1y ago

Purism found a way to make its Linux phone even more expensive: meet the $2,199 Liberty Phone - Liliputing

Purism found a way to make its Linux phone even more expensive: meet the $2,199 Liberty Phone

23 comments

What’s not to like about a device sporting a 5 year old CPU paired with a 720p display and 4GB of RAM costing 2.2k usd?

One of my harder earned life lessons is it’s structurally impossible to run a company that develops and sells a product based on this kind of soft values and buying devices from them is almost always a recipe for disappointment. It doesn’t even have to be the fault of the company (though it often is)

All the electronics of the Liberty Phone are made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled at that same facility.
I suppose that this is the reason for the high price. It's built all in one single factory in the US (I was too lazy to research if it's their factory). I hope that their target groups are real and that they can afford the phone.
- That is a lie. They are not fabbing their own SOC or any of the camera modules.
  Also the SOC in this thing is ancient. Purism seems to be cashing in on the paranoid and gullible.

I don't see anyone addressing what should be the main concern: purism as a long history of internal toxicity and screws up. There were problem and their CTO left a long time ago, since then everything went downhill. Their communication is also one of the worse I've seen. They don't mind lying, it feels borderline scam sometimes.
Whatever the price and the alleged goal I would not get behind a shady organization.
Nothing is perfect but Purism has been way passed the limits for me a long time ago.

I'd love to use Linux on my smartphone, but unfortunately it isn't viable yet and I'll keep using Android instead :/

Lmao. At this point buy any android phone and just put a custom ROM on it.
- I think the appeal was supposed to be all drivers are open source. where as even with custom roms, you still have proprietary firmware blobs that must be updated by the manufacturer to prevent any exploits
- For $1,800 I will personally install a custom ROM on your phone.

entry-level Librem 5 sells for $1,299
made-in-the-USA model $1,999
Liberty Phone also made-in-the-USA with more memory & storage $2,199

I'm not sure why anyone would buy a Linux phone from Purism these days. Buying one from Pine64 seems like a better option in every way.

I get it that they need to find a way to fund their R&D team.
I get that there is also some people willing to pay top-dollar for some specific features which can not be had on commodity phones Linux-based, fully assembled in the US, etc. Which is going to be impossible to fulfill at scale.
What I don't get is: why can't they offer something that makes this explicit? I for one have no interest in a $2k phone, but I would gladly give them $50 per month and in exchange I'd get the right to participate in some periodic (monthly, quarterly, yearly?) dutch-style auction when they had a new update to their phone. Perhaps a percentage of the money that I had given could be used to pay for the device, etc.

23 comments