Indeed, the $2k example was misleading, but the fact it's still $800 for a phone with 2014 specs alone would have been more than enough to get his point across. You do have to pay 3-4x the price you would otherwise to get the privilege of running another OS on older hardware with arguably less functionality (OOTB, at least).
Again, those "selling points" are extremely fringe. Let's not pretend like grandma (and the average phone user) cares about hardware killswitches, DP over USB-C, etc...
Like they say themselves in that very article you posted :
> For people who want these specialized features that no other phone offers, the Librem 5's price is not unreasonable.
Also, specs are obviously not the only thing that matters, but having seen Librem 5 phones run, it's pretty damn obvious they do kind of matter - the thing seems to run quite choppy.
That is why I asked why grandma would need a performance of iPhone 12. Native apps work quite smoothly on Librem 5 (and many of them even on Pinephone).
I mean, just take a look at their own damn videos. [1] The thing runs choppy and had horrible input lag just typing the lockscreen passcode or opening the dialer.
I don't expect my mom to need iPhone 12 performance, but even my mom told me her older LG G-something was slow getting slow, and having played with it before her switching phones, it wasn't nearly as choppy looking as this video.
You and I obviously have very different definitions of "quite smoothly". And specs related or not, UI is a major part of the experience. The initial point still stands: Linux phones are pretty damn far from being anywhere viable for anyone but the most hardcore enthusiasts.
It does look quite a bit snappier indeed, but as I said in my previous comment as well:
> specs related or not, UI is a major part of the experience
When someone buys a phone (or hell, a computer), they're buying a package of hardware, which dictates available software. Hell, you could make some hypothetical $200 phone with the best hardware on the market, if it doesn't have what some people consider "basic" functionality software side, they won't buy... coming back to the initial point that Linux phones are not ready for prime time.
Fair enough. Some people prefer to buy early and get all software updates on the way though (with lifetime updates btw). It's also FLOSS, so everyone can contribute.
Is that unreasonable? Running another OS on a device with physical hardware switches is a privilege right now, so it costs more. There are essentially two companies doing this, and neither of them are even at the point where they can completely honestly say their products are out of beta. The Librem is expensive in no small part because its feature list is fringe, and even ignoring the inherent hardware challenges that's just how the law of supply and demand works.
What other market have you seen that acts differently? Look at how much other niche devices like Braille screens cost, or even more "mainstream" specialized hardware like the Remarkable Tablet -- arguably a much less capable E-Reader than a Kindle/Kobo device by almost all consumer-relevant metrics. But you'll pay more for stylus support on an E-ink screen if you need that, and you'll tolerate a suboptimal reading experience as well.
It's also important not to ignore the fact that the Librem is a flagship device. It is currently the most powerful Linux phone hardware on the market. So you can buy a cheap, low-powered Pinephone (the far better choice for most tinkerers), or you can shell out for something with more raw power -- which is also pretty consistent with how most markets work.
If you want to buy the single top-of-the-line Wacom tablet, you'll shell out at least $4,000, probably more when you factor in accessories. You want rotational support in the pen? That's another $100. Is the fractional improvement in a Cintiq Pro 'worth' the frankly massive price increase over consumer tablets? Probably not, you can buy an entire Surface Studio for the same price, and that comes with a "free" computer. But you'll pay the Cintiq price if you belong to a niche that needs the best the market currently has to offer for your particular use-case. And you'll pay the Librem price if you belong to a niche that needs the (currently) most powerful phone hardware that's realistically usable with a Linux OS.
These days, a braille display can be had for around $400-$600. We also have multiple manufacturers, with multiple models and prices you can choose from. I don’t see that happening with open source hardware.
Genuine question, I was interested in trying to play around with one a while ago, and I spent a fair amount of time searching and could not find a single monitor for under $1000, and most of them were in the $3000 to even $7000(!!!) range for a device that can literally only display a single line of text at a time.
If there are manufacturers making cheaper devices, or even just doing anything interesting with the hardware like building multiple-row 2D displays instead of 1D single-line outputs, I would love to know about them. It's a market I'm somewhat interested in.
Ooh! Disappointing to see that it's only 20 characters, but that is way cheaper than what I was finding online. And they're actually experimenting with 2D displays (https://www.orbitresearch.com/product/graphiti/)! Thanks a ton, I need to keep an eye on this.
Don't forget that Purism also pays for the software development, while Pine64 uses that software for free (10 euro donations per sold Pinephone do not cut it).
> Is that unreasonable? Running another OS on a device with physical hardware switches is a privilege right now, so it costs more. There are essentially two companies doing this, and neither of them are even at the point where they can completely honestly say their products are out of beta. The Librem is expensive in no small part because its feature list is fringe, and even ignoring the inherent hardware challenges that's just how the law of supply and demand works.
