
The Librem 5 has been “shipping” for a month–but not to backers - smacktoward
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/the-librem-5-has-been-shipping-for-a-month-but-not-to-backers/
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x__x
This was posted 2 days ago on their site:

We want to give everyone a super quick update on shipping of the current batch
of Librem 5 smartphones.

There’s a delay. But, never fear, it’s only a delay of just a couple days.

[https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-birch-shipping-update-
delay-o...](https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-birch-shipping-update-delay-of-
just-a-few-days/)

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digikata
Sounds like manufacturing struggles. Hope they work their way through them and
are able to deliver.

~~~
smacktoward
Their manufacturing struggles seem like a smaller problem than their
communications struggles, at least to me.

If they'd just come out in September and said "hey, this is turning out to be
a lot harder than we'd anticipated, we're going to miss our Q3 2019 ship
date", I honestly don't think most supporters would have had a problem with
it. Hardware is hard, they're trying to do something novel, these things
happen. But they _didn 't_ say that, they instead cooked up a whole schedule
of half-baked "iterative batches" just so they could say they really were
shipping _something_ in Q3 -- which only set them up to faceplant when they
weren't able to meet the deadlines for those either.

I have been an admirer of Purism for a long time, and I was excited to see
them make this move into the smartphone space. But my enthusiasm has been
gradually whittled down over time by their consistently poor communications
around the project. They're constantly coming across as too clever by half,
when clarity and transparency would have served them much better. The quickest
way to have people lose faith in you is to treat them like you don't deserve
it.

