Purism found a way to make its Linux phone even more expensive: meet the $2,199 Liberty Phone
  • @CmarEnglish
    33•1 year ago

    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?

  • @regnskogEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    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)

  • @muaveriEnglish
    8•1 year ago
    • 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
  • @[email protected]English
    6•1 year ago

    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.

    • kroldenEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      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.

        • kroldenEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Yeah its kinda annoying. I guess I just have to assume it got posted when I get a timeout

  • Daniel JacksonEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    As the article says, I’m not denying that Purism has contributed greatly to the fully OSS Linux mobile ecosystem. But it’s not like they’re the only one, and they’re relying on a lot of other people’s work as well.

    But this is becoming more and more outrageous in terms of price/quality.

  • YAMAPIKARIYAEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    Lmao. At this point buy any android phone and just put a custom ROM on it.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      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

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      Funnily enough, this is for running Linux not Android and the best devices for running mobile Linux are all either older models (used Oneplus 6t doesn’t cost much) or pretty cheap (Pinephone pro).

  • @[email protected]English
    3•1 year ago

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

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    This feels like a very bad joke.

    You could buy one of those embedded CPU/RAM motherboard, 3d print a tablet like case for it + design a screen for that case, install linux with a GUI supporting touchscreen and you created a much better product for the fraction of the cost.

    How do they even find customers to buy this thing?