Why does the Librem 5 phone cost that much?
puri.sm
puri.sm
https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/55eece8c-2d6c-4da3-8c8c-...
This prototype version is definitely not ready for mass market due to (1) known overheating issue (so far I've observed it get quite warm sometimes, but not uncomfortably hot), (2) a bunch little software things to work on. But it's really exciting to be able to `ls` and `cd` and `ssh` on a phone, and know that the software updates are coming.
Purism's accomplishment already is pretty incredible on both a hardware and software level. For me, well worth the price. Congrats to them even if there is a ways to go yet.
Can't you do that on any other Android phone with terminal software installed?
Modern Android has been locking down access to everything that isn't an NDK public API.
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
Given the changes started with Android 7 to block access to everything else?
In fact, https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Differences_from_Linux
It's quicker than any of the YouTube downloader apps I've tried!
How it works: in ~/bin there's a termux-url-opener script that handles what you share:
"#!/bin/bash
case "$1" in
*youtu*)
echo "$1 is a YouTube URL,
downloading"
sh ~/shortcuts/dl_yt.sh $1
..."I love it and am still finding new uses for Termux. I've got neovim and all my dotfiles loaded, so in a pinch I can ssh into my phone to do some work.
youtube-dl -f bestaudio -x --no-progress -o "~/storage/music/YouTube/%(title)s.%(ext)s" "$1"
This generally gives me .opus files, which play OK but my player can't change the tags.
Google is like a feudal lord. In exchange for owning you, they'll protect you from everyone weaker than they are. Google doesn't want to break into your office computer as long as they can shovel ads down your throat. And their reputation for security is much higher than a small startup regardless of the startup's competence and intentions. See e.g. Project Zero or Chrome vulnerabilities vs Firefox.
Not all security mind you, Android runs on ancient kernel and it won't be changing for a long time even though Google announced plans for moving to mainline linux.
The best part is that I don't really need to trust Purism, I can choose to trust the community instead to whistleblow if Purism breaks the community's trust. Their target demographic is exactly the type that will be watching over their shoulder to make sure nothing fishy is going on.
Can you boot to a shell without starting GNOME?
> sudo systemctl disable phosh.service
Or something like that. I'm sure it would be pretty easy with a bit of fiddling. However, you're right that you'd probably need a keyboard plugged in because the default TTY probably doesn't have a soft keyboard.
I'm so fed up with software that tries to anticipate what I want. Computers running Linux do what you ask in spite of what you want, but phones running modern phone operating systems do what they think you want in spite of what you need. And that is deeply frustrating to power users.
I guess now I just need to decide when to jump into this.
It's strange that SailfishOS has not caught more marketshare on the hacker/tech enthusiast community, because it's (almost) everything people wants about Purism : you lose a bit in the free software and open hardware side, but you win in terms of price (used phone + 50$ license), availability and usability (Right now, it's the only alternative to Android and iOS I can safely recommend).
If only Jolla devs had kept their promises of open-sourcing more of their code.
I think that's a big part of the answer to why it hasn't caught among techies. When I tried using it (shortly after release), there were numerous issues in their default apps that nobody could fix because they are proprietary and Jolla didn't seem to have the resources to handle all the bugs.
I'd wager that if it had been open source, the early adopters would have put some time in to fix a lot of the bugs.
In retrospect I'm pretty pissed at them for not being honest and upholding their promises. In my book they're basically con artists that just tried to get the Linux community's money by saying "open source" without actually meaning it.
I later switched to Ubuntu Touch because, despite Canonical picking up the project, the community had continued maintaining it. They could do that because it was freely licensed; nobody could do that for Sailfish.
I suspect the issue is that PeerTube is getting a NAT IP instead of properly determining its own external IP, which is causing problems streaming when it tries to get back to the origin. I'm pretty sure it's a simple enough fix, I just need to take a look at it in the light of day.
Er, no. You bought a bunch of silicon off the shelf, and you had to integrate it. Several orders of magnitude less work.
Fifteen developers, and two years? Not mentioned, but this means you didn't write the telephony stack either.
iMX8M bringup, driver development, software integration. This is real work, but it's a tiny fraction of what goes into making your own phone.
Hoping you sell enough of these that you manage to attract adversarial attention. Because how you deal with that will be the true test of your commitment...
