The whole point is that you are not reinventing the wheel.
From what I’ve been reading, the Librem 5 is just running a more or less standard Linux distro, rather than a Linux kernel with some other middleware and a mobile-only GUI on top. As I see it, the reason the Librem 5 has the interest that it does is because it’s not going down the road of Maemo, MeeGo, Mer, Tizen, Sailfish, or Android, all of which are based on Linux, but not really a normal Linux distro by any stretch.
The default/official UI is going to be GNOME, with Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch being supported in partnership with KDE and UBPorts.
That’s reassuring to me, but if you’re still skeptical, there are devkits already shipping, so you could look at how those are being received by their purchasers. Also, the dev blog is an interesting place to look: https://puri.sm/posts/tag/advanced-readers/
Where do the likes of bedroom coders, like XDA, fit in all this.
Google will dump android no doubt when Fucia comes along but what’s to stop the above just taking the existing source, adapting, improving and expanding on it as they see fit.
Just because Google stops does not means the world does.
It is, especially if you primarily look at the hardware. However, this is to be expected when you consider relatively low volume and the additional development cost. It is a niche product.
You forget the the hardware developers don’t give out the binary blobs easily, and those that do drop support. Ask why you cant easily get other OS’ on android phones right now? Its just difficult.
They didn’t ask for enough. If you look at the numbers they don’t add up. Their kickstarter raised maybe 1/4 of the money they really need.
Low volume really is the killer, not just for this, but also projects like the Talos II and Blackbird
Maybe they are using some of the profits from the Librem laptops?
They’re also not the only ones building an IMX-based ARM phone for Linux; Necunos claims to be building a similar device, although without kill switches, and an IMX.6 processor rather than the Librem’s IMX.8.
I don’t really know mobile phone development costs enough to tell. The development time for software alone must be quite significant even though they don’t start at zero.
My guess would be that they are trying to break even but it is quite possible that Purism is expecting to take a loss at this. A lot of early products of newcomers to specific hardware market segments loose a company money but that is to be expected. You have to start somewhere.
Startups can get by in incubators where they pay if they make profits.
And then there is always someone with more money than sense that gives tons of venture capital to startups.
It more likely development costs, wages, insurance, and factory costs. The actual components are cheap. Its everything else, even if you add up conservative costs its a huge sum.
I looked through some of the manufacturing posts, looking for information relating to costs, financing, or shipment volume, maybe you’ll be able to extrapolate from some of this.
To [ship from inventory], we are leveraging past sales revenue to get investment and a larger line-of-credit, so we can place an even larger order for all the supplies, hardware, and component parts needed to build and house inventory.
Samsung and then later LG indefinitely delayed shipments of 4K panels, the post-mortem article discusses the costs of this debacle:
We made heavy investments trying to make this happen, and have spent sums that we cannot recoup: approximately $75,000 in assembly line retooling and deposits for 4K screens to Samsung and LG for orders that will, it seems, never materialize. We are trying to negotiate and recover some of the supplier deposits, but at this point we have to consider this money a net loss. On the other hand, we’ve made other investments early in our campaign that were worth it (for example: $50k to place an initial order for rarer Intel CPUs requested by some backers, $25k to retool the motherboard to 6 layers to support 32GB of RAM, progressively growing our team…)
The first post also mentioned raising money via Fundable
Somewhat off topic, but there is a 2016-11 chart for what their customers did in response to the cancellation of the 4K model:
Correct me if im wrong but i thought one of the major selling points of this device nobody mentioned in the thread yet is the ability to hardware disable wifi, GPS, Bluetooth, Camera & Microphone ?
… So it’s a phone with a Linux distro and the hardware can be toggled off. It’s akin to running an enclosed desktop PC in your pocket vs running your home PC where all your communications hardware is only able to be ‘soft toggled’ off and microsoft / google / apple / facebook [insert 3rd party app made in China ] control that soft toggle whenever they want.