10 ms·

Manufacturing the Librem 5 USA Phone in the US

305 points by dmytton 5y ago

olah_1 5y ago
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.
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  Maybe I'm missing it, but it doesn't seem obvious if the parts they're using were also manufactured in the US? Which, if they're not, makes sourcing them still an issue if global supply chains were to break down for example.
  - jonchang 5y ago
    https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ Scroll a little bit down and you'll see the country of origin for the parts. Most are of US origin.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      Am I missing something or does that not say where the SoC/processor is made? TFA does not seem to say where the NXP CPU is made either. Or is that categorized under the "Electronics" category?
      - martin8412 5y ago
        That answer would be Korea.
        SahAssar 5y ago
        Where is that stated?
    - martin8412 5y ago
      Maybe you don't know, but Purism tends to publish misleading information. Most of the stuff in that product listing is trivial stuff to produce. The PCB/PCBA entries can basically all be ignored, and all the ICs on those PCBs can basically be assumed to be made in China, except for the NXP i.MX8M which is made in Korea
      - detaro 5y ago
        Do you have a source for where the i.MX8s are made? I tried to figure that out a while back and didn't find a clear answer, although Korea seems likely. (Samsung process which is done at fabs in the US and Korea, but origin documents I found list China for packaging/testing, which is more likely for a Korean fab - but not 100% certain, since chips get flown stupid distances sometimes for packaging, and not 100% if there aren't US-made ones too)
        amosbatto 5y ago
        The NXP i.MX 8M Quad processor in the Librem 5 has "Made in Korea" stamped on them and there have been news articles published about how NXP was switching its foundry work from TSMC to Samsung. By the way, the i.MX 8M is designed in Austin, Texas (by the old Motorola division, which turned into Freescale and then was bought by NXP). For more info, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#86-where-is-the-librem-5-assembled-and-where-are-its-components-made https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
  - mboperator 5y ago
    This page has a table of components and their corresponding country of origin https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
- deeviant 5y ago
  Ah, what is a "bad" price for an massively underwhelming piece of hardware, in your book, then?
  - bartvk 5y ago
    Come on, the Purism people have put up a huge effort. You can't just casually the product "massively underwhelming" without stating your reasons for doing so.
    - martin8412 5y ago
      Well.. The CPU is multiple generations behind anything else on the market. Power management is basically non existent. They've only recently managed to get cameras working sorta, but not really. It was sold as a customer device, not a damn development platform. They started crowd funding in 2017, and so far have only delivered less than two months worth of devices to customers. Purism is violating the law on a daily basis.
      - amosbatto 5y ago
        Yes, the CPU is weak, suspend-to-RAM hasn't yet been added to the mainline Linux driver for the i.MX 8M, camera auto-focus doesn't yet work, and lot of work is needed for full functionality of the Megapixels camera app and use of an OpenPGP smartcard, but you are ignoring all the progress that has been made. Purism started with a new chip that didn't yet have good mainline Linux support and had to make several hundred commits to mainline Linux to support half a dozen new chips. Purism created a new mobile environment for Linux, which 65% of PinePhone users say in a poll is their favorite interface. Purism created the first free/open hardware phone since the Golden Delicious GTA04 in 2014 and manufactured the first phone in the US since the Motorola Moto X in 2013. The Librem 5 contains 6 innovations in the mobile phone industry, which is more innovations than any phone since the Samsung Galaxy S5 released in 2014. This is the first phone ever produced where the manufacturer promises lifetime software updates and the processor will be produced by the manufacturer (NXP) until at least Jan. 2033. All of this info is on the FAQ: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
stu2b50 5y ago
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.
- fsflover 5y ago
  This is not just about the specs: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#14-do-the-specs-justify-paying-599-799-for-the-librem-5 https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque.... By the way, there is also China-made version for $800.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    The point is the device is clearly not competitive on specs. You have to put a lot of value in it being an open platform to find it attractive. It is the kind of specs you typically find on $30 phones. https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Mobile-Prepaid-Smartphone-Locked/dp/B08J59PM55 https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Mobile-Prepaid-Smartphone-Lock...
    - danhor 5y ago
      That's subsidized via the sim-lock. The "real" prize is probably more like 80$.
- Answerawake 5y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong but the choice of SoC was due to the open nature of it and not the origin. All of the other limitations stem from the choice of SoC it seems.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Is it actually more open than a typical SoC? Also asking for the PinePhone. Also, will it ever get firmware updates? Also, I’m not even sure we have source code for the existing firmwares.
jolux 5y ago
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.
- bluGill 5y ago
  There is also debate on if the US should invest in that. Political tensions with China are one factor. However remember there are limited resources so investing in this means something else can't be invested in. Really this should be a world wide concern: if China is so bad how can we build up someone more friendly - it need not be the US. Could be Germany, could be Kenya (I understand China is investing there)