> I think the story is that Washington SPCs are LLCs in pretty much every aspect besides shareholder-board disputes.
and, why
> have they never made a Social Purpose Report available despite the fact that they've been an SPC for two and a half years?
from the bottom of the article[1]:
> It is also worth keeping in mind that Purism isn't actually incorporated as a typical LLC (Limited Liability Company). They are actually incorporated as a SPC (Social Purpose Corporation) in the state of Washington. The primary difference between an LLC and an SPC in Washington is that SPCs can do things that are in the best interests of their customers rather than always doing things that are in the best interests of their shareholders. It is also important to know that in Washington this status comes with some extra regulatory requirements ...
----
if formed as an SPC, shouldn't they be transparent in how they allocate budgets to internal projects (as proof that they do what is outlined in the Social Purpose Report (SPR))? It's a shame they don't produce a SPR which could be used to verify the claims about price in this post.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371573
[1] https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri...
We urgently need alternatives and I do want Purism to succeed.
"Quantities matter [in China] and getting only dozen or couple of hundred orders per month doesn't really help. That said, the Librems are heavily overpriced but that is because Purism seemingly never tried to get better deal and the South San Francisco partner abused this so that is why Purism Librems are double the price they should be. I believe that if we had more realistic prices, it would be much better for Purism not only financially but also more talking about it, more of it in wild which in turn means much more orders, more happy customers etc. The innovation is not really that hard in this space because big players don't try to really innovate as they have strong positions, so it wouldn't be that hard to be good or better then most of big players even, but quantity leverage is hard to pass by."
When I saw the price I assumed they were trying to position a premium product. I think this is a little bit of a mistake given that in the market of handsets, Apple owns the "premium" devices, and maybe samsung counts as #2? Nobody is crossing that Rubicon.
$700 isn't really bad but I don't like the look of it. Maybe if they can make this thing for 6 or 7 years. People who are worried about this have been aware of Essential phones which aren't the same, but end users aren't shopping these Freedom characteristics.
I predict another few years of nobody batting an eye to these devices. Great shame.
They are. They are building a product that let's you do anything you want on the device.
Honestly, the phone should be priced at a premium level because it will appeal to a demographic that will pay more for a phone that lets them break free from the closed ecosystems of Android/Apple. It also gives them extra cash to re-invest in the company and doesn't require them scaling their manufacturing just yet.
Completely orthogonal to “premium”
They do at least appear to be actively developing those drivers publicly for eventual submission upstream, though: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux-next/activity
[0] https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Software_Reference.html
I did. Pretty much because all the drivers are mainline(able). Even if purism went belly up today, I could continue to run up to date Linux on my librem 5 basically forever.
More info: https://liliputing.com/2019/08/librem-5-smartphone-will-have...
I have no interest in Android or iOS. I have no interest in phones that make it difficult to run non-android systems on them. I have no interest in devices I have to break into in order to make them do what I want them to do.
Phones that I've been using for more than 10 years now make it easy to run Debian GNU/Linux on them, baremetal, straight out of Debian repositories. Those devices don't require me to run any proprietary binary blob on my system. Those devices are supported by community years after their manufacturers abandoned them, as mainlining makes that task actually manageable. That's the kind of phone I'm interested in and its OS plays a big part in it.
And that is?
Just two examples: removing Google apps from Android devices, installing non-store apps on iOS.
If you run a web search along the lines of "best apps for rooted Android" or "best apps for jailbroken iPhone" you will find many more examples of useful things that you can do with rooted/jailbroken devices.
I have a secondary Android device just out of necessity, I am a power user with enough past experience (I was active in Openmoko community, made Debian chroot for Kindle Paperwhite, am still using Nokia N900 etc.) and no - I have no actual interest in Android. Stop-gaps like Debian chroots or layers on top of libhybris won't replace the real baremetal, mainline thing.
The advances in camera tech these days are primarily software, which is not open source. We're talking dozens of person-years minimum to replicate what Apple, Google, Samsung, etc do in software.
You need to get out more often. Look, I am a KiCAD supporter, too. But KiCAD is repeating the mistakes of commercial ECAD systems of the 1980’s. Am I glad it exists? Surely. But set your sights higher. KiCAD has much room for improvement.
My favourite open source EDA tool that IMO does it better is horizon EDA. https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/feature-overvie...
