If you're wondering why it's so expensive, it's a confluence of factors:
- Making things in the us is expensive. This isn't the root cause but leads to the next point...
- Phones are low margin devices. Most consumers are intensely price sensitive. Even if a US-made phone cost only $40 more, it'd still be at a serious disadvantage.
- Therefore, there's no point in competing on price. The batch size of this is limited. Manufacturing has limited advantage of scale. They need to find another hook for value-add.
- And thus, a huge part of the value add of this device is that it's certified "secure", and with a traceable supply chain.
They will probably sell a reasonable amount of these, to interested parties, but this is not likely to be a profit center for them. It's as much as a real attempt at achieving their goals, as it is marketing that furthers their "privacy/integrity" branding goals. Marketing with a real and good product behind it is a great move if you can pull it off, and they seem to be doing a great job!
Assembly in the US is expensive, and what is the benefit to the end user?
We're looking at manufacturing hardware, and considering Mexico for assembly (if anyone has experience with this, please let me know).
Our initial thinking is
1) lower cost than the US
2) geographically closer
2a) lower environmental footprint in shipping
2b) quicker time from assembly to customer
2c) easier to visit the factories, solve problems, manage the relationship
3) the obvious geopolitical/tax/duty implications
I wonder if Purism would have as much impact with Made in the USA, as they would with Made in North America? Or even Made in The Americas - if there are other countries outside of Mexico and Canada that have the requisite manufacturing capabilities.
In our current climate more so than just the supply chain oversight that some customers will want and the other customers that will pay a premium to support an alternative to Google/Apple, also unless you are a massive corporation, you are at the back of the line for procurement of components and assembly. The big folks are feeling it too. Localized supply chain is critical to making sure we can have nice things going forward. Some people are willing to put the money up.
Mexico is a very solid place to look. In fact I think over the next five years our partnership with Mexico for manufacturing is going to explode. They have the people and facilities to do the work and are our neighbors.
Purism though, with what they are doing. Like OP at the top of the thread said, is making a statement, and a powerful one, by doing what they are doing and it's part of their mission because they are making phones and people, correctly, have a lot of anxiety about their current ad slabs.
I think your reasoning for Mexico manufacture is on point and you'll really see rewards establishing that production relationship.
If you don't mind me asking, what are you building? Your username says to me guitar pedals. Link?
Even if you were to buy into the proposition that "made in the USA" delivers any extra security, the foreign made SOC is such an enormous part of the overall system IMHO that everything else is nearly meaningless. And their table has several rows about PCBs, but do they build their own cameras? If not, where do they source them from? What about microphones and speakers?
[Disclaimer: My employer manufactures phones; I don't speak for them, nor do I work in phone hardware]
Right unless they wrote the RTL and fabbed themselves, verified the netlist and compared to the golden master and shipped it securely, all the rest of the efforts likely don’t provide much more than a false sense of security. In fact you’re much likely better off using a reflashed Pixel 5a.
I don’t like this kind of product. I think it’s exploiting the paranoid and creating the belief that privacy is obtainable in 2023 which it absolutely is not.
The video on their website is even more damaging...
Edit: Note, this is NOT a claim about this company, their security, or practices -- just a look at the "Made in USA" label they press heavily
"The integrated circuits can come from outside the united states"
A bit of research seems to indicate that this is a fuzzy system..
> The product’s final assembly or processing must take place in the U.S. The Commission then considers other factors, including how much of the product’s total manufacturing costs can be assigned to U.S. parts and processing, and how far removed any foreign content is from the finished product. [1]
So basically, they could have a foreign made network card, cpu, OS... but if you're making a $10,000 car and the total cost of the foreign assistance is <~$500?, it can still be Made in America while being 100% all logic from foreign sources and highly insecure (as long as the dollar costs work out satisfactory to a commission of people)
You can basically skirt the rules by taking 'assembled in America' another level or two deeper -- like they have. They also do the OS in-states, which they can likely claim is a "huge processing effort" -- which could make the hardware aspects and origin less important in the commissions review
purism doesn't have the benefit of the doubt anymore.
in past i rooted for them and assumed everything was innocent mistakes... but receiving their borderline illegal investment scam emails every month and the way they deny librem13/15 quality issues just taught me it is pure malice.