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I've bought a few non-consumer electronics from Germany all manufactured in Germany including the housing/plastic parts. Quality is exceptional and everything is to the spec and well documented. The advantage of having semiconductor/electronics manufacturing in the US would be cheap land/labor, quantity of labor, gov incentives, regulation waivers, particularly in the American Southwest: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-southwest-is-americas-new-factory-hub-cranes-everywhere-11622554044 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-southwest-is-americas-new-f...
  - jolux 5y ago
    I agree, but part of the problem with manufacturing in China is that American companies have become complicit in the abuses of a brutal authoritarian regime. The manufacturing efficiencies cannot be ignored, but it would be wise to take this into consideration as well moving forward. I’m just not sure if there’s a reasonable way to do so. This may be an inevitable consequence of globalization in the short-term.
sokoloff 5y ago
$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".
- EForEndeavour 5y ago
  What's the basis for your impression that this "seems" a significant premium over the actual cost differential? I have zero idea of what it costs a company to manufacture a phone in China versus the USA, so I'm genuinely curious.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I've priced out PCBA (of a handful of boards substantially less complex than the Librem, of course) in the US and overseas. In volumes of 1K, the US suppliers were closer to 2.5-3.5x overseas rather than 5x. In writing this, I just realized that I can't do math. I was thinking it was a 5x multiplier rather than a 2.5x multiplier, which seems pretty reasonable.
- tashoecraft 5y ago
  The amount of overhead to spin up a US based manufacturing process for an already niche item is going to be expensive. If someone has that type of hard requirement, they must not have many alternatives and should pay the premium for it. I'm sure if there was enough demand the cost would come down.
- bluGill 5y ago
  They need a lot of customers to make it worthwhile to bring US costs down. Right now US production is mostly used for prototypes where high production costs don't matter as much as flexibility to make changes. If you need 10 made in the US that is good enough. If you need millions made in the US then it would be worth investing in all the things needed to manufacture something cheaply. With enough investment per-unit costs in the US can be lowest in the world - but few things are worth putting that much investment in when China already has most of what you need and the supply chain is shorter. Everything I said about the US applies in some form to every other country to some extent.
nivenkos 5y ago
The US is the biggest surveillance state of all, why is this a step forward?
- nickserv 5y ago
  The West in general has been on a downward trend when it comes to manufacturing. Areas that were relatively wealthy decades ago now have high rates of unemployment, crime, drug abuse, shortened lifespans etc. If projects like this work out it could help reverse that trend.
- Proven 5y ago
  Because it's not made by a company connected to the state.
krrrh 5y ago
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/ https://puri.sm/posts/made-in-usa-librem-key/
yifanlu 5y ago
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.
- cle 5y ago
  Even assuming that all hardware is backdoored, it can still make sense to use hardware from your own country, since your own government probably doesn’t want to harm its own economic interests.
  - ahmedalsudani 5y ago
    On the other hand, your own state has more of an incentive to control your behaviour. As with everything else, think through the threat model.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      I’m more worried about the other state understanding the topology of my state in higher resolution than my own state does. The ramifications are endless, and I believe that to be the more grave threat (aka undermine society at its cultural fabric while stealing/undermining the economy and crippling the military).
      - ahmedalsudani 5y ago
        Sure, arrive at your own conclusions :)
Jabbles 5y ago
Google/Motorola tried this before, but it didn't work out: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27643474 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27643474 I don't know what went wrong there, or what lessons could have been learned.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Actually, that's interesting in that 1. they imply that it wasn't a "made in USA" issue and that the problem was just that they were only making the Moto X there and it didn't do well in the market, and 2. "Motorola says that the Moto X smartphone will still continue to be manufactured at plants in China and Brazil." -> if they're still making stuff in Brazil, that implies that it's really not as simple as "can't make anything outside of China".
  - ac29 5y ago
    Tariffs on some electronics can be insane in Brazil - for example "At a time when the [Playstation 4] was selling for $399 in the U.S., an equivalent system was heading to Brazil for $1,899". source: https://tedium.co/2015/07/16/sega-master-system-brazil/ https://tedium.co/2015/07/16/sega-master-system-brazil/
Romulus968 5y ago
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.
- taylorfinley 5y ago
  For perspective a name-brand 256gb microsd card currently retails for roughly $30. The value here isn't in raw specs, it's in privacy and respect for the user, which is a total blow out in favor of the librem.
  - Romulus968 5y ago
    Yeah I definitely see the value in privacy and respect for the user, and Librem is king there, but that still doesn't justify a $2,000 price tag to me. I wouldn't pay $15,000 for a Ford Pinto because it has bulletproof windows.
- Proven 5y ago
  > The iPhone 12 Pro Max is $1,099 Is it made in the US? If not, you should compare it with the other Librem model. I am interested in Librem 5 phones, precisely because they are not iOS or Android. No need to deal with their rules. I use my phone very little - so I can't say I care about the screen quality or performance.
