If you're wondering why it's so expensive, it's a confluence of factors:
- Making things in the us is expensive. This isn't the root cause but leads to the next point...
- Phones are low margin devices. Most consumers are intensely price sensitive. Even if a US-made phone cost only $40 more, it'd still be at a serious disadvantage.
- Therefore, there's no point in competing on price. The batch size of this is limited. Manufacturing has limited advantage of scale. They need to find another hook for value-add.
- And thus, a huge part of the value add of this device is that it's certified "secure", and with a traceable supply chain.
They will probably sell a reasonable amount of these, to interested parties, but this is not likely to be a profit center for them. It's as much as a real attempt at achieving their goals, as it is marketing that furthers their "privacy/integrity" branding goals. Marketing with a real and good product behind it is a great move if you can pull it off, and they seem to be doing a great job!
Assembly in the US is expensive, and what is the benefit to the end user?
We're looking at manufacturing hardware, and considering Mexico for assembly (if anyone has experience with this, please let me know).
Our initial thinking is
1) lower cost than the US
2) geographically closer
2a) lower environmental footprint in shipping
2b) quicker time from assembly to customer
2c) easier to visit the factories, solve problems, manage the relationship
3) the obvious geopolitical/tax/duty implications
I wonder if Purism would have as much impact with Made in the USA, as they would with Made in North America? Or even Made in The Americas - if there are other countries outside of Mexico and Canada that have the requisite manufacturing capabilities.
In our current climate more so than just the supply chain oversight that some customers will want and the other customers that will pay a premium to support an alternative to Google/Apple, also unless you are a massive corporation, you are at the back of the line for procurement of components and assembly. The big folks are feeling it too. Localized supply chain is critical to making sure we can have nice things going forward. Some people are willing to put the money up.
Mexico is a very solid place to look. In fact I think over the next five years our partnership with Mexico for manufacturing is going to explode. They have the people and facilities to do the work and are our neighbors.
Purism though, with what they are doing. Like OP at the top of the thread said, is making a statement, and a powerful one, by doing what they are doing and it's part of their mission because they are making phones and people, correctly, have a lot of anxiety about their current ad slabs.
I think your reasoning for Mexico manufacture is on point and you'll really see rewards establishing that production relationship.
If you don't mind me asking, what are you building? Your username says to me guitar pedals. Link?
We're building an EEG headband that improves the efficiency of deep sleep (https://soundmind.co)
Pedal handle is like bike, not guitar, though I recently started playing guitar.
I've never heard somebody suggest a guitar, I usually have people ask "why are you nicknamed after a flower" (PetalPete) :)
That is absolutely fascinating. I've spent over a decade doing R&D for computer interface. I've played with EEG off and on. I've done a lot with myoelectrics. I spend a lot of time trying to find color, light, sound, and rhythm that sum up stressful light up rectangles into a more human mode.
I'm super curious about your manufacturing journey and your product. No pressure on response turnover or really any larger goal, but would you mind if I email you some time? I think we might have some overlaps that make for enriching conversation.
conservation of energy and enjoying a public forum with poetry and prose. I'll hit you up and show you what I mean. And also it'll be weird because alternative interface it's hard to point at something and say, "It's like that" right? All we know is glowing rectangle. Just know that nearly religiously, I'm not trying to big time you or being cryptic or contrarian. I've got a goal. I do love talking to folks who got it enough to tell me "I have no idea what your talking about" or "this sounds stupid".
I dunno. I turn 40 next month. I'm kind of sorting out what that means. What you see is what you get with me. Test it. But yeah man. I will hit you up.
On a related but adjacent note, I've got massive respect for independent hardware manufacturers. I know a lot about what that dream looks like. I have not been able to get where you're at with anything that made the right sense.
Even if you were to buy into the proposition that "made in the USA" delivers any extra security, the foreign made SOC is such an enormous part of the overall system IMHO that everything else is nearly meaningless. And their table has several rows about PCBs, but do they build their own cameras? If not, where do they source them from? What about microphones and speakers?