I made quite a few working PCBs with that one already. Downsides are:
- the library is not that big yet (but adding parts is really easy, you can even use inheritance etc)
- won’t run on any old machine because of the OpenGL-version
- if you are not using windows you need to compile yourself
One of the things I really like besides the UI/UX (one button hotkeys!) is the library concept called “pool”, where every part is made up of modular pieces, which makes things reusable and consistent. If you’d like to change the resistor symbol for all resistors you just have to edit in one place, if you feel like making a opamp with eight channels, just duplicate the quad one and add four more opamp units. Their concept takes a moment to sink in, but is incredible flexible and is one of these “why didn’t we do it like that from the start”-ideas.
* Projects not standalone / portable across computers, which makes collaborating hard.
* Parts library management is not intuitive. Lots of confusing UI around library paths for example.
* Footprint assignment should be handled automatically or at least provide sensible suggestions instead of every footprint with the same amount of pads.
But there are two promising alternatives around: Horizon EDA, which the sibling post already mentioned, and LibrePCB (https://librepcb.org).
I personally only used LibrePCB for some project and it worked quite well, apart from some missing features, like missing design rule check. But the upcoming 0.1.3 release adds quite some of them.
In the category of still stuck in the 1980's:
Handling of bus rippers, and hierarchical nets as they expand through topological hierarchy. Especially in regard to the flexibility of naming ripped sub-nets.
Restrictive topological hierarchy.
Lack of separation between attributes files and topology files. Inability to mate a single topology file with multiple different attribute files for different circumstances.
There are also features like buried components and complicated material stack-ups that commercial tools handle, but I really can't fault an open-source tool for not including things that are expensive to validate.
General complaints:
UI is cranky and not intuitive, especially w.r.t. part libraries.
Obtuse and restrictive footprint specifications. The sad thing here is that KiCAD went through a gut-and-redesign of the footprint specification format, and seemed to willfully ignore the RS-274X specification and willfully ignored the hard lessons that led us to the methodology of using RS-274X macros to define footprints. If I can write a trivial RS-274X aperture macro for my footprint, I should be able to specify that in a footprint and have it come out correctly in the Gerbers. HELLOOOO!!! Please read up on years-old industry best-practices before "improving" your system. (Admittedly, I haven't read the KiCAD footprint spec documents lately, maybe they have evolved.)
In the category of just plain broken:
I don't use KiCAD a whole lot, but not too long ago a client asked for design file deliverables in KiCAD format. I was annoyed that my Rev A boards came back with trivial issues that the design rule checker completely missed. Sorry, that is one piece that needs to be pretty damn solid for me to take the tool seriously. (I have also use GEDA and have plenty of complaints about it, also, but at least the PCB DRC has never led me astray.)
But as much as I like it, it's still years if not decades away from catching up to the big industry tools like Altium, Cadence, Mentor. They have $$$$$/seat pricing, but if you need them, you need them.
When android devices have a major public video permission hole, everyone exhales and mentally checks out. When purism is late, it sucks but it's not the same
Pre-sale customers are along for the ride. If the lesson for other startups is 'if you're really innovating, your users will be there when you're ready', I think that's a really good outcome.
If only. I suspect that only tech enthusiasts are aware of these issues. In the meantime, non-technical people only give you weird disbelieving looks when you mention this to them, and then continue ignoring it.
It’s psychological. People can’t believe things which would make it too hard for them to stay the person they currently are. It’s almost impossible for anyone to do anything but ignore and repress such information. If you ask them later about it, they probably would deny even hearing it or having the conversation, because they wouldn’t actually remember it.
Ask anyone who tried to convince a sweeping societal change based on logical arguments. See what happened to Ignaz Semmelweis. You simply can’t convince people of hard things with logic.
Of course. Of course. Certain powers milked (and continues to milk) flashy terror attacks for political gains.
I personally think security has been spoiled by unrealistic advice. "Use PGP" is the worst, but it's not alone. A few years ago a mass-market device (tens of millions sold) asked me to enter my password three times within two minutes in order to carry out one single operation, and it demanded that the password be secure enough that I needed two kinds of mode-shift to enter it on that device's keyboard. Who takes that vendor's ideas about security seriously after experiencing shit like that?
People might say that they want security, but when some logical person takes this literally and respond “Use PGP”, they might be logically correct (since as bad as it may be, there might not be any secure alternative to PGP), this advice will always be ignored because what people want is not actually security. What people want is to feel secure while not changing anything about what they are doing or how they are doing it.
