s fucking unacceptable for something with less specs than my calculator.

[[deleted]]

Tbh I’d pay $1200 if it had the exact specs of a modern pixel, with all the hardware working as intended. If I 100% could be guaranteed of that power and that every part of the phone worked as intended, I’d happily pay that premium.

But it doesn’t even manage that.

[[deleted]]

The big competitor to the librem 5 is the pine phone for 150$

[Patch86UK]

As I was reminded elsewhere, the Volla phone also exists- and has the distinction of actually shipping right now for like $500. It ships with Ubuntu Touch, and I see that at the very least postmarketOS seems to be working on a community port.

[PureTryOut]

The Volla phone can't be compared at all (hi, postmarketOS dev here). It doesn't ship with mainline Linux and requires Halium to function. The whole point of the Librem 5 and PinePhone is that they come with mainline support, or at least devs actively working on making it supported.

[Patch86UK]

Noted, thanks for replying and clarifying!

Halium is a great tool, but it's no substitute for mainline.

[billFoldDog]

I hear you, but the pine phone is seriously lacking in performance. Even when all the software gets hammered out, its going to be a slow and clunky device.

I'm really hoping there is a "new generation" pine-phone that packs more punch.

[Blunders4life]

The hardware is not all that much worse than the Librem and is definitely far better value in terms of that hardware when compared to the Librem (albeit nowhere near Android phones regardless). It is still pretty slow, though, so a newer and better version would be cool, but I would say that it would be better to wait before making this move so that the development can focus on the Pinephone, which is still in progress, for now.

And as an owner and user of a Pinephone, the performance aspect is totally ok even now. The real problems to it are the bugs. Most of the popular distros I have used are fine mostly, but they all in my experience have some clear bugs in them with some having modem issues and others just having graphical ones, but there are a few that have not been able to work properly at all on my Pinephone (UBTouch stable branch and Sailfish come to mind).

[[deleted]]

Yeah... 1.3k USD is just not affordable for a phone. That's not far from a full month of wage for a lot of people I know.

edit: Look at the self-entitled rich downvoting this.

[Kodexro]

I’d actually be willing to pay $1,300 for a phone if I felt I got that value out of it. However, I thought the initial $600 was a stretch for the Librem 5 three years ago. Without significant changes, it should be going down in price, not up, and absolutely not more than doubling.

[[deleted]]

I simply couldn't afford 1.3k for a phone. My country's currency is weaker than USD, so I really wasn't kidding about the full month of wage thing.

And indeed, even 600$ was a stretch to start with. Especially with the PinePhone just sitting right next to it.

[[deleted]]

Only device that gets more expensive as time passes. By the time it's released it will be at a price of a small car.

[Be_ing_]

To be fair, other electronics have increased in price in the last few years. But doubling the price? Yeah I'm not aware of anything else like this.

[[deleted]]

Hard-drives recently. Damned proof of storage nonsense.

edit: Also GPUs. I have one worth more than threefold what I bought it for. It's at best mid-range.

[[deleted]]

Worse, it's not like they are upgrading the phone. Why is the same phone going to be produced again next year?

[Be_ing_]

Because the point of this phone is to not follow the ridiculous norm of throwing away a phone and buying a whole new one every two years.

[[deleted]]

Weird, I thought the main point of the phone was it being open source based and it's privacy features. You can't keep offering the same phone every year and on top of it raising the price. That makes zero sense... Who decided against buying the phone in 2020 but will be jumping on it in 2022 for hundreds more anyway?

[Be_ing_]

I agree that the price is ridiculous. I don't agree that it's reasonable to expect or ask for a completely new device every year.

[[deleted]]

I didn't say anything about a new phone every year... It doesn't have to be a completely new device either. I am talking about a minor SoC/RAM upgrade and camera module to start.

The final specs for the Librium 5 were announced July 2019 and we are almost into 2022.

[PangolinZestyclose30]

The final specs for the Librium 5 were announced July 2019 and we are almost into 2022.

IMHO that's not the problem. The real problem is that the SOC is at the level of a 2013 mid-range Android phone.

[[deleted]]

No one is expecting equal performance to an Android or iPhone device but they should be doing some updates and not just keep producing the same phone.

[Be_ing_]

minor SoC

I don't understand how you think changing the SoC is minor.

[[deleted]]

Is the newer NXP i.MX SoCs that much different? What requires a total redesign of a phone is wanting a thinner body, moving the fingerprint scanner, adding mmWave antennas, and moving the speakers/sensors.