While the 13/15 had poor build, the Librem 14 is quite well built and the most secure laptop on the market today (outside of proprietary closed-source.)
2200$ for a phone, which has wanky software support at its best.
Come on, this is getting ridiculous. Phosh is nowhere stable, and these claims cannot be true with an 8 year old SoC from NXP.
I get that made in USA is your brand and whatnot, but people expect a phone to be able to run google maps in the browser, and whatsapp, and instagram in parallel.
If it turns off and reboots while doing that because it runs out of memory, you cannot claim it's a smartphone.
Even the nokia 3310 generation phones could do that with WAP internet access and GPRS. Now it's more than 20 years later and people's expectations are way higher than back then.
How many do you think will recommend a librem phone if your focus is now another not really supported platform instead of improving the software than runs it?
If software is your problem (which I think it is) make it fundable directly. Allow people to support the software development directly, and start a foundation for that. But this 2200$ price tag when a competitor's product has more than 10x the featureset for half the price...there's a limit of what people can take.
I don't know why would I want to use Google Maps in a browser when there's Pure Maps, but I just tried and I can use it just fine on the base Librem 5 model with 3GB RAM. I also have several games installed on it, including even some Android games that work fine, so I don't get what you're talking about at all.
Also, Nokia 3310 had no WAP and no GPRS. The next model, Nokia 3410, had WAP over CSD but no GPRS, and certainly wasn't suitable for anything like Google Maps which did not even exist back then.
[edit] The parent has moved the goalposts quite far in a sneaky edit, but even the edited claims are pretty unreasonable. Of course there was IM running in the background and there was still plenty of free RAM left for something more, and no, "Nokia 3310 generation phones" couldn't do anything like that for at least a few more years :)
The main market for this would realistically the US government or government contractors if the US made some sort of rule requiring the government and contractors to use these types of phones
LOL, I'd want to build it myself at that price, with a hot-air tool and microscope. Like they used to offer a build-your-own engine program on the Corvette assembly line.
> All the electronics of the Liberty Phone are made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled at that same facility, [...] By doing all electronics fabrication, assembly, and fulfillment within the same facility Purism can oversee each stage of the production.
Reading this I just imagine a ASML machine, fabricating the wavers for their SoC, next to a photochemical vacuum bonding machine making the OLED screens. Absurd nonsense, I would be very surprised if they even have pick and place machines in their US factory, some hot glue guns at best.
I don't really care about the supply chain all being traced to being USA made. The USA is not a particularly trustworthy government, and in my experience auditing various US facilities, their physical security was always worse than many 'developing' nations.
Only phone like this that seems good to me is the FairPhone, except it doesn't work that well in the US supposedly.
Readit News
- Making things in the us is expensive. This isn't the root cause but leads to the next point...
- Phones are low margin devices. Most consumers are intensely price sensitive. Even if a US-made phone cost only $40 more, it'd still be at a serious disadvantage.
- Therefore, there's no point in competing on price. The batch size of this is limited. Manufacturing has limited advantage of scale. They need to find another hook for value-add.
- And thus, a huge part of the value add of this device is that it's certified "secure", and with a traceable supply chain.
They will probably sell a reasonable amount of these, to interested parties, but this is not likely to be a profit center for them. It's as much as a real attempt at achieving their goals, as it is marketing that furthers their "privacy/integrity" branding goals. Marketing with a real and good product behind it is a great move if you can pull it off, and they seem to be doing a great job!
We're looking at manufacturing hardware, and considering Mexico for assembly (if anyone has experience with this, please let me know).
Our initial thinking is
1) lower cost than the US 2) geographically closer 2a) lower environmental footprint in shipping 2b) quicker time from assembly to customer 2c) easier to visit the factories, solve problems, manage the relationship 3) the obvious geopolitical/tax/duty implications
I wonder if Purism would have as much impact with Made in the USA, as they would with Made in North America? Or even Made in The Americas - if there are other countries outside of Mexico and Canada that have the requisite manufacturing capabilities.
Until that sort of thing is fixed, it’s not helpful for manufacturing trustworthy devices.
Mexico is a very solid place to look. In fact I think over the next five years our partnership with Mexico for manufacturing is going to explode. They have the people and facilities to do the work and are our neighbors.
