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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Was just thinking about this the other day. Why were the librem and the pinephone never updated? I'd like to get a new one, but am sure not going to buy something 10+ years old at this point. (Would be happy if a new one was comparable to my old iPhone 6s.)

I know there's not a lot of money in them. But if you want sales at all you better update your hardware more often than never.

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Librem 5 is starting to get old, can't argue with that, but it's not quite 10+ years old yet. It's a 2018-2019 design based on a SoC that went into GA in 2018. Even though its ARM cores weren't state-of-the-art at that time already, it has bigger caches, stronger GPU and faster DDR that what you would usually find paired with similar cores earlier, giving it a solid boost when compared to, say, PinePhone, which uses a CPU that seems very similar from a quick glance at specs on paper until you actually try to use it.

I've been using L5 as my daily driver for years now and I don't feel very constrained with its performance just yet. The most painful things are related to lack of features in its SoC rather than its age - such as no hw video encoding or camera ISP, which means that things that other phones do efficiently in hardware have to be done in software. i.MX 8M Quad isn't the best suited SoC for mobile phone use-case, but it was the best that was available back then given other constraints of the project.

Today there's still no abundance of such choices, but there actually are a few more interesting ones on the market. I hope we'll see some projects following through soonish, as I'll eventually need an upgrade path for my Librem 5 indeed.

Maybe not in years, but my iPhone 6s debuted in 2015 and Android of the time was competitive. These phones don't match it. It's not so much bad performance I object to but spending top dollar on something that's already long obsolete. Qualcom is supposed to have competitive CPUs now.

An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux, charge an extra $100/yr for drivers and support, and start a nice little business. Believe Purism already has a subscription where they provide vpn, matrix, and other privacy tools, so they are almost there.

Maybe they need an investor, but honestly the capital outlay should be tiny for the amount of goodwill and eventually business it would bring. With the trillions sloshing around with nowhere to go at the moment, it could change the world for the better.

> An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux

Good luck with that. Unless you settle for Android middleware underneath your OS (like some existing projects do), it's a massive undertaking. You still need to invest a lot into R&D while you lose what's differentiating you in the process (in case of Librem 5, there are things like hardware kill switches, PGP card reader, replaceable M.2 modules etc.) so you can chase SoCs that will already be considered obsolete once you're done with the software anyway. Even Purism with their prices couldn't afford to use an unsupported SoC and relied on NXP's upstreaming efforts.

I suspect that if I was wrong and it was actually a viable path it would already be taken by someone. Maybe we'll see something appearing in coming years, as these days more vendors actually started to care about mainline support, but as it is today the landscape is still not that great, especially when it comes to SoCs that are actually targeting smartphones.

Lots of companies build/buy/sell cheap phones and presumably put some work into getting Android up on the hardware.

I think maybe that's where Purism went wrong. They tried to go pure from the get-go. But think it would be better to get a profitable product out first, and then invest in opening components, one by one.

I don't need a perfect device. Rather hardware getting better every year. Then I could upgrade, and they'd make more money.

Getting Android up on the hardware is easy - you just grab the unmaintainable kernel fork provided by the vendor and you're 90% there.

I'm not interested in Android though, so I just wouldn't buy such phone no matter how cheap would it be. I'm not interested in upgrading every year either. Librem 5 is great, but unfortunately I'll need something to upgrade to in a few years anyway, as the Web has a tendency to only get heavier with time.

You don't have to upgrade every year, the point is that the hardware improves over time.

And that's what I'd love to see. It's not as easy as you make it appear though. An obvious upgrade path for Librem 5 would be a newer SoC from i.MX line as there have been several released since, but all of them are even less suited for a smartphone than i.MX 8M or come with downgrades in some important areas, such as GPU - so this now calls for a complete redesign around a different vendor. Not impossible, but not cheap either.

Grabbing some cheap Android devices is a path to nowhere. Otherwise we all could be just grabbing them and putting postmarketOS on them ourselves, as there's no shortage of such devices on the market.

A defeatist mindset. The point is to make money, then invest in making more.

For example my new starlite linux tablet is awesome and star is making money hand over fist. Because they finally built a good one and stopped making excuses. They develop firmware with coreboot and upstream patches to Linux.

That’s what a successful business is, you invest then reap the rewards.

Then what are you waiting for? There's a successful business for you to pursue and reap the rewards from.

I've been using GNU/Linux phones and watching this market for the last 18 years. If I'm a defeatist, please prove me wrong.

I'm broke but would gladly join an effort.

What exactly do you want to upgrade? See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

Pine64 updated the PinePhone with the PinePhone Pro.

Guess I thought of that one as more like a "fix," since the first one was not fit for purpose. Still not good enough, needs spec bump and driver support.

I was looking at potential linux phones the other day, postmarketOS has ports for phones as new as fairphone 4 and OnePlus 6. They don't have any phones with decent camera support though.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

Hmm, I saw the fairphone 5 on another page and the hardware support is not substantially worse.

Install page says you need fairphone.com to give you permission to unlock. :-/

yeah most android phones do, it has to do with the modem I think

>driver support

It's Pine64, their whole business model is «Here's the hardware, you're on your own now».

Not a good business model if they can’t afford to rev the hardware.

It was more like making the PinePhone catch up to Librem 5. I'm writing this on my L5 and I still have no prospects if I wanted to upgrade.

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