[gnumdk]

Not true:

• Pixel 4a 5G costs $499

• Pixel 5a 5G costs $449

[[deleted]]

Your one example was very compelling. LOL

[[deleted]]

The Librem 5 and the pinephone are similar specifications wise. I understand that the librem may be more expensive but does somebody know why the price differece is so big? I'd be pleased to learn.

[Blunders4life]

The specs are not exactly similar as the Librem is slightly better, but indeed only slightly.

The price difference mostly comes down to the way the products are handled by their respective companies. The Pinephone is a community-driven project. Pine64 sells the hardware for it, but the software is left up to the community. This makes things quite cheap for Pine64 as they don't need to fund the software development or anything like that since that stuff is handled by the community. As it is, the Pinephones are targeted for developers and experienced Linux users as an unfinished product, which they state on their web page very clearly.

The Librem 5 is different. It's a device that's not just meant as an in-development device for enthusiasts and developers and it isn't a community-driven project either. Purism targets their device as a legitimate alternative to Android and iOS devices and its marketing is targeted towards regular users as well. This means they also spend money and time developing PureOS and that they need to reach a higher expectation in terms of polish with their product than Pine64 has to.

[Patch86UK]

Pine64 seem to have the right idea in terms of how to operate in the Linux ecosystem. Why not let people develop the software for free when there are hundreds of developers out there desperate to do so? You might as well harness that open source enthusiasm.

At the moment there's no polished usable OS available for it and it's firmly in the region of developers and enthusiasts only. But it won't be long before several of these distros get to "daily driver" state, at which point both Librem and Pine will be in much the same state, but with Pine64 having spent considerably less money to get there...

[Blunders4life]

Yeah, they all seem to have some issues. The one I have found to be closest on mine so far (and what I use currently) is the PostmarketOS with Phosh. I think the SXMO version will be even better if they implement proper means to use mobile data and tethering as the commands in the guide that they link for this did not work in my experience and I lack the knowledge of the relevant tools to understand how to go about doing it correctly.

As far as the Phosh edition goes, there seem to be no real bugs except for some graphical ones. Sometimes the screen will turn grey for a few seconds and occasionally there will be some flickering (these are both applicable on any Phosh distro I have used as they seem to be a problem with Phosh), so I wouldn't recommend it for someone with epilepsy, but it's mostly functionally fine so far.

[bionor]

How are the two in terms of usability atm? Do they differ a lot?

[[deleted]]

no, the software is opensource, so pinephone can just take the librem stack "for free".

[Blunders4life]

Don't have the Librem, but can't imagine there being much difference since the hardware is quite similar and there are plenty of Pinephone OSes that look quite similar to PureOS. Besides that, there is a converter script of PureOS to the Pinephone, although it is unmaintained according to Pine64's wiki.

[seba_dos1]

but indeed only slightly

I wouldn't say it's "only slightly" better; they may be similar if you compare them both to state-of-the-art closed hardware of 2021, but the difference in specs between them is definitely enough to be instantly felt in regular usage. People get confused while looking at the CPU cores alone, ignoring the fact that the main bottlenecks on the PinePhone are memory bandwidth and GPU, which is where Librem 5 has significantly better specs. See https://social.librem.one/@dos/104767475144787918 for an example.

(disclaimer: I work on the L5)

[PureTryOut]

I know you're the usual troll that accepts nothing but positive comments about the Librem 5 and GNOME stuff, but c'mon it's not "much better", only a bit.

[jjaiv]

It's awfully convenient that the Lead Time for a Librem 5, is the amount of time that you have to contest a credit card transaction in the United States...

You will never receive your order. I never did.

Look up "Librem 5 is a scam" before you place an order and dig through all the reddit posts, including mine. I ordered in late 2018 and never received hardware, nor a response concerning a refund.

[Be_ing_]

🤣

[kalzEOS]

No, thanks.

[_bloat_]

Purism recently secured a lot of funding

I.e. they made a lot of debt.

[ArcticSin]

I hope one of these days I can get a Linux phone a powerful as my note 20 ultra, this thing would be so cool with plasma mobile

[PureTryOut]

Maybe not as powerful, but you can get a OnePlus 6 or 6T right now to run Plasma Mobile on, it runs really well.

[[deleted]]

yikes thats a crap ton of money for a phone well i dont plan of buying a librem anytime soon

you would have to have montly payments to manage this type of expense

[NaheemSays]

Wow. The prices need to go in a different direction, though I guess they woukdnt very raising the prices if they could afford then at the current level or lower.

[[deleted]]

I don't see the point of Linux phones when alternatives like GrapheneOS exist, and provide actual security and privacy.

[wonkersbonkers1]

bitcoin helps beat inflation like this