Purism though, with what they are doing. Like OP at the top of the thread said, is making a statement, and a powerful one, by doing what they are doing and it's part of their mission because they are making phones and people, correctly, have a lot of anxiety about their current ad slabs.
I think your reasoning for Mexico manufacture is on point and you'll really see rewards establishing that production relationship.
If you don't mind me asking, what are you building? Your username says to me guitar pedals. Link?
[Disclaimer: My employer manufactures phones; I don't speak for them, nor do I work in phone hardware]
I don’t like this kind of product. I think it’s exploiting the paranoid and creating the belief that privacy is obtainable in 2023 which it absolutely is not.
Personally, I'd prefer they got their existing phone working well...
Quote: "All the electronics of the Liberty Phone is made in our USA facility, and the entire phone is assembled in the USA"
Table of origin says:
WiFi Card India
Both can't be true.
Edit: Note, this is NOT a claim about this company, their security, or practices -- just a look at the "Made in USA" label they press heavily
"The integrated circuits can come from outside the united states"
A bit of research seems to indicate that this is a fuzzy system..
> The product’s final assembly or processing must take place in the U.S. The Commission then considers other factors, including how much of the product’s total manufacturing costs can be assigned to U.S. parts and processing, and how far removed any foreign content is from the finished product. [1]
So basically, they could have a foreign made network card, cpu, OS... but if you're making a $10,000 car and the total cost of the foreign assistance is <~$500?, it can still be Made in America while being 100% all logic from foreign sources and highly insecure (as long as the dollar costs work out satisfactory to a commission of people)
You can basically skirt the rules by taking 'assembled in America' another level or two deeper -- like they have. They also do the OS in-states, which they can likely claim is a "huge processing effort" -- which could make the hardware aspects and origin less important in the commissions review
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/bu...
in past i rooted for them and assumed everything was innocent mistakes... but receiving their borderline illegal investment scam emails every month and the way they deny librem13/15 quality issues just taught me it is pure malice.
Deleted Comment
It doesn't inspire confidence.
Agreed that there is no way the same facility is manufacturing the chips and handling assembly as implied by their language
Come on, this is getting ridiculous. Phosh is nowhere stable, and these claims cannot be true with an 8 year old SoC from NXP.
I get that made in USA is your brand and whatnot, but people expect a phone to be able to run google maps in the browser, and whatsapp, and instagram in parallel.
If it turns off and reboots while doing that because it runs out of memory, you cannot claim it's a smartphone.
Even the nokia 3310 generation phones could do that with WAP internet access and GPRS. Now it's more than 20 years later and people's expectations are way higher than back then.
How many do you think will recommend a librem phone if your focus is now another not really supported platform instead of improving the software than runs it?
If software is your problem (which I think it is) make it fundable directly. Allow people to support the software development directly, and start a foundation for that. But this 2200$ price tag when a competitor's product has more than 10x the featureset for half the price...there's a limit of what people can take.
Also, Nokia 3310 had no WAP and no GPRS. The next model, Nokia 3410, had WAP over CSD but no GPRS, and certainly wasn't suitable for anything like Google Maps which did not even exist back then.
[edit] The parent has moved the goalposts quite far in a sneaky edit, but even the edited claims are pretty unreasonable. Of course there was IM running in the background and there was still plenty of free RAM left for something more, and no, "Nokia 3310 generation phones" couldn't do anything like that for at least a few more years :)
Same websites, same performance, same responsiveness, same app interactions, same bluetooth/hardware compatibility support?
...without having to use the terminal, ever?
Really? Is this a joke or something?
How many _minutes_ do you wait until google maps is loaded, and are still satisfied with it?
My experience with the librem phone has been _way worse_ than yours, apparently.
[edit]
Nevermind, of course you are working for purism.
[/edit]
The iphone is likely 1000x more secure than this phone and a much better choice for government workers.
Apparently they're bringing it back this year.
Reading this I just imagine a ASML machine, fabricating the wavers for their SoC, next to a photochemical vacuum bonding machine making the OLED screens. Absurd nonsense, I would be very surprised if they even have pick and place machines in their US factory, some hot glue guns at best.
Deleted Comment
Only phone like this that seems good to me is the FairPhone, except it doesn't work that well in the US supposedly.