Ccecil 5y ago
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.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> Making a convergent operating system that is not Android nor iO "convergent"?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  In this case, that means that it converges with desktop software. From what I can tell, GTK and QT have both been shifting their focus to touch-based, scalable UIs. The result is native code that feels just as good with a mouse as it does on a touchscreen.
failwhaleshark 5y ago
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?
- gabrielsroka 5y ago
  The 362.874 kg gorilla.
emacsen 5y ago
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-purism-and-the-librem-5-part-1 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.
- fsflover 5y ago
  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.
  - emacsen 5y ago
    > 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.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > I believe the Pinephone also has software kill switches which function much the same way. Pinephone has hardware kill switches which are not usable/convenient. You have to open the back cover to access them and they are very tiny. You won't be able to switch the microphone on when you receive a call, unlike with Librem 5.
tomcam 5y ago
> 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
wdb 5y ago
I will wait for the European edition. I can imagine its a unique selling point for people in North America
blihp 5y ago
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/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  From your referenced page > The Librem 5 USA will have a user-replaceable assembled in USA modem. The Gemalto modem chip itself is supplied from Germany, and we will be manufacturing our premium Gemalto M.2 modems in our USA facility.
  - sct202 5y ago
    I think he's referencing how some of the chips on the boards are unlikely to be US sourced given Librems low volumes, but seem to be consolidated as USA because they were soldered on a PCB in the US. For example, from Librem's spec sheet at the bottom of that page lists 2 components from STMicroelectronics: Accelerometer (LSM9DS1) Country of Origin is listed as Malta https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm9ds1.html#sample-buy https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm9ds1.html#sample-b... GPS (TESEO LIV3) Country of Origin is listed as South Korea https://www.st.com/en/positioning/teseo-liv3f.html#sample-buy https://www.st.com/en/positioning/teseo-liv3f.html#sample-bu...
- wott 5y ago
  > 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.
zf00002 5y ago
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.
fouric 5y ago
> 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?
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  I don’t know why they won’t just come out and say who the manufacturer was, to give the hypothetical some real-world context. I wouldn’t want to assume that they are referring to Texas Instruments. Sarcasm aside, I appreciated the humor they put into that paragraph.
perihelions 5y ago
This hack is remarkable. https://puri.sm/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/purism-librem-5-usa-made-in-usa-electronics-2021-05-emmc-test-pins.jpeg 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."
auraham 5y ago
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.
627467 5y ago
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.
kaba0 5y ago
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?
- fsflover 5y ago
  https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#43-how-secure-is-the-librem-5-compared-to-an-android-phone https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Thanks for the link! Some nitpicks (not directed at you at all): > When we develop security solutions, we develop them without looking down on the user or thinking of them as som[e]body that we have to protect almost like a parent-child relationship. We try to build a solution that gives them control over their own security. That's many words for saying we don't have any sort of security measures. > Because all the code in the root file system of the Librem 5 is free/open source, all of it can be reviewed to verify that it doesn't contain backdoors and doesn't do anything that the user doesn't want it to do At most it answers privacy but not security. Also, non-existent security can so easily add a "backdoor", especially on top of an all-memory-unsafe environment where memory bugs are everywhere. But I will give them that they do list basically all my gripes with it: > It lacks a secure boot process to verify that none of the boot files have been changed. > It lacks a hardware-backed key store. > The apps are not run in a secure sandbox. > PureOS doesn't have shim kernel drivers that do most of their execution in userspace libraries like Android and iOS. > PureOS doesn't have low-level protections such as Control Flow Integrity and ShadowCallStack in Android and Pointer Authentication Codes in iOS. > Most of the operating system and applications are written in memory unsafe languages like C and C++. > The Librem 5 lacks a permission system where each app is required to ask the user for permission to access parts of the phone like Android has. And unfortunately the answer to these is that there are some distant plans for some of these. Hopefully both desktop and mobile Linux will improve heavily in this area in the coming years.
clarkevans 5y ago
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.
lugu 5y ago
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!
Jerry2 5y ago
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.
- amosbatto 5y ago
  It would be almost impossible to make a phone with parts that are entire manufactured in the US. Most silicon foundry work is done in Taiwan (TSMC, UMC, Vanguard) and S. Korea (Samsung, DB HiTek). See: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-world-depends-on-taiwan-for-semiconductors.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-w... However, if you are interested where the Librem 5 parts are made, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#86-where-is-the-librem-5-assembled-and-where-are-its-components-made https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

