by jolux on 6/2/21, 4:10 PM
I applaud this accomplishment. I think there will be a push to manufacture more semiconductor-intensive products in the US over the next several years as tensions with China continue to heat up and Taiwan is left as a single point of failure. I know progress is already being made with TSMC building new fabs in the US.
I will note that Purism do not say what their production capacity is, and that it would probably be a different task entirely to manufacture a significant percentage of iPhones in the US. I’m not surprised that manufacturing thousands of extremely expensive phones in the US is possible. I would be a lot more surprised if they had managed to manufacture millions of reasonably priced phones in the US. The big question is whether the federal government will embrace the industrial policy required to rebuild our manufacturing capacity in high-tech.
by sokoloff on 6/2/21, 4:13 PM
$800 (down from $900) for the Librem 5; $2000 for the Librem 5 USA edition.
(Edit: I'm leaving this paragraph here as it attracted comments that would no longer make sense if I edited/removed, but it was a result of a flawed premise [bad math in my head]) That seems a significant premium over the actual cost differential, but they self-admit "this is for customers who have hard requirements on sourcing" rather than "this is what it costs to make something in the US".
by emacsen on 6/2/21, 6:31 PM
I purchased the LibreM phone when it was being crowdfunded. I waited years for the thing to be released, and what they came out with at the end was beyond disappointing. It's nearly three times heavier and 2.5x thicker than a normal phone- by today's standards, the thing is a brick.
If I had been told that I was going to get a developer device, that would have been one thing, but I (and many others) were sold the LibreM as a consumer device, and it's just not.
Along with that, there are reports of how working within the company was, such as this one:
https://jaylittle.com/post/view/2019/10/the-sad-saga-of-puri...
... which paints an extremely negative picture of the internal working of the company.
Between feeling ripped off for my purchase and hearing how terrible working with them was, I'd have a hard time buying any new products from Purism.
by yifanlu on 6/2/21, 4:42 PM
Yeah it’s 2021 and Chinese manufactured are more reliable and higher quality than anything American made. As an anecdote I build PCBs for a hobby and I’ve purchased PCBs and chips from both cheap Chinese fabs and suppliers as well as Americans ones. The only issues I’ve ever had were with American ones (which were many times more expensive) and I’ve stopped using them completely.
I would be curious if librem will ever release data regarding failure rates of their American made phones versus non-American made ones. But considering how they’re branding this and the kind of person who will spend the premium to buy it, I doubt they will ever say anything.
Also after the Snowden revelations, I laugh at the idea that American made products are somehow more “secure”. Sure we (as in US intelligence community) think China puts back doors in things but from the Snowden revelations we KNOW that American companies like Cisco puts backdoor into things.
by blihp on 6/2/21, 7:01 PM
Is their claim about electronic components 'origin declaration'[1] credible or is it just marketing sleight-of-hand? Aren't they just buying the same components made in Taiwan/China/wherever from a U.S. distributor such as Digikey and then saying 'Made in U.S.A.' in the same way other manufacturers do? (which would seem to seriously undermine their 'secure' supply chain claim) I've been under the impression that we don't have fabs in the U.S. making anywhere near the variety of components needed for a complete modern smartphone. I don't ask to be pedantic, but rather if it would be more accurate to say 'assembled' rather than 'manufactured' in USA.
[1] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
by Ccecil on 6/2/21, 5:13 PM
As a small US contract manufacturer working largely in Opensource Hardware I applaud their efforts. It is a step forward...even if it costs more.
There are many people in the US who would pay more for a phone made in the US. It isn't just military/govt. Although, they are not the majority.
I got into electronics in the mid/late 90s when there was still a lot of development and production in my area. I watched it largely move out of country and quite a few mid/high paying jobs largely disappear.
It still costs quite a bit more to have boards made in the US (unless you get your own equipment) but with the tariffs, shipping and possibility of further issues between our governments it starts to become fairly close to being worth the effort, at least for some things.
It would just take one or two lot rejections or a batch lost in shipping to make it not worthwhile for a mid sized producer. Large companies can absorb and plan in advance...small companies the loss may not be sizable...but the mid size company very well may have most of their eggs in the same basket so to speak.
I have had fairly good results with our Chinese manufacturer over the last 8 years or so but doing our own in house QA/Test is absolutely required. There has been very few batches where we could have got away with not doing so.
In our case we are doing small batch production in house while doing larger batches from China but since we have the machines in house and we can order parts from anywhere there is very little reason to not do our own in house production entirely. This allows for much tighter control over the process as well as defect mitigation on the fly during production.
The next few years are going to be very interesting for manufacturing worldwide. I expect it won't just be the US who is looking to bring at least a portion back to their country...or to countries which are cheaper/easier to work with.
by olah_1 on 6/2/21, 4:08 PM
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.
by fouric on 6/2/21, 8:06 PM
> Let’s say hypothetically that a Texas-based Instrument and parts maker has a part, let’s say that part is something like a TPS65892 (revision AB), and like all parts that Electronics Engineers (EEs) select, needs to be kitted exactly to part number (TPS65892) and package (NFBGA 96). Normally parts vary by part number (I am pretty sure it’s why they’re called part numbers), but in rare instances (I can think of only one) that part is a completely different part if it is appended by what you normally would read as a revision number: TPS65892BB. In this example these are pin-matching parts that do completely different things and where all things work fine with the exception of charging the battery and providing USB connectivity. After a number of hours tracing schematics to board read values, this hunting manifested itself into a data sheet comparison where we learned these are
unrelated parts.