For an excellent argument of why most people shouldn't do that, I recommend the essay "epistemic learned helplessness": https://web.archive.org/web/20180406150429/https://squid314....
The gist is that most people are so bad at evaluating logical arguments that they are more likely to be swayed by false arguments rather than correct ones, so the winning strategy is to simply ignore everything that sounds strange.
What does the Purism give me? None of my existing apps work with it.
Spending zero brain cells on which computer junk to buy and getting on with my life is the most rational choice imo.
But you would probably benefit by recognizing that nothing about this is logical. There are some logical arguments why one ought to use (for instance) the Librem 5 phone as a phone and forgo the additional features present on mainstream smartphones. But you (or me) can’t be open to those logical arguments unless we’re already ready to change; i.e. when we already (irrationally) want to find a reason to do it. Then, logical arguments can be effective. But not otherwise.
Trying to go "the obvious logical conclusion is this Purism phone, but your irrational monkey brain is too idiotic to see that (no offense intended)" is somewhere between ridiculous and insufferable. If you want to evangelize Linux, you're doing it wrong.
No, that is not what I am doing. Read my previous comments if you don’t believe me. I am actually (in this thread, at least) not arguing about whether you should get a Purism phone or not. I am arguing that whatever you or I decide (yes, even if we do decide to get a Purism phone) our decision will not be logical. Even though there might be logical reasons for one or the other decision, those logical reasons are not the actual reasons for the decision. We and everybody else make decisions by irrationally picking one option which feels right and rationalizing it after the fact using whatever logic we can torture enough to support our decision.
Me too, which is why I'm interested in the Librem 5 (and the Pinephone).
I don't have the energy to constantly be fighting my phone's attempts to trick me into surrendering all my data to various corporations.
If you want to run software that is only on Android or iOS, then buying a Linux phone would be illogical, no?
You seem to misunderstand me. No decision we make is made logically – not a decision to buy a Librem 5, nor a decision to buy an iPhone or an Android-based phone. There may be one or several logical reasons for one or the other decision, but this is at most a tiny factor.
For most people on the street, this phone:
* Doesn't have a bunch of things you're used to in a smartphone
* Has stuff that you don't understand the value of
* From some company you've never heard of
* For $700
That's not some post facto breakdown. I commend their efforts, truly, sincerely, but to be blunt, they made a phone for Ed Snowden.
Your facts are the most compelling for you, since you’ve decided not to get a Librem 5 phone. If it were otherwise, you would have listed different facts.
Facts do not make people change their opinion.
Who did that? Certainly not me. I framed all decisions to be akin to that, not any particular one. We are all “feeble trapped brains” making irrational decisions, all the time. Yes, me too.
Why do you think people's identity is tied to the auditability of complex computer systems?
I don’t think that. I think people tie their identity to all sorts of things, including the obvious Apple and Android fans, but more importantly “user of mainstream apps”. Many people think they can’t be who they are (a.k.a. “can’t live”) without normal mainstream phone apps.
People don’t have to tie their identity to this, but many do.
—
I didn’t put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.
[…]
You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you’d rather die. You faced the fear of your own death, and you were calm and still. Try to feel now what you felt then…
I… felt… like… an angel…
— V for Vendetta, issue 7, 1989
I didn't realize how true this was until just last week. My partner was having a conversation with her friends (non-techies) about phones. One person mentioned that they are skeptical about whether Android is secure because it is open source. And that's why they stuck with their iPhone.
Given that the design is open, it should be possible for another company, who doesn't have these sunk costs, to deliver the same phone for less.
Does this mean that they have the price wrong? Can selling open designs ever recoup such design costs?
That being said, Pine64 has been able to make a similar device for far less also using their own design, so I'm a little skeptical that hardware design was such a large part of the price. I'm guessing the bulk of it was getting the SoC up and going since Pine64 had similar products that likely make it simpler to design a phone SoC.
Business around privacy is a thing going on for at least a decade. However, we often forget that our data flow is controlled, monitored, and stored by those who we try to protect our data from.
We've seen so many NIH (on the software side) phones over the years, and then finally this. It bodes well for the future.
I have also seen many review claiming the track pad is great and even one say it is as good as a macbook track pad.
