This guy gets it: it’s an investment. Expecting a full-fledged product equivalent to existing mobile phones is incredibly ignorant. It just shows how little people understand about what goes into software and hardware development. Even worse are people who understand just enough to consider themselves experts yet actually know next to nothing on the topic. Yes, they know much more than the average rando, but they know very little compared to those who work on these things.
Their phone is way worse specs than similar products, such as the PinePhone Pro, the Pro¹ X, the Fairphone 4 and the Volla Phone, and for a significantly higher price (in fact, the Librem 5 is more expensive than even the iPhone 14 Pro Max, the Galaxy S23 Ultra and the Pixel 7 Pro).
To summarize, Purism is a cult that sells iPhone 8’s for more than iPhone 15 Pro Max prices and then doesn’t deliver or refund them. My old Huawei P10 Lite has better specs in every single way, and it cost one sixth of their price when it was released six years ago.
Yes, the Librem 5 is expensive and Purism treat consumers poorly.
But, the comparison and the focus on pure specs make it seem that you don’t understand the appeal of the product, which is to run a GNU/Linux stack on a phone with a very-close-to-mainline kernel. Among the devices you compared the Librem 5 too, the only one that’s comparable is the PinePhone Pro (yes, the others support Ubuntu Touch, but they are essentially standard Android hardware featuring a Mediatek or Qualcomm SoC. The vendor kernel is then being used with a compatibility layer to run Ubuntu Touch on it.
The PinePhone Pro (as the only other mainline smartphone in your comparison) is significantly cheaper, but that’s in large part due to PINE64’s modus operandi: They supply hardware, and the community makes that hardware usable by supplying the software. This model has worked okay for the OG PinePhone, may be due to the Community Editions, where PINE64 partnered with distributions/software projects, but it has not worked so well for the PinePhone Pro. The PinePhone Pro also has - depending on how you want to spin it - a too power hungry SoC or a undersized battery. Thanks to standby, it can last a day, but you can’t really use it for much during that day then - e.g., browsing the web rapidly drains the battery. Also, without Purism’s efforts, there would be way less user space software to make use of the device.
The Librem 5 is not without flaws, it’s a really complicated hardware device (they were aiming for some FSF stamp of approval) - while the (socketed) 4G modem has GPS support, Purism also added a dedicated chip for that so that you can navigate while the LTE unit is “killswitched off”. The NXP i.MX8M only has Cortex A53 cores, and the GPU is not amazing, either (at the time when design decisions were made, it was the only GPU with decent blobless mainline driver support though), but at least the battery is large enough to make the Librem 5 a phone I can reasonably use as a daily driver these days.
Regarding the Liberty Phone: I hate the name, but given that this is just the Librem 5 USA with as much RAM as the SoC supports and a larger eMMC, there’s no technical excuse to delay that product, as these hardware changes are very, very minor.
This guy gets it: it’s an investment. Expecting a full-fledged product equivalent to existing mobile phones is incredibly ignorant. It just shows how little people understand about what goes into software and hardware development. Even worse are people who understand just enough to consider themselves experts yet actually know next to nothing on the topic. Yes, they know much more than the average rando, but they know very little compared to those who work on these things.
People dunk on Purism and the Librem 5 because:
To summarize, Purism is a cult that sells iPhone 8’s for more than iPhone 15 Pro Max prices and then doesn’t deliver or refund them. My old Huawei P10 Lite has better specs in every single way, and it cost one sixth of their price when it was released six years ago.
Yes, the Librem 5 is expensive and Purism treat consumers poorly.
But, the comparison and the focus on pure specs make it seem that you don’t understand the appeal of the product, which is to run a GNU/Linux stack on a phone with a very-close-to-mainline kernel. Among the devices you compared the Librem 5 too, the only one that’s comparable is the PinePhone Pro (yes, the others support Ubuntu Touch, but they are essentially standard Android hardware featuring a Mediatek or Qualcomm SoC. The vendor kernel is then being used with a compatibility layer to run Ubuntu Touch on it.
The PinePhone Pro (as the only other mainline smartphone in your comparison) is significantly cheaper, but that’s in large part due to PINE64’s modus operandi: They supply hardware, and the community makes that hardware usable by supplying the software. This model has worked okay for the OG PinePhone, may be due to the Community Editions, where PINE64 partnered with distributions/software projects, but it has not worked so well for the PinePhone Pro. The PinePhone Pro also has - depending on how you want to spin it - a too power hungry SoC or a undersized battery. Thanks to standby, it can last a day, but you can’t really use it for much during that day then - e.g., browsing the web rapidly drains the battery. Also, without Purism’s efforts, there would be way less user space software to make use of the device.
The Librem 5 is not without flaws, it’s a really complicated hardware device (they were aiming for some FSF stamp of approval) - while the (socketed) 4G modem has GPS support, Purism also added a dedicated chip for that so that you can navigate while the LTE unit is “killswitched off”. The NXP i.MX8M only has Cortex A53 cores, and the GPU is not amazing, either (at the time when design decisions were made, it was the only GPU with decent blobless mainline driver support though), but at least the battery is large enough to make the Librem 5 a phone I can reasonably use as a daily driver these days.
Regarding the Liberty Phone: I hate the name, but given that this is just the Librem 5 USA with as much RAM as the SoC supports and a larger eMMC, there’s no technical excuse to delay that product, as these hardware changes are very, very minor.