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Comment by olah_1 | Hacker News Reader

This is really inspiring to see consumer electronics made in America. So many people say that “we lost the capability” to do such.

$2000 isn’t a bad price in the grand scheme of things. But I will be waiting until the software / UI is snappier.

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Maybe I'm missing it, but it doesn't seem obvious if the parts they're using were also manufactured in the US? Which, if they're not, makes sourcing them still an issue if global supply chains were to break down for example.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/

Scroll a little bit down and you'll see the country of origin for the parts. Most are of US origin.

Am I missing something or does that not say where the SoC/processor is made? TFA does not seem to say where the NXP CPU is made either. Or is that categorized under the "Electronics" category?

That answer would be Korea.

Where is that stated?

Maybe you don't know, but Purism tends to publish misleading information.

Most of the stuff in that product listing is trivial stuff to produce. The PCB/PCBA entries can basically all be ignored, and all the ICs on those PCBs can basically be assumed to be made in China, except for the NXP i.MX8M which is made in Korea

Do you have a source for where the i.MX8s are made? I tried to figure that out a while back and didn't find a clear answer, although Korea seems likely. (Samsung process which is done at fabs in the US and Korea, but origin documents I found list China for packaging/testing, which is more likely for a Korean fab - but not 100% certain, since chips get flown stupid distances sometimes for packaging, and not 100% if there aren't US-made ones too)

The NXP i.MX 8M Quad processor in the Librem 5 has "Made in Korea" stamped on them and there have been news articles published about how NXP was switching its foundry work from TSMC to Samsung. By the way, the i.MX 8M is designed in Austin, Texas (by the old Motorola division, which turned into Freescale and then was bought by NXP).

For more info, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

This page has a table of components and their corresponding country of origin

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/

Ah, what is a "bad" price for an massively underwhelming piece of hardware, in your book, then?

Come on, the Purism people have put up a huge effort. You can't just casually the product "massively underwhelming" without stating your reasons for doing so.

Well.. The CPU is multiple generations behind anything else on the market. Power management is basically non existent. They've only recently managed to get cameras working sorta, but not really. It was sold as a customer device, not a damn development platform. They started crowd funding in 2017, and so far have only delivered less than two months worth of devices to customers. Purism is violating the law on a daily basis.

Yes, the CPU is weak, suspend-to-RAM hasn't yet been added to the mainline Linux driver for the i.MX 8M, camera auto-focus doesn't yet work, and lot of work is needed for full functionality of the Megapixels camera app and use of an OpenPGP smartcard, but you are ignoring all the progress that has been made. Purism started with a new chip that didn't yet have good mainline Linux support and had to make several hundred commits to mainline Linux to support half a dozen new chips. Purism created a new mobile environment for Linux, which 65% of PinePhone users say in a poll is their favorite interface. Purism created the first free/open hardware phone since the Golden Delicious GTA04 in 2014 and manufactured the first phone in the US since the Motorola Moto X in 2013. The Librem 5 contains 6 innovations in the mobile phone industry, which is more innovations than any phone since the Samsung Galaxy S5 released in 2014. This is the first phone ever produced where the manufacturer promises lifetime software updates and the processor will be produced by the manufacturer (NXP) until at least Jan. 2033.

All of this info is on the FAQ: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

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