However, one problem with them is that they are not refreshed often and use older Intel ships (currently 7th gen).
One of the thing I suspect prevents them from refreshing the laptops is they do not have enough resources (people) to do some while developing the librem 5.
I like it because the hardware is all well-supported under linux. I run a fairly stripped-down Debian. I am no linux wizard, and I was able to make everything I needed functional. Bluetooth required a non-free firmware package.
Additionally, I got to support a company working toward more-open, more-free hardware. I would love for movement in that direction to be more common, so I put my money where my mouth is. If you don't care about that, you could get a laptop of equivalent performance, or better, for less money.
I don't know much about hardware performance or what the latest-and-greatest is. I don't play games or do anything that performance intensive locally. It is more than performant enough for my needs. The battery life seems good, but I've never timed it. I have an M.2 SSD in it.
The trackpad and keyboard are both relatively nice. The trackpad is a clicky pad, like the one on a macbook. I have it configured to use the "clickfinger" click method of libinput and two-finger-scrolling. The keyboard is backlit and has decent travel (not nearly as good as the old thinkpad keyboards, though).
There are hardware kill switches. One for wifi and bluetooth, and one for the camera and microphone. I generally just leave the camera/microphone off, and the wifi/bluetooth on. The switches protrude a bit so it is possible to accidentally move them.
The screen is a matte 1920x1080 IPS panel. I hate glossy screens because I like to use my laptop outside, so this is perfect for me.
It has a decent complement of ports. No ethernet port, though.
But the world's moved on since those reports were made. It's FUD: https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/6wtul0/on_sen...
We're already in a world were we can't quite trust our CPUs, so why trusting baseband chips?
If it does make the design more complicated, it may also reduce the potential attack surface.
an increase in complexity would rule out reduction of attack surface. in fact attack surface would be guaranteed to increase
As a counter-example -- removing all of Linux's privilege checking would make the code a lot less complicated, but the attack surface would increase a million-fold. In this case, the Librem 5's separation of the baseband such that communication is done over USB (a protocol which doesn't have DMA) is a security improvement over giving the baseband DMA access.
if the security boundary is baked into the code or the design of the system, and also assuming it doesn't introduce more bugs, then I agree[1]. Security controls that get introduced on top do risk an increase in attack surface. An additional interface is by definition a an additional "surface", the question is if it can be attacked.
[1] you could still argue that more lines of code always means more bugs (but let's assume it's very close to bullet-proof)
I have no experience with PCIe so maybe it's harder with USB to abuse the host system, than with PCIe these days.
You can think of USB as being similar to using a TCP/IP protocol between multiple machines capable of executing code, and having to execute code to handle higher level protocols, like HTTP or whatnot. If there's a code execution bug anywhere, the USB capable device will be able to exploit it.
And by default, there's a code-execution bug on all normally configured Linux machines. If you'll not create a USB "firewall", modem can just create a virtual keyboard and kernel will happily accept all input from it, for example. So modem can just type whatever it wants to your shell. It will be obvious, but, it's still device->host RCE.
On the other hand, the baseband processor is mostly unknown, black box hardware, running unknown black box software, that completely controls the transmission of cellular data. Of course it would be horrible if there was no separation between the CPU and baseband. You shouldn't trust that setup. But as it turns out, separation does exist!
The article you linked to says: "There can be an IOMMU with very tight restrictions providing proper isolation or a setup where the IOMMU is effectively not doing anything and permits access to all of the memory. Determining that requires real research."
So it sounds more like separation might or might not exist and you're not likely to find out if it does on your particular device.
General design failures/bugs from assumed acting-in-good-faith silicon/sw designers vs not-acting-in-good-faith silicon/sw designers.
Assuming the radio's are the primary threat to privacy then I'd prefer a design from a privacy activist company who explicityly designs the hw so that the less trustable parts are forced behind physcial and defined interface "firewalls".
> Complex parts like the cellular modem or the WiFi can access the very same RAM that is used at runtime to store your most private data, but at the same time they are controlled by binary-only firmware that no one except the manufacturer of that chip has access to.
For the cellular modem, in your run-of-the-mill iPhone or Android phone nowadays, it is simply false that the cellular modem can access arbitrary data in RAM. Can't tell you about WiFi, but I expect a similar situation.
There's a lot of room for improvement in secure smartphone architectures, but the "baseband can read your photos" trope is simply false.
