The Liberty Phone
puri.sm
puri.sm
- 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!
Personally, I'd prefer they got their existing phone working well...
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.
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?
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) :)
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.
I'm not sure about what you mean about "sum[ming] up stressful light up rectangles into a more human mode".
Love to hear of people doing interesting things in the BCI space.
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.
Until that sort of thing is fixed, it’s not helpful for manufacturing trustworthy devices.
[Disclaimer: My employer manufactures phones; I don't speak for them, nor do I work in phone hardware]
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.
Quote: "All the electronics of the Liberty Phone is made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled in the USA"
Table of origin says:
WiFi Card India
Both can't be true.
It doesn't inspire confidence.
Agreed that there is no way the same facility is manufacturing the chips and handling assembly as implied by their language
> 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.
"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.
"All the electronics of the Liberty Phone are made in our USA facility"
"All the electronics"
Edit: newlines
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 <~$500?, it can still be Made in America while being 100% all logic from foreign sources and highly insecure (as long as the dollar costs work out satisfactory to a commission of people)
You can basically skirt the rules by taking 'assembled in America' another level or two deeper -- like they have. They also do the OS in-states, which they can likely claim is a "huge processing effort" -- which could make the hardware aspects and origin less important in the commissions review
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/bu...
in past i rooted for them and assumed everything was innocent mistakes... but receiving their borderline illegal investment scam emails every month and the way they deny librem13/15 quality issues just taught me it is pure malice.
Come on, this is getting ridiculous. Phosh is nowhere stable, and these claims cannot be true with an 8 year old SoC from NXP.
I get that made in USA is your brand and whatnot, but people expect a phone to be able to run google maps in the browser, and whatsapp, and instagram in parallel.
If it turns off and reboots while doing that because it runs out of memory, you cannot claim it's a smartphone.
Even the nokia 3310 generation phones could do that with WAP internet access and GPRS. Now it's more than 20 years later and people's expectations are way higher than back then.
How many do you think will recommend a librem phone if your focus is now another not really supported platform instead of improving the software than runs it?
If software is your problem (which I think it is) make it fundable directly. Allow people to support the software development directly, and start a foundation for that. But this 2200$ 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.
The iphone is likely 1000x more secure than this phone and a much better choice for government workers.
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 :)
Same websites, same performance, same responsiveness, same app interactions, same bluetooth/hardware compatibility support?
...without having to use the terminal, ever?
Really? Is this a joke or something?
How many _minutes_ do you wait until google maps is loaded, and are still satisfied with it?
My experience with the librem phone has been _way worse_ than yours, apparently.
[edit]
Nevermind, of course you are working for purism.
[/edit]
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:)
Apparently they're bringing it back this year.
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.
Only phone like this that seems good to me is the FairPhone, except it doesn't work that well in the US supposedly.
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.
> The Liberty Phone integrates 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage.
$2200? Is this a joke? A typo?
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’m cool with it
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.
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
I know, because I did all those things on the SGS1 and it worked fine.
Seriously, what the fuck happened?
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.
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.
Then you can charge 2k!
- 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.
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.
All orders are expected to be fulfilled within 6 weeks: https://forums.puri.sm/t/estimate-your-librem-5-shipping/112...
Wish granted.
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.
No idea why.
When they go to my grandmother, it has the benefit of upsetting parts of the family, who get upset she gets something better than they have.
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.
If you’re going to burn $2000, just stop and give it to me. I’ll buy a Vision Pro :)