305 points by dmytton 5y ago

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.

ryukafalz 5y ago
Maybe I'm missing it, but it doesn't seem obvious if the parts they're using were also manufactured in the US? Which, if they're not, makes sourcing them still an issue if global supply chains were to break down for example.
- jonchang 5y ago
  https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ Scroll a little bit down and you'll see the country of origin for the parts. Most are of US origin.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    Am I missing something or does that not say where the SoC/processor is made? TFA does not seem to say where the NXP CPU is made either. Or is that categorized under the "Electronics" category?
    - martin8412 5y ago
      That answer would be Korea.
      - SahAssar 5y ago
        Where is that stated?
  - martin8412 5y ago
    Maybe you don't know, but Purism tends to publish misleading information. Most of the stuff in that product listing is trivial stuff to produce. The PCB/PCBA entries can basically all be ignored, and all the ICs on those PCBs can basically be assumed to be made in China, except for the NXP i.MX8M which is made in Korea
    - detaro 5y ago
      Do you have a source for where the i.MX8s are made? I tried to figure that out a while back and didn't find a clear answer, although Korea seems likely. (Samsung process which is done at fabs in the US and Korea, but origin documents I found list China for packaging/testing, which is more likely for a Korean fab - but not 100% certain, since chips get flown stupid distances sometimes for packaging, and not 100% if there aren't US-made ones too)
      - amosbatto 5y ago
        The NXP i.MX 8M Quad processor in the Librem 5 has "Made in Korea" stamped on them and there have been news articles published about how NXP was switching its foundry work from TSMC to Samsung. By the way, the i.MX 8M is designed in Austin, Texas (by the old Motorola division, which turned into Freescale and then was bought by NXP). For more info, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#86-where-is-the-librem-5-assembled-and-where-are-its-components-made https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
- mboperator 5y ago
  This page has a table of components and their corresponding country of origin https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
deeviant 5y ago
Ah, what is a "bad" price for an massively underwhelming piece of hardware, in your book, then?
- bartvk 5y ago
  Come on, the Purism people have put up a huge effort. You can't just casually the product "massively underwhelming" without stating your reasons for doing so.
  - martin8412 5y ago
    Well.. The CPU is multiple generations behind anything else on the market. Power management is basically non existent. They've only recently managed to get cameras working sorta, but not really. It was sold as a customer device, not a damn development platform. They started crowd funding in 2017, and so far have only delivered less than two months worth of devices to customers. Purism is violating the law on a daily basis.
    - amosbatto 5y ago
      Yes, the CPU is weak, suspend-to-RAM hasn't yet been added to the mainline Linux driver for the i.MX 8M, camera auto-focus doesn't yet work, and lot of work is needed for full functionality of the Megapixels camera app and use of an OpenPGP smartcard, but you are ignoring all the progress that has been made. Purism started with a new chip that didn't yet have good mainline Linux support and had to make several hundred commits to mainline Linux to support half a dozen new chips. Purism created a new mobile environment for Linux, which 65% of PinePhone users say in a poll is their favorite interface. Purism created the first free/open hardware phone since the Golden Delicious GTA04 in 2014 and manufactured the first phone in the US since the Motorola Moto X in 2013. The Librem 5 contains 6 innovations in the mobile phone industry, which is more innovations than any phone since the Samsung Galaxy S5 released in 2014. This is the first phone ever produced where the manufacturer promises lifetime software updates and the processor will be produced by the manufacturer (NXP) until at least Jan. 2033. All of this info is on the FAQ: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