Holy moly. I'm glad that I don't have to deal with that.
What is going on with that instrument maker?
by stu2b50 on 6/2/21, 4:10 PM
For reference, the Librem 5 USA cost $2000 and comes with 32GB of eMMc on device storage, a SoC that can be generously called "slow", and 3GB of RAM.
It's easy to see why phones are not entirely sourced from the US when it makes the iPhone look like impossibly good value for your money.
by tomcam on 6/2/21, 7:00 PM
> Another misconception is that a machine placed part is in some way superior to the same connected part placed by hand. It’s not. It’s faster and more efficient, but hand (re)placement is equally stable. Electronics off a line are hand repaired more often than people understand. This only increases cost (labor and time), it doesn’t reduce reliability.
I had no idea! Worth the price of admission. Whole article fascinated me tbh
by perihelions on 6/2/21, 8:25 PM
This hack is remarkable.
https://puri.sm/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/purism-librem-5-u... [.jpeg]
"Fun side story, one brand of 32GB eMMC has test pins on the underside that confuses the optical scanner for SMT parts placement, while another brand does not have the test pins. Since there is no easy way to mask the optical scanner of those test pins, a black permanent marker is a quick fix to blot them out so as not to confuse the scanner."
by Jerry2 on 6/2/21, 11:13 PM
How many ICs are actually made in the US? They're pretty mum about it. My guess is that none of them are made in the US. So the phone was assembled in the US from all kinds of parts.
by Jabbles on 6/2/21, 5:14 PM
by krrrh on 6/2/21, 4:42 PM
Interesting to note that they started US manufacturing with the Librem Key[1] in 2019 which I imagine has a much lower total labor component than a full phone. Paying double the price for an under specced product is a lot easier to justify at $59 than $2000, especially for something so security essential. I would be happy to pay the premium just for the cool factor and to support supply chain diversity. I just wish they would release a USB-C NFC version of it.
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/made-in-usa-librem-key/
by clarkevans on 6/2/21, 9:55 PM
What if pricing was listed in two parts: first, the price at current market rates, relative to its alternatives; second, a share of early adopter stock. The price paid less market rates for a comparable phone treated as an investment, perhaps as much as several hundred dollars per device. The stock pool being a percentage of the company commensurate with network-effects of its adoption. Sometimes crowd-sourced purchases like this are more easily justified, and even rewarded later, if accounted for as investments.
by auraham on 6/2/21, 9:00 PM
It is an interesting idea to have a USA model. However, I do not understand why do they have two models of the same phone? It is like saying "We have this made-in-China phone which is secure and open source but we also have this other made-in-USA phone which is more secure and more open". Oversimplistic but that is the idea.
by failwhaleshark on 6/2/21, 6:02 PM
It seems nice but I don't think it matters at this point to wave the nationalist flag when it's only a half-measure forgetting the 500 kg gorilla in the room. Where are nearly all the closed-source designs, manufacturing, and firmwares for the chips made? And, absolutely no chances of backdoors there, right?
by wdb on 6/2/21, 7:00 PM
I will wait for the European edition. I can imagine its a unique selling point for people in North America
by lugu on 6/2/21, 10:39 PM
Hope having production on the same floor as inovative hw designers will bring new features for hackers like:
- ability to extract all memory component to reflash them
- pinctrl connectors for i2c/spi
- reboot of grey bus
- sdr components
Please make something incomparable!
by jrochkind1 on 6/2/21, 5:30 PM
> Making a convergent operating system that is not Android nor iO
"convergent"?
by 627467 on 6/2/21, 9:30 PM
Other than US govmt, and other highly regulated US institution, I wonder about the size and social characteristics of the group that both can/doesn't mind paying 2000USD for a understating (and in many ways underpowered) and rejects the non-USA model.
by kaba0 on 6/2/21, 9:48 PM
My only gripe with bringing desktop Linux to phones is that desktop Linux is a security nightmare. Someone with more experience please chime in, but the whole thing is C, no usable sandbox (a bug in firejail will make the untrusted code run root..) and the old xkcd comic is still true: the only thing a malicious actor can’t do is install a video driver. That is, your user account with all the important data is basically left completely open. Compared to the iphone, and android (especially graphene os) it is laughable.
And while basically noone uses pinephone/librem 5, there are plenty of people running desktop linux (myself included), but I don’t sleep well knowing how unsecure the whole thing is, and seemingly it is not a priority to anyone. Is my paranoia based on facts?
by zf00002 on 6/2/21, 7:52 PM
Off topic I guess, but the font that article uses is throwing my eyes for a loop. The lower-case 't' in particular, but I am also not fond of the number '3' either.
by nivenkos on 6/2/21, 4:27 PM
The US is the biggest surveillance state of all, why is this a step forward?
by Romulus968 on 6/2/21, 5:00 PM
This is really cool, but it's $2,000. The problem is the specs don't quite justify a $2,000 price tag. The iPhone 12 Pro Max is $1,099 for 256Gb model. The Librem 5 has 32Gb built in. Granted you can expand storage on the Librem 5, but that's added cost on top of the $2,000. There are other specs to compare, but storage is an easy target.
I think the project is awesome, and I'd be very inclined to purchase one, but I can't justify $2,000 for a comparatively subpar device.
