What is not ready? A tablet today can surely run a full OS without restrictions [0]. Apple doesn't want it, and it's worth talking about it.
iPadOS is bad as a laptop compared to Windows.
Nobody yet has been able to fully square the two different paradigms.
I already made that mistake with Linux phones. They were unusable crap.
Immediately I can tell you that $1000 for a tablet with an Intel N5100 (Celeron) is not a good buy at all. The processor you get in the iPad Pro is 7x faster at multi-core operations and 4x faster in single thread (PassMark).
You can play recent AAA games like Resident Evil 2 (Remake) on an iPad Pro. It looks very similar to a home console in terms of level of detail in graphics.
The 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited benchmark is a difference in performance score of 12x
You're also getting a tandem OLED display that's essentially the best display on the market.
These are not even in the same class of device. I have to seriously question what the Librem 11 is actually good at? What is the target audience going to do with it? Being able to become root and fuck around in the terminal on a potato device isn't a use case. I can just go do that on a laptop or desktop which will be a much better device for doing those kinds of tasks.
If things that tablets are good at and intended for like drawing, viewing content, and any tablet workflows (e.g. digital audio produciton or film editing) or games involving high performance are all literally 10x better/more performant on an iPad, what is the Librem tablet supposed to be good at that isn't going to be a better experience in something like a Framework or even just a Dell/Lenovo laptop with Linux installed?
People don't buy devices to read the source code.
I'm sure it's a great daily driver for someone who wants to do almost nothing on their phone.
I mean we are talking about a $800 phone with no 5G modem. That's already a dealbreaker just from a carrier spectrum allocation aspect alone. This is a phone that will not get as good of a connection to do basic things like make calls and exchange texts/images/vidoes compared to any other device on the market.
It has a full desktop Firefox with all addons, for one. Can your phone do that? See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/nine-months-librem-5-as-my-only-pho..., https://forums.puri.sm/t/a-l5-review-1-week-to-my-ready-to-s...
> no 5G modem
What exactly do you get out of 5G? Watching 4k videos live?
I don't know if this is a resolved problem with 5G LTE and/or how backwards compatible 5G is with 4G (can they share spectrum? I honestly don't know, and perhaps it all depends on the particular carrier and how they allocate their deployments), but in the past you could notice that your 3G service would be a lot worse in its latter years of deployment than the 4G service simply because most customers had 4G and the carrier was allocating way more spectrum and bandwidth to 4G LTE service.
So you think about the median person replacing their phone every 3 years and you can figure that basically everyone in the US now has a phone with 5G capability, that's the service that cellular carriers are going to prioritize. That's also the level of service I am paying the carrier every month for.
And yes, 5G does get me a lot of great stuff like that. I actually tether my phone to my laptop or gaming handheld and play streamed games on it. I also work with large files so I can upload/download those large files to a server while I'm on a commuter train or in the passenger seat of a car. I can join video conference calls and things like that without issue.
I also personally switched from Android to iPhone specifically because so many carriers test iPhones so extensively (and there aren't an overwhelming amount of SKUs to test). The iPhone seems to have fewer carrier-related glitches in my experience. For example, I have a family member who switched from iPhone to Android and subsequently experienced call drops to their international calls consistently on their Android device (even after replacing the SIM card and other troubleshooting), but they resolved it entirely by switching back to an iPhone. Their carrier just didn't test out that particular Android phone that well, I guess. But the underlying reasons were irrelevant, they just need a phone that works for the purpose it's supposed to perform.
Considering that cellular service is the most expensive part of phone ownership, it seems to me that having a shitty device that can barely utilize the network's functionality is a way bigger problem than the device not being open source or not being Linux based or whatever line in the sane that Librem markets their very expensive phone under.
And of course I haven't even gotten into convenience features that depend on the proprietary app stores or carrier-integrated features like banking, transit cards/boarding passes/wallet functionality, CarPlay/Android Auto, visual voicemail, having a camera on hand that competes well with standalone point and shoot cameras, but I guess a Linux/Open Source die hard doesn't mind going back to the previous decade for those things. Still, those features are pretty damn enticing.
I can understand if you don't want those things but we have to remember that Librem is charging iPhone money for a device that does less things and has worse specs than a basic $100-300 Android phone.
Let's not forget also that Android is mostly open-source and that there are actual Google-free Android alternatives out there: GrapheneOS, /e/OS, LineageOS, CalyxOS...so Librem is competing with other open source alternatives that are far more capable and run on far better hardware.
Or you could just get a tablet with a cellular modem like a Surface Pro, or a laptop like a Framework.
I know I'm beating this thread to death but I feel quite strongly that Librem is just many bars below other open source and/or fair/repairable device companies like Fairphone and Framework in terms of delivering a product that makes reasonable tradeoffs and isn't wildly behind other options in value.
> If you bought an iPhone 16e and a Raspberry Pi
Now you have to manage two devices, each not individually capable of what you want. You have to care about synchronization and backups, always being online. You can't use ordinary tools like ssh -X, you can't customize your working environment. By the way, Apple's artificial limitations on what you can and can't do with your devices are outrageous.
> Or you could just get a tablet with a cellular modem like a Surface Pro, or a laptop like a Framework.
Now, you're comparing a laptop with a phone. Seriously? Similar for the tablet, which is much larger and can't provide a good development environment, especially for Linux apps.
> Fairphone
What they're doing is great, but relying on Android is a dead end in my opinion, since Google decides its development direction and they have no reason to support user freedom. They're restricting the OS more with each update. (It's similar to switching from Chrome to Chromium trying to avoid the Manifest v3.) Can you even run LibreOffice on it? Supporting alternative operating systems is strongly needed.