[Disclaimer: My employer manufactures phones; I don't speak for them, nor do I work in phone hardware]
Right unless they wrote the RTL and fabbed themselves, verified the netlist and compared to the golden master and shipped it securely, all the rest of the efforts likely don’t provide much more than a false sense of security. In fact you’re much likely better off using a reflashed Pixel 5a.
I don’t like this kind of product. I think it’s exploiting the paranoid and creating the belief that privacy is obtainable in 2023 which it absolutely is not.
The video on their website is even more damaging...
Edit: Note, this is NOT a claim about this company, their security, or practices -- just a look at the "Made in USA" label they press heavily
"The integrated circuits can come from outside the united states"
A bit of research seems to indicate that this is a fuzzy system..
> The product’s final assembly or processing must take place in the U.S. The Commission then considers other factors, including how much of the product’s total manufacturing costs can be assigned to U.S. parts and processing, and how far removed any foreign content is from the finished product. [1]
So basically, they could have a foreign made network card, cpu, OS... but if you're making a $10,000 car and the total cost of the foreign assistance is <~$500?, it can still be Made in America while being 100% all logic from foreign sources and highly insecure (as long as the dollar costs work out satisfactory to a commission of people)
You can basically skirt the rules by taking 'assembled in America' another level or two deeper -- like they have. They also do the OS in-states, which they can likely claim is a "huge processing effort" -- which could make the hardware aspects and origin less important in the commissions review
Linux doesn't have one specific national origin if you were to add up all the developers of the kernel and the base packages in a CLI only Debian install.
purism doesn't have the benefit of the doubt anymore.
in past i rooted for them and assumed everything was innocent mistakes... but receiving their borderline illegal investment scam emails every month and the way they deny librem13/15 quality issues just taught me it is pure malice.
While the 13/15 had poor build, the Librem 14 is quite well built and the most secure laptop on the market today (outside of proprietary closed-source.)
That’s not quite what they claim. I’ll grant you it is confusing wording though. The paragraphs above the table of origin say:
> We use US companies with US fabrication whenever possible. Most distributors are based in the US with the exception of large integrated circuits that are made in a variety of countries where those companies do fabrication (US, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan); an example is the NXP CPU we use from their fabrication in South Korea.
That is clearer and more believable. I'm going by the language on the page I shared. (Yes I'm aware your quote is from the same page).
"All the electronics of the Liberty Phone is made in our USA facility" tells me that they are manufacturing all the components at the same facility, which beggars belief.
The phone (its PCB, PCBA and assembly) is made at the USA facility, in contrast to the regular Librem 5 which is made in China. It uses some components that come from outside of the US.
"All the electronics of the Liberty Phone are made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled at that same facility, using the same manufacturing process we used for the Librem 5 devkits in 2018 and Librem Key that has the Made in the USA label started in 2019."
"All the electronics of the Liberty Phone are made in our USA facility"
I would wager a significant amount of money that the vast majority of people who read "ALL ELECTRONICS" are going to believe that discrete electrical components are considered part of the category "ALL ELECTRONICS".
2200$ for a phone, which has wanky software support at its best.
Come on, this is getting ridiculous. Phosh is nowhere stable, and these claims cannot be true with an 8 year old SoC from NXP.
I get that made in USA is your brand and whatnot, but people expect a phone to be able to run google maps in the browser, and whatsapp, and instagram in parallel.
If it turns off and reboots while doing that because it runs out of memory, you cannot claim it's a smartphone.
Even the nokia 3310 generation phones could do that with WAP internet access and GPRS. Now it's more than 20 years later and people's expectations are way higher than back then.
How many do you think will recommend a librem phone if your focus is now another not really supported platform instead of improving the software than runs it?
If software is your problem (which I think it is) make it fundable directly. Allow people to support the software development directly, and start a foundation for that. But this 2200$ price tag when a competitor's product has more than 10x the featureset for half the price...there's a limit of what people can take.