Sure. 800$ is still quite steep and, exactly as you said, relegates the device to a fringe market.
> What other market have you seen that acts differently? Look at how much other niche devices like Braille screens cost, or even more "mainstream" specialized hardware like the Remarkable Tablet -- arguably a much less capable E-Reader than a Kindle/Kobo device by almost all consumer-relevant metrics. But you'll pay more for stylus support on an E-ink screen if you need that, and you'll tolerate a suboptimal reading experience as well.
> It's also important not to ignore the fact that the Librem is a flagship device. It is currently the most powerful Linux phone hardware on the market. So you can buy a cheap, low-powered Pinephone (the far better choice for most tinkerers), or you can shell out for something with more raw power -- which is also pretty consistent with how most markets work.
"Flagship" doesn't mean much other than "best X company has to offer". Indeed, it's the best you can buy for now, doesn't mean it's particularly great. The experience seems quite hit-or-miss, I've seen both horribly sluggish and quite usable footage just recently.
> If you want to buy the single top-of-the-line Wacom tablet, you'll shell out at least $4,000, probably more when you factor in accessories. You want rotational support in the pen? That's another $100. Is the fractional improvement in a Cintiq Pro 'worth' the frankly massive price increase over consumer tablets? Probably not, you can buy an entire Surface Studio for the same price, and that comes with a "free" computer. But you'll pay the Cintiq price if you belong to a niche that needs the best the market currently has to offer for your particular use-case. And you'll pay the Librem price if you belong to a niche that needs the (currently) most powerful phone hardware that's realistically usable with a Linux OS.
Fair point. Am I misunderstanding the goal of Purism, and merely existing enough for these projects, or are they aiming to grab some market share? I'm just utterly unconvinced that this is anything other than a fun curiosity.
The ultimate goal of Purism is to expand the market, but (opinion me) when I look at Purism's products in general I don't see them ever themselves moving out of niche categories.
If you buy a Purism laptop today, you'll already pay a premium over companies like Dell. I suspect that Purism is happy to see companies like Pine existing, and I know that they want Linux smartphones in general to be a broader market, I don't know that they're seriously thinking about trying to launch $100-200 competitors. To me, it just doesn't match their other products, I don't see anything else they're offering that would fall into that same category.
And while people would like to see Linux completely take over the desktop/mobile space, I think there's a much broader category of people who just want the market to be big enough for us and to be big enough that it is able to meet our needs. Past that it's not the end of the world if it doesn't get larger.
This is also part of what's frustrating about stuff like the "year of the Linux desktop" joke -- in many ways, the year of the Linux desktop already happened a while ago. Linux got good enough that you can pretty easily mainline it instead of Windows without serious issues or downsides. I have not booted into a Windows computer in multiple years, I don't even have a backup install anywhere. It just doesn't come up anymore. In terms of software, Linux support is something that a sizable portion of the indie games market now talks about, and between Steam/Proton and the recent architectural/policy changes happening on Mac you're now about as likely to be able to run a game on Linux (if not more likely) than you are to be able to run it on a modern Mac device. Meanwhile, 'mainstream' Linux OSes finally got polished enough that it's completely reasonable to put a tech-unfriendly kid or parent on a Linux machine without worrying that you'll get tech support requests every week. There's still a little ways to go with some legacy/holdout software in more niche professional fields like graphic design, but if you're a relatively normal user, then at some point Linux stopped being a struggle to run.
So in the same way, when I talk about the success of the Linux phone market in general, I'm not necessarily aiming for "we monopolize the entire space and nothing else exists." I think it's completely plausible that the Linux phone market might grow, not put Apple out of business, but still grow enough that there is a reasonably priced, usable alternative for people who value privacy and freedom.
In them meantime, it's niche. As far as I know, the front camera on the recent Pinephones still doesn't have software support. So yeah, it's currently a niche market for people who have very specific wants and needs. It seems kind of premature to me for people to be complaining about price and hardware when we're still celebrating things like camera support; commoditization is something that happens to mature markets, not new ones -- and that all takes time.
Regardless, the point still stands that if we've had camera support for ~3 months, we're probably not at the point where we need to seriously worry about whether we're currently offering the highest value-to-money hardware choices to consumer demographics that have never opened up a command line before.
Asus 1215B released in 2011 with AMD Radeon HD 6250.
Windows and original proprietary AMD drivers, OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11
Open source AMD driver replacement, OpenGL 3.3
So in 9 years no one bothered to match the previous proprietary AMD drivers capabilities, while Asus keeps the Windows ones available in the latest Windows versions.