stu2b50 5y ago

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.

fsflover 5y ago
This is not just about the specs: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#14-do-the-specs-justify-paying-599-799-for-the-librem-5 https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque.... By the way, there is also China-made version for $800.
- jandrese 5y ago
  The point is the device is clearly not competitive on specs. You have to put a lot of value in it being an open platform to find it attractive. It is the kind of specs you typically find on $30 phones. https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Mobile-Prepaid-Smartphone-Locked/dp/B08J59PM55 https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Mobile-Prepaid-Smartphone-Lock...
  - danhor 5y ago
    That's subsidized via the sim-lock. The "real" prize is probably more like 80$.
Answerawake 5y ago
Correct me if I am wrong but the choice of SoC was due to the open nature of it and not the origin. All of the other limitations stem from the choice of SoC it seems.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Is it actually more open than a typical SoC? Also asking for the PinePhone. Also, will it ever get firmware updates? Also, I’m not even sure we have source code for the existing firmwares.

jolux 5y ago

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.

bluGill 5y ago
There is also debate on if the US should invest in that. Political tensions with China are one factor. However remember there are limited resources so investing in this means something else can't be invested in. Really this should be a world wide concern: if China is so bad how can we build up someone more friendly - it need not be the US. Could be Germany, could be Kenya (I understand China is investing there)
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I've bought a few non-consumer electronics from Germany all manufactured in Germany including the housing/plastic parts. Quality is exceptional and everything is to the spec and well documented. The advantage of having semiconductor/electronics manufacturing in the US would be cheap land/labor, quantity of labor, gov incentives, regulation waivers, particularly in the American Southwest: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-southwest-is-americas-new-factory-hub-cranes-everywhere-11622554044 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-southwest-is-americas-new-f...
- jolux 5y ago
  I agree, but part of the problem with manufacturing in China is that American companies have become complicit in the abuses of a brutal authoritarian regime. The manufacturing efficiencies cannot be ignored, but it would be wise to take this into consideration as well moving forward. I’m just not sure if there’s a reasonable way to do so. This may be an inevitable consequence of globalization in the short-term.

sokoloff 5y ago

$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".

