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Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

puri.sm

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Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#121

Post by wott »

blihp wrote: post #70

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 d…

> 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?

Considering how fuzzy their language has been on the subject + the fact that they never cleared it despite many people asking for clarification + their track record on "embellishing" reality, we can rather safely assume that what they call 'Electronics' is in fact a dumb PCB, and that most of the components are the same as on the regular version.

In fact, I am even highly suspicious when this post talks about "in-house", "our facility". They have basically never manufactured anything so far, they are not a hardware maker (not even designers, this is outsourced too), there is no sign that they have qualified personal for such operation, the facility they have been talking so far was in fact a warehouse with a bit of final assembly and a bit of warranty service (just last month they said they had no personal there qualified to even simply check or fix the laptops motherboard they get from China), and they have zero cash. This is not consistent with suddenly buying PCB making and assembly line tooling and operating it for a single small series of product. The only possibility is if they got some government contract or something like that.

With this company, you should never forget that the boss is a bullshit artist, and that you should take anything he says with a large grain of salt. It doesn't mean that their projects are complete vaporware, or that they never deliver, but there is great difference between what they claim, what they promise, what they drive people to believe on one side, and what they actually do and achieve on the other side. He says what people want to hear, and it doesn't matter much whether it reflects reality or not. For example, in late 2019 he said that they would produce 50,000 Librem 5 before the end of Q1 2020. Well, as of the end of Q2 2021, they will have produced less than 2,000 unit (IIRC). And of course just a few months before, they completely faked the release in September 2019.

Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#122

Post by bsder »

nikodunk wrote: post #21
jolux wrote: post #4

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…

To your point on production capacity: This reminds me of pushback in the early days of Tesla. Sure they can build 1,000, but can they build 10,000. Now we’re at “sure they can build 500,000, but can they build 5M.” I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. And I agree with you that industrial policy could help jumpstart that demand.

There's a hell of a big difference between producing 10,000 cars and 10,000 of anything electronic.

10,000 cars is real manufacturing volume. 10,000 electronic something hasn't even reached volume discount status.

There is a reason we call 100,000 units "The Valley of Death" in the electronics industry. Your volume is large enough to hit all the problems but not large enough to get the discounts.

Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#123

Post by lugu »

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!

Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#124

Post by whereis »

mPReDiToR wrote: post #97
yumraj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also after the Snowden revelations, I laugh at the idea that American made products are somehow more “secure”. Be that may, but as a US person I’d rather have US intelligence snooping on me than a foreign hostile entity. There are no ifs and buts about it. For folks in other countries, I leave it to them if they are more comfortable with a democracy, with relatively good relations with most countries in the world,…

The foreign entity isn't interested in you. They're interested in you to get to your state. Your state is only interested in you. If they snoop on you they're after you personally.

Foreign entities seek to use info on civilians for malicious targeting ops. This is an example of why the OPM hack[1] was so devastating.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...

Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#125

Post by hervature »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #102
ludocode wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course everyone wants the government to do something about climate change. They're not thinking about what they'll have to sacrifice in order to make it happen. Almost no one is willing to suffer even minor inconvenience in favor of stopping climate change. Let's see the results of a poll that asks if people would be willing to take climate action that doubled the price of airline tickets, or that doubled the pric…

> Almost no one is willing to suffer even minor inconvenience in favor of stopping climate change. People aren't taking minor, inconvenient, personal, moral steps to solve these problems because it's obvious that won't do anything to solve the problem. It's irrelevant whether or not I shut the water off when I brush my teeth when the farm over in the desert is subsidized to run a center-pivot irrigation in system in…

What do you think happens when we stop giving water to fertile lands? Oh, that's right, people are forced to buy produce from local farmers. It's a defeatist attitude to say that buying at a local farmer's market does nothing. At the end of the day, that's what needs to happen. You prefer for it to be government mandated (stop giving them water) whereas others prefer that people make the individual choice and vote with their dollars. More nuanced is that government action doesn't cause fundamental changes in culture. Look at prohibition. Governmental action also makes the new profiters (local farmers in this case) heavily invested in keeping the legislation. This large societal change needs to start with people taking individual responsibility. By actively saying that individuals are inculpable, you are part of the problem.

Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#127

Post by tristan957 »

emacsen wrote: post #61

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 Lib…

I'm personally waiting for the next revision. Hardware specs are not for me at the moment.

Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#128

Post by emacsen »

fsflover wrote: post #113
emacsen wrote: post #61

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 Lib…

Not sure why you are disappointed exactly. Because of the size? It's the only phone with usable kill switches, running fully free software, recommended by the FSF, with good working convergence mode and so on.

> Because of the size?

It's huge and because of that, it's not in the same category as a normal phone. If it had been sold as that, that would be one thing, but it wasn't.

I bought an MNT Reform laptop knowing it won't look like a normal laptop- that's fine. But if they had shown something that looked like a Dell XPS 13 and then shipped something that looks like the MNT Reform does, I'd be just as upset.

> usable kill switches

Physical kill switches, not usable. I believe the Pinephone also has software kill switches which function much the same way.

> running fully free software

Yes, no binary blobs is good, but that doesn't change the issue of the form factor making it unusable.

Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#129

Post by m-ee »

ludocode wrote: post #43
nikodunk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your point on production capacity: This reminds me of pushback in the early days of Tesla. Sure they can build 1,000, but can they build 10,000. Now we’re at “sure they can build 500,000, but can they build 5M.” I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. And I agree with you that industrial policy could help jumpstart that demand.

> I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. It's not a question of demand. A negligible number of customers care where their product is manufactured. They care only about price, which is why manufacturing moved overseas in the first place. What is needed to manufacture phones in the West is protectionism and mercantilism. Our governments would have to subsidize domestically manufactured products, require the…

People said the exact same thing about international trade making war impossible before both world wars.

Re: Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

#130

Post by benlivengood »

ludocode wrote: post #43
nikodunk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your point on production capacity: This reminds me of pushback in the early days of Tesla. Sure they can build 1,000, but can they build 10,000. Now we’re at “sure they can build 500,000, but can they build 5M.” I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. And I agree with you that industrial policy could help jumpstart that demand.

> I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. It's not a question of demand. A negligible number of customers care where their product is manufactured. They care only about price, which is why manufacturing moved overseas in the first place. What is needed to manufacture phones in the West is protectionism and mercantilism. Our governments would have to subsidize domestically manufactured products, require the…

> Unfortunately such policies lead to higher costs for consumers and lower economic growth.

Money circulates faster with more well-paying jobs which would result from increasing on-shore manufacturing.

I think the key is to phase tariffs in linearly over several years (perhaps even decades). That gives the domestic economy time to adjust wages for the higher price of domestic manufacturing and doesn't have an immediate negative result on foreign countries. It should drive foreign countries to improve human rights and labor laws to avoid tariffs and stay in the market. Domestic investors should see increasing tariffs as an investment opportunity instead of a cost, and balancing the rate of tariff increase could be another tool for the central banks to encourage growth.

> Worse, these policies also tend to lead to war. One of the big reasons we've had relative peace between world powers for the last 75 years is that our economies have become closely intertwined, so no politician or corporation can stomach the economic costs of war. If global trade starts to break down we'll head directly into World War 3.

That's why increasing tariffs slowly is appealing; it doesn't destroy global trade by disruption. Countries with minimal labor laws would face a choice; fully isolate (like North Korea) or gradually improve human/labor rights to remain a functional part of the global economy.

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