Modern Android/Qualcomm phones have pretty sophisticated security architectures that do indeed isolate the baseband, partly because exploiting baseband bugs was such a common source of phone unlocks in the past. If an app is using SSL then the baseband can't read what's happening.
If the chips are tightly integrated propriatary black boxes like on most hw then from my POV its _physcially_ possible for them to read anything regardless of what the designers/industry say because I do not trust them.
You trust your sources that say "..simply false that the cellular modem can access arbitrary data in RAM". I don't. Even if you claim to have personally designed, fabbed and shipped that silicon I still have no practical reason to trust.
The baseband is permanently attached to a public network. Not having control over whether that connection actually is up is a huge security hole. The entire baseband software stack runs in supervisor mode. There are no non-executable pages, there's no stack protection.
EDIT-1: Qualcomm baseband chips have location tracking baked in. Even with a clean OS and no tracking apps, the baseband does it. The tracking data is commercially available: https://web.archive.org/web/20180514003056/https://www.qualc...
My understanding is that integators buy the baseband module (with FCC and other licenses) and add it to their device so as to not incur the patent fees and oversight required by developing the radio device into every regional handset.
Side note: this is the strangest font I've seen in a long time. Why is the lower-case "t" smaller than every other letter? It almost looks like one of those fonts designed for dyslexic readers, but with no variations in the width of the letter strokes, I don't think that's the case. Anyone know if it was just a really strange choice, or if it serves some greater purpose?
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/23/16923832/global-smartphone-pri...
Of course I am supporting both of these projects because my income apparently doesn't matter to me, but I think it's still worth considering that a heavy, chunky phone may be somewhat of a detriment when their target base is already pretty small.
Mostly I worry about perfect being the enemy of good, and that Purism will end up going out of business before they can make a v2 which truly surpasses expectations. The existing Librem 5 is definitely a cool step in the right direction, but living long enough to fulfill their ultimate goal (having everyone be able to run and want to use ethical, open, and free as in freedom devices) is also important.
It feels like early Apple over again. That dancing on the edge between business pragmatism and perfectionism. I can easily see them becoming the "new Apple" in a few years' time. I hope so.
Sure I'm comparing apples to lemons here, but the first iPhone was $500, twelve years ago, and much more functional.
From what I can see, this is untrue:
Calculator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esYJSNZrQWc
Notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34XhhVlmYTU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEzRgjHaIZo
It would surprise me if there wasn’t a calendaring program in there, too
"Upon initial shipment of the Librem 5 in 2019, it will offer the essentials: phone functionality, email, messaging, voice, camera, browsing. Your user experience will improve as we incrementally add commonly requested applications and features (such as calendaring, notes, calculator, PDF viewer, etc.) while keeping performance in mind."
adjusts glasses, shuffles papers
Gotta be missing some pages here...
Not bad for another $99.
We'll see what makes the cut by the time Evergreen rolls out.
So they may support a single old version because the effort of upstreaming the support would be expensive.
The blog post says that the Librem paid 15 developers full time for 2 years on the project.
That's a huge expense and most of all the customers of the SoC won't be demanding upstream support.
Of course also what happens is that you get into a rabbit hole of patching your fork until it becomes a huge task to reintegrate.
For the first tier customers they get a custom solution developed for them, and have access to all the specs under the NDA, but since that is the case, they cannot develop stuff for mainline and just produce blobs.
I spent days hunting down issues in the launch iOS 13 simulator that turned out not to happen on real hardware (and had never happened worth the iOS 13 launch).
Their UX is on a downward trend for several years now, IMO.
Historically I've heard Apple described as a software company that uses hardware to achieve competitive advantage.
Apple sucking is relative, obviously - their stuff is still better than most other products, but it's not add good as it used to be, IMO.
I wonder if the iPhone's success has transformed them into more of a hardware company?
I’ve always heard it as the exact opposite, hardware company that uses software to achieve competitive advantage. If you look at what they actually “sell”, the version I’ve heard makes much more sense.
But yes, they do seem to straddle the divide somewhat, and they have wavered to one side or the other in the past. But is does seem that even Apple can’t go against the stream; they either seem to do bad hardware and good software or vice versa at any given time.