EForEndeavour 5y ago
What's the basis for your impression that this "seems" a significant premium over the actual cost differential? I have zero idea of what it costs a company to manufacture a phone in China versus the USA, so I'm genuinely curious.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I've priced out PCBA (of a handful of boards substantially less complex than the Librem, of course) in the US and overseas. In volumes of 1K, the US suppliers were closer to 2.5-3.5x overseas rather than 5x. In writing this, I just realized that I can't do math. I was thinking it was a 5x multiplier rather than a 2.5x multiplier, which seems pretty reasonable.
tashoecraft 5y ago
The amount of overhead to spin up a US based manufacturing process for an already niche item is going to be expensive. If someone has that type of hard requirement, they must not have many alternatives and should pay the premium for it. I'm sure if there was enough demand the cost would come down.
bluGill 5y ago
They need a lot of customers to make it worthwhile to bring US costs down. Right now US production is mostly used for prototypes where high production costs don't matter as much as flexibility to make changes. If you need 10 made in the US that is good enough. If you need millions made in the US then it would be worth investing in all the things needed to manufacture something cheaply. With enough investment per-unit costs in the US can be lowest in the world - but few things are worth putting that much investment in when China already has most of what you need and the supply chain is shorter. Everything I said about the US applies in some form to every other country to some extent.

nivenkos 5y ago

The US is the biggest surveillance state of all, why is this a step forward?

nickserv 5y ago
The West in general has been on a downward trend when it comes to manufacturing. Areas that were relatively wealthy decades ago now have high rates of unemployment, crime, drug abuse, shortened lifespans etc. If projects like this work out it could help reverse that trend.
Proven 5y ago
Because it's not made by a company connected to the state.

krrrh 5y ago

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/ https://puri.sm/posts/made-in-usa-librem-key/

yifanlu 5y ago

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.

cle 5y ago
Even assuming that all hardware is backdoored, it can still make sense to use hardware from your own country, since your own government probably doesn’t want to harm its own economic interests.
- ahmedalsudani 5y ago
  On the other hand, your own state has more of an incentive to control your behaviour. As with everything else, think through the threat model.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    I’m more worried about the other state understanding the topology of my state in higher resolution than my own state does. The ramifications are endless, and I believe that to be the more grave threat (aka undermine society at its cultural fabric while stealing/undermining the economy and crippling the military).
    - ahmedalsudani 5y ago
      Sure, arrive at your own conclusions :)

Jabbles 5y ago

Google/Motorola tried this before, but it didn't work out: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27643474 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27643474 I don't know what went wrong there, or what lessons could have been learned.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Actually, that's interesting in that 1. they imply that it wasn't a "made in USA" issue and that the problem was just that they were only making the Moto X there and it didn't do well in the market, and 2. "Motorola says that the Moto X smartphone will still continue to be manufactured at plants in China and Brazil." -> if they're still making stuff in Brazil, that implies that it's really not as simple as "can't make anything outside of China".
- ac29 5y ago
  Tariffs on some electronics can be insane in Brazil - for example "At a time when the [Playstation 4] was selling for $399 in the U.S., an equivalent system was heading to Brazil for $1,899". source: https://tedium.co/2015/07/16/sega-master-system-brazil/ https://tedium.co/2015/07/16/sega-master-system-brazil/

Romulus968 5y ago

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.

taylorfinley 5y ago
For perspective a name-brand 256gb microsd card currently retails for roughly $30. The value here isn't in raw specs, it's in privacy and respect for the user, which is a total blow out in favor of the librem.
- Romulus968 5y ago
  Yeah I definitely see the value in privacy and respect for the user, and Librem is king there, but that still doesn't justify a $2,000 price tag to me. I wouldn't pay $15,000 for a Ford Pinto because it has bulletproof windows.
Proven 5y ago
> The iPhone 12 Pro Max is $1,099 Is it made in the US? If not, you should compare it with the other Librem model. I am interested in Librem 5 phones, precisely because they are not iOS or Android. No need to deal with their rules. I use my phone very little - so I can't say I care about the screen quality or performance.

