from Hacker News

The Speed of the Librem 5

by theycallhermax on 10/24/23, 2:27 PM with 74 comments

  • by acdha on 10/24/23, 5:08 PM

    > In 2017, Apple admitted to intentionally slowing down older iPhones. The claim was this would increase your phone’s lifespan. But really, it made your once snappy phone feel much more sluggish, leading some to upgrade their phones to a newer model with marginally better specs

    I doubt any of their marketing people are reading this but outright lying like that is not how you build trust in your products. They’re referring to the phone throttling its power draw when a degraded battery could no longer provide full output, and the alternative would be shutting down suddenly at a time when the phone was doing something demanding like playing a game. Other devices do this as well for the same reason, and anyone selling battery powered devices has no excuse for not knowing this. A company which shipped a phone in 2020 with 5 hours of battery life when new must be painfully aware of the challenges.

    Similarly, anyone buying another phone rather than a much cheaper battery replacement is probably doing so because they want the additional performance, camera quality, etc. or simply normal wear and tear has added up over time and the repair costs are closer to replacement.

    A company delivering a phone with performance slower than competing devices made a decade earlier similarly has no business claiming that the gains for most users are marginal just because their hardware has lagged far behind. There’s a great example of deceptive marketing here:

    > The Librem 5 utilizes a quad-core arm based CPU, where Purism is the first company to include this CPU in a mobile phone

    https://puri.sm/pages/iphone-vs-librem-5/

    Someone who doesn’t know that quad core ARM CPUs started shipping in phones around 2011 would not understand that to mean “nobody else uses this specific CPU for phones” rather than what they’re hoping the reader will think: “this thing isn’t slower than an iPhone 4S” The security claims are similarly broad and designed to be read as more persuasive than is actually warranted.

    This is disappointing because I like the idea of more open hardware, and it’s certainly the case that a lot of phones are thrown out because they stop getting support, but the more I read their copy the less I trust this company. They’re trying to make an argument for why you shouldn’t hold slower hardware against them, but they way they do it makes me less inclined to trust anything they say without carefully validating it.

  • by yjftsjthsd-h on 10/24/23, 3:47 PM

    > A single intrusive Android, Apple, or Microsoft app enables the developer to conduct audio, video, and physical surveillance on the end user while data mining highly confidential personal, business, medical, legal, employment, and location information from the end user to exploit for profits.

    Y'all do know that modern Android and iOS have permission prompts to prevent this kind of thing, right? And at best this would still be "don't worry that our hardware is inferior because at least we make it harder to install malware" - deflecting doesn't convince me that speed isn't a problem.

  • by neilsimp1 on 10/24/23, 5:28 PM

    FWIW, I have been daily driving a Librem 5 for about 5 months now. It is NOT slow.

    Some JS heavy pages take a long time to load (FF is mostly fine, GNOME Web is not) in the browser. Other apps work totally fine speed-wise.

    There's a lot of opinions in this thread but not a lot of people with firsthand experience.

  • by mrstone on 10/24/23, 5:19 PM

    The phone itself looks like junk from 2011. The ghosting on the screen is apparent in the video demonstrating its "speed". The apps they are demoing look very poorly designed, but all of this to be forgiven because "they aren't collecting your data".

    Disappointing but I didn't really expect much from them.

  • by strangus on 10/24/23, 3:50 PM

    I can't believe this company is still around.

  • by curt15 on 10/24/23, 3:50 PM

    The header bar with nothing but the app's name seems redundant and gives me the impression that I'm looking at a phone-sized window in GNOME rather than an app designed for the entire screen.

  • by renewiltord on 10/24/23, 4:46 PM

    Really hard to make this stuff. It would be pretty neat if whiteboxed phones would show up that are the equivalent of Clevo/Sager that other brands could specialize to and relabel. I imagine there's a lot of work in making the next phone in each of these cases that is probably better spent on the software platform.

    Good for them for trying, of course. Impressive work.

  • by poopooracoocoo on 10/28/23, 4:52 AM

    Incredible. Purism has come a long way. It's amazing to have a truly open phone. A lot of people don't know how hard it is to mod an Android phone. You have to worry about drivers and firmware, security protections and attestation. For me the value of this comes from its freedom. Not from its privacy necessarily, but the hardware switches are great. I hate that I rely on the very many apps for Android and iOS that don't have a web counterpart like Discord. Linux apps on phones are very much a chicken-egg problem and I don't think we can break the duopoly

  • by MerelyMortal on 10/24/23, 5:35 PM

    The video looks pretty good, time to dust off the Librem 5 in my closet and update its software.

  • by whalesalad on 10/24/23, 5:25 PM

    Absolutely nothing about the demo video looks fast.

  • by yellow_lead on 10/24/23, 4:20 PM

    The touch interactions look laggy from my perspective, but I could be wrong.

  • by akioni on 10/24/23, 5:06 PM