The Librem 5 has been “shipping” for a month–but not to backers

Their manufacturing struggles seem like a smaller problem than their communications struggles, at least to me.

If they'd just come out in September and said "hey, this is turning out to be a lot harder than we'd anticipated, we're going to miss our Q3 2019 ship date", I honestly don't think most supporters would have had a problem with it. Hardware is hard, they're trying to do something novel, these things happen. But they didn't say that, they instead cooked up a whole schedule of half-baked "iterative batches" just so they could say they really were shipping something in Q3 -- which only set them up to faceplant when they weren't able to meet the deadlines for those either.

I have been an admirer of Purism for a long time, and I was excited to see them make this move into the smartphone space. But my enthusiasm has been gradually whittled down over time by their consistently poor communications around the project. They're constantly coming across as too clever by half, when clarity and transparency would have served them much better. The quickest way to have people lose faith in you is to treat them like you don't deserve it.