The Librem 5 project is one ive never fully vested myself in; even though they seem compelling at times. Some of the vectors their chasing have though given me pause.
At somepoint in the intervening year the PinePhone has kind of seemed like the better horse to back; at least for me personally.
Tabling past Librem 5 wierdness. Ive been struggling to parse the most recent noise ive heard about the Librem 5 shipping schedule.
It reads to me like they expect a lot of people to receive preproduction units instead of the production commercial units they advertised and took preorders for.
Most open hardware projects ive been aware of have constricted these kinds of preproduction revisions to developer units where they can. Though Librem mostly just slipped naked production boards to developers, with no other intermediate units.
It strikes me like a good way to have your earliest supporters and initial reviewers end up with pretty disastrous bugs.
Like how first version of the Freerunner GTA02 had microphones that made all calls low volume and full of interference buzzing. Or the iPhone 4 antenae problem. Lots of technical issues can plague a phone’s basic functionality even if the system board is 95% finalized.
Though in all honesty im not sure if im READING this release strategy properly. Several things are vague and my brain feels a bit like mush right now. Maybe this will make more sense with more info or with a clearer head.