Ccecil 5y ago

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.

jrochkind1 5y ago

> Making a convergent operating system that is not Android nor iO "convergent"?

smoldesu 5y ago
In this case, that means that it converges with desktop software. From what I can tell, GTK and QT have both been shifting their focus to touch-based, scalable UIs. The result is native code that feels just as good with a mouse as it does on a touchscreen.

failwhaleshark 5y ago

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?

gabrielsroka 5y ago
The 362.874 kg gorilla.

emacsen 5y ago

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-purism-and-the-librem-5-part-1 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.

fsflover 5y ago
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.
- emacsen 5y ago
  > 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.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > I believe the Pinephone also has software kill switches which function much the same way. Pinephone has hardware kill switches which are not usable/convenient. You have to open the back cover to access them and they are very tiny. You won't be able to switch the microphone on when you receive a call, unlike with Librem 5.

tomcam 5y ago

> 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

wdb 5y ago

I will wait for the European edition. I can imagine its a unique selling point for people in North America

blihp 5y ago

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/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
From your referenced page > The Librem 5 USA will have a user-replaceable assembled in USA modem. The Gemalto modem chip itself is supplied from Germany, and we will be manufacturing our premium Gemalto M.2 modems in our USA facility.
- sct202 5y ago
  I think he's referencing how some of the chips on the boards are unlikely to be US sourced given Librems low volumes, but seem to be consolidated as USA because they were soldered on a PCB in the US. For example, from Librem's spec sheet at the bottom of that page lists 2 components from STMicroelectronics: Accelerometer (LSM9DS1) Country of Origin is listed as Malta https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm9ds1.html#sample-buy https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm9ds1.html#sample-b... GPS (TESEO LIV3) Country of Origin is listed as South Korea https://www.st.com/en/positioning/teseo-liv3f.html#sample-buy https://www.st.com/en/positioning/teseo-liv3f.html#sample-bu...
wott 5y ago
> 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.

zf00002 5y ago

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.

fouric 5y ago

> 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?

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
I don’t know why they won’t just come out and say who the manufacturer was, to give the hypothetical some real-world context. I wouldn’t want to assume that they are referring to Texas Instruments. Sarcasm aside, I appreciated the humor they put into that paragraph.

perihelions 5y ago

This hack is remarkable. https://puri.sm/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/purism-librem-5-usa-made-in-usa-electronics-2021-05-emmc-test-pins.jpeg 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."

auraham 5y ago

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.

627467 5y ago

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.

kaba0 5y ago

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?

fsflover 5y ago
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#43-how-secure-is-the-librem-5-compared-to-an-android-phone https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
- kaba0 5y ago
  Thanks for the link! Some nitpicks (not directed at you at all): > When we develop security solutions, we develop them without looking down on the user or thinking of them as som[e]body that we have to protect almost like a parent-child relationship. We try to build a solution that gives them control over their own security. That's many words for saying we don't have any sort of security measures. > Because all the code in the root file system of the Librem 5 is free/open source, all of it can be reviewed to verify that it doesn't contain backdoors and doesn't do anything that the user doesn't want it to do At most it answers privacy but not security. Also, non-existent security can so easily add a "backdoor", especially on top of an all-memory-unsafe environment where memory bugs are everywhere. But I will give them that they do list basically all my gripes with it: > It lacks a secure boot process to verify that none of the boot files have been changed. > It lacks a hardware-backed key store. > The apps are not run in a secure sandbox. > PureOS doesn't have shim kernel drivers that do most of their execution in userspace libraries like Android and iOS. > PureOS doesn't have low-level protections such as Control Flow Integrity and ShadowCallStack in Android and Pointer Authentication Codes in iOS. > Most of the operating system and applications are written in memory unsafe languages like C and C++. > The Librem 5 lacks a permission system where each app is required to ask the user for permission to access parts of the phone like Android has. And unfortunately the answer to these is that there are some distant plans for some of these. Hopefully both desktop and mobile Linux will improve heavily in this area in the coming years.

clarkevans 5y ago

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.

lugu 5y ago

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!

Jerry2 5y ago

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.

amosbatto 5y ago
It would be almost impossible to make a phone with parts that are entire manufactured in the US. Most silicon foundry work is done in Taiwan (TSMC, UMC, Vanguard) and S. Korea (Samsung, DB HiTek). See: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-world-depends-on-taiwan-for-semiconductors.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-w... However, if you are interested where the Librem 5 parts are made, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#86-where-is-the-librem-5-assembled-and-where-are-its-components-made https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...