- Doing a hard fork of the software stack for every product family/generation/platform, because it's assumed up front that hardware differences/bugs and changes in product definition will require non-portable changes throughout the stack (e.g. things like GUI element sizes and line lengths are often hardcoded to fit the layout to a particular screen, various GPIO pins/buttons/LEDs/connectors change identity/significance, hardware gains/loses capabilities needed for a feature so UI elements related to that feature need to be added/removed/altered)
- Expecting the vast majority of development effort to be on shipping new products because already-shipping products are "in the can" and the big deals have already been closed
- Management belief that hardware is hard and software is easy (which is arguably sometimes rational from the perspective of managing product-dooming risks)
- Upstream vendors wasting developers' time with shenanigans around stuff like documentation (oh, you wanted the real manual that actually says what the registers do?) and firmware (some vendors apparently forget to mention that there is firmware until you ask your SE/FAE why something isn't working)
- Uncertainty around whether a given problem ought to be fixed in hardware or software
SoC has a gigantic cost advantage over discrete parts, let alone PCIE cards.
The only showstopper is the 4G radio. There are no IP vendors for it at all, and that is very much a result of things antitrust regulators should've been taking care of.
What's the reason not to use Plasma Mobile though? I'd prefer investment of effort into that.
I see the same problems on desktop Plasma, wildly inconsistent padding, UI elements not lining up and bits of the interface crushed and cramped, while 100px below you have gigantic elements.
If you're going to take a swing at doing a FOSS phone right, you really need to avoid the wonky programmer art or you are not going to convince the average user that its any better or more polished than previous failed attempts.
Can't say about Plasma Mobile though, but that's the point why investing effort into that would be useful. The base is more promising than Gnome one.
I can't find a good introduction on the topic at the moment, so I'll just quote Microsoft's succinct answer: "Alignment makes your UI look neat, organized, and balanced and can also be used to establish visual hierarchy and relationships."
They also have a nice illustration: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/layout/a...
This kind of thing matters for usability. KDE has always been ahead in technical features, but GNOME has for a long time been way ahead in paying attention to basic principles of visual design.
Personally, I never had problems with KDE design. If anything, I prefer it to Gnome's. Plus KDE is so customizable, that if you don't like something, you can find a way to change that.
or if there isn't anyone you want to buy from, you can try LocalBitcoin and then convert.
There should be a market for electronics that goes against planned obsolescence. Build a device that runs a good enough OS, with low specs, that doesn't require fast hardware, make it sturdy and last at least 3 years, and I would buy it.
I refuse to spit more than $200 for any of those devices. People say "but I used it everyday, it is my main computer", well with all due respect you are addicted to your phone.
The smartphone industry is bizarre. Of course you can accuse Apple and google ecosystems, but still.
Well, that's an entirely arbitrary line in the sand you've drawn there. It's an entertainment platform. Am I addicted because I pay extra for a high quality TV, stereo, or gaming computer? What if it was spending extra money on a jigsaw for my woodworking hobby?
“How about you make a cheaper product without software bloat” To me this was very clearly answered with we broke new ground building the right system from the ground up and that was expensive.
And we used our existing OS as the base and we’ve achieved true mobile <> PC converance.
Give the article a full read and please consider editing this comment.
The reason for the cost was literally what was covered in the article.
Non-smart phones in the old days had to use either WAP (a simplified version of XHTML) which you probably won't find much content available on today, or a thin client for a server-side browser (e.g. Opera Mini) which is not great for privacy/security.
> Well, here we are, we are shipping with GNOME / GTK+
...this point is I think quite unfortunate. I tried to write a GTK+ program a few years ago and it was completely impossible. Using GNOME / GTK+ will surely limit its attractiveness of a development platform. It's too bad they couldn't have done something based on Qt instead.
EDIT: Rather than downvoting, why don't you post your contrary experience with GTK+?
My experience with GTK has been fine its been far from impossible to use - with python, rust, and C. At least on linux, but that is the context of the issue.
Plasma mobile exists and apps will use QT so we can see how both turn out.
Strictly speaking, everything I wrote was about my own personal opinions and experience. I did try writing an app; I did find trying to figure out was was going on impossible (and switching to web development much more fruitful). So it's natural for me to think that lots of people will have similar experiences, and that if they do, it will limit the growth of the platform.
I knew that what I wrote might be controversial, and I'm willing to take my downvotes like a man. But I'd rather be shown other perspectives.