I don't know why would I want to use Google Maps in a browser when there's Pure Maps, but I just tried and I can use it just fine on the base Librem 5 model with 3GB RAM. I also have several games installed on it, including even some Android games that work fine, so I don't get what you're talking about at all.
Also, Nokia 3310 had no WAP and no GPRS. The next model, Nokia 3410, had WAP over CSD but no GPRS, and certainly wasn't suitable for anything like Google Maps which did not even exist back then.
[edit] The parent has moved the goalposts quite far in a sneaky edit, but even the edited claims are pretty unreasonable. Of course there was IM running in the background and there was still plenty of free RAM left for something more, and no, "Nokia 3310 generation phones" couldn't do anything like that for at least a few more years :)
> So you're honestly trying to tell me that a librem phone has the same feature set as say, an iphone in comparison?
Haven't said anything close to that and I certainly wouldn't because it's not true. However, personally I'm not very interested in iPhone's feature set, while I'm very interested in things that Librem 5 can offer that iPhone can't. The terminal is a feature I cherish rather than be afraid of.
> How many _minutes_ do you wait until google maps is loaded
Zero. Five seconds, to be exact.
I also tried it inside an Android container, so pretty much having two complete operating systems running at the same time. Interestingly, it was faster by one second there:)
The main market for this would realistically the US government or government contractors if the US made some sort of rule requiring the government and contractors to use these types of phones
LOL, I'd want to build it myself at that price, with a hot-air tool and microscope. Like they used to offer a build-your-own engine program on the Corvette assembly line.
> All the electronics of the Liberty Phone are made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled at that same facility, [...] By doing all electronics fabrication, assembly, and fulfillment within the same facility Purism can oversee each stage of the production.
Reading this I just imagine a ASML machine, fabricating the wavers for their SoC, next to a photochemical vacuum bonding machine making the OLED screens. Absurd nonsense, I would be very surprised if they even have pick and place machines in their US factory, some hot glue guns at best.
I don't really care about the supply chain all being traced to being USA made. The USA is not a particularly trustworthy government, and in my experience auditing various US facilities, their physical security was always worse than many 'developing' nations.
Only phone like this that seems good to me is the FairPhone, except it doesn't work that well in the US supposedly.
"All the electronics of the Liberty Phone are made in our USA facility"
Wait, do they have a fab now?
No, seriously, I would never spend that money for a phone, not even if it was assembled by nude virgins and the nude virgins themselves were included in the package, but aside that, I totally would want to believe that claim (which would be huge if true) but I first want to see their fab.
Happy to pay that price if I can have some gaurentees slaves and children did not assemble them. A new, maxed out, unlocked iPhone approaches $1500 pretty quickly. And I would be willing to guess some indentured “workers” put them together.
Sure but are you really pushing the performance of your phone? More power to you if so. I do game programming and rarely need to utilize super new features (unless AR related, but even then I could get by with a few gens back). For me personally peace of mind and not supporting slavery in worth the downgrade.
It's meant to run GNU Linux instead of Android, so maybe the 4GB RAM might be ok?
Definitely not enough if this was running Android. RAM usage on my Android right now:
- 2.1 GB Android OS
- 1.0 GB Google
- 0.5 GB Android System
- 0.5 GB Firefox
- 0.4 GB Android System Intelligence
- 0.4 GB System UI
- 0.4 GB Google Play services
... and a bunch more < 0.1 GB services that seem necessary
Android really shat on, set fire to and salted one of my favourite things about Linux in this regard. I.e, how few resources I can give it and still be productive. Hell, I'm gonna assert right now that if Android didn't waste such gobs of memory, I could still be doing the... oh, about 4 or 5 things a phone is actually useful for, on hardware equivalent to the SGS1.
I know, because I did all those things on the SGS1 and it worked fine.
That's the difference between GNU/Linux and Android.
Android uses Java because there's an existing market of Java developers. Java does not have much inherent overhead but like any tool with a lower barrier to entry a lot of lower quality software hits the market. Optimizing for time to market by each company's app team is where the wheels come off the bus. People expect software to be free or $0.99. Companies are pushing the technical limits on how much data can be mined bloating their apps. Android is fragmented across diverse hardware, operating system versions, and cellular carrier permutations making testing and QA a much harder problem.
google doesn't take losses on smart phones. only home devices
proof: see profit margins on all pixels/nexus. they either use cheap components in flagship models, or partner with someone a la apple and break then to build phones at their loss (see: htc, moto)
I couldn’t possibly begin to disprove or prove that.
What I can say is we have decently strong childhood labor laws which other developing countries do not, and that fact is exploited to drive down costs and increase profits.
Curious if they’re really trying to sell to consumers or hoping to get a large DoD contract. Wouldn’t be surprised if the US government would be interested in these if the NSA vets them.
Advice for people making the next Linux phone: be generous with specs.
4G of RAM is pathetic even for just a phone. For a LINUX phone, people want to plug it in a monitor and run desktop grade software on it, they don't just want the title linux for show.
I can imagine that this may be harder than it seems.
- Most modern consumer-grade chips and SoCs have proprietary specs and closed-sourced drivers. It can be difficult to obtain drivers suitable for mainlining into Linux.
- The automotive industry seems a good place to source parts with open specs. But for reasons I don’t understand, they seem to cling to absurdly old process sizes.
- Higher-specced chipsets would potentially eat into profit margins even more, even though ongoing app/drivers/OS development is already expensive enough.
Mostly speculation on my end but I think there are reasons for choosing lower-end specs somewhere in that zone.
>"All the electronics of the Liberty Phone is made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled in the USA"
There is no way in hell that is true if read it literally.
I dont think anyone would do this at present.
They would need a full fab and design team
To make cpu, gpu, and ram (not sure how ram is produced to be honest)
and all the rest.
I think that is how most people will and are intended to see it.
If you read it as marketing speak and tie it to the
"Made in USA Electronics" badge and read up on the actual
criteria to get it, it may be true.
Lots of loopholes there.
The huge kicker about this is that the company pine64 already has a better, cheaper option with their line of the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, which are designed exclusively for Linux and phosh experiences. With every upgrade they don't even scratch $600 a unit. At the very least, Purism is pricing themselves unfairly. Also with their past quality control failures with the Librem line, what faith should we have in the company that it will succeed?
And yet I’ve received no emails.. the idea that they’re ready to ship to new buyers in 6 weeks when existing ones have not been made whole says it all.
You seem to musunderstand the situation. Your turn did not come yet, but it will come much earlier than in 6 weeks, because all orders will be fulfilled within 6 weeks.
Could iPhone from 2007 run any software from GNU/Lunux repositories, connect to screen/keyboard turning into desktop, run without proprietary drivers and offer lifetime security updates?
Why should I? It works fine as a phone and runs apps that I need sufficiently well (and is quickly getting even better). No other phone can do that.
Example: desktop Firefox with all plugins. Yes, it scales to the small screen just fine. Can your 'smart'-phone do that? If not, maybe you should reconsider its utility as a smartphone.
> I’d buy Oculus Quest Pro, if I can use that $2000 for anything.
I don't get why you'd bring Oculus in this discussion. It's not a phone. And people already pay $2000 for phones. Not mainstream phones, but neither is this phone.
Anyway, in terms of what people would do with $2000, I would rather set the cash on fire than give it to Facebook.
- Making things in the us is expensive. This isn't the root cause but leads to the next point...
- Phones are low margin devices. Most consumers are intensely price sensitive. Even if a US-made phone cost only $40 more, it'd still be at a serious disadvantage.
- Therefore, there's no point in competing on price. The batch size of this is limited. Manufacturing has limited advantage of scale. They need to find another hook for value-add.
- And thus, a huge part of the value add of this device is that it's certified "secure", and with a traceable supply chain.
They will probably sell a reasonable amount of these, to interested parties, but this is not likely to be a profit center for them. It's as much as a real attempt at achieving their goals, as it is marketing that furthers their "privacy/integrity" branding goals. Marketing with a real and good product behind it is a great move if you can pull it off, and they seem to be doing a great job!