"Quantities matter [in China] and getting only dozen or couple of hundred orders per month doesn't really help. That said, the Librems are heavily overpriced but that is because Purism seemingly never tried to get better deal and the South San Francisco partner abused this so that is why Purism Librems are double the price they should be. I believe that if we had more realistic prices, it would be much better for Purism not only financially but also more talking about it, more of it in wild which in turn means much more orders, more happy customers etc. The innovation is not really that hard in this space because big players don't try to really innovate as they have strong positions, so it wouldn't be that hard to be good or better then most of big players even, but quantity leverage is hard to pass by."
When I saw the price I assumed they were trying to position a premium product. I think this is a little bit of a mistake given that in the market of handsets, Apple owns the "premium" devices, and maybe samsung counts as #2? Nobody is crossing that Rubicon.
$700 isn't really bad but I don't like the look of it. Maybe if they can make this thing for 6 or 7 years. People who are worried about this have been aware of Essential phones which aren't the same, but end users aren't shopping these Freedom characteristics.
I predict another few years of nobody batting an eye to these devices. Great shame.
They are. They are building a product that let's you do anything you want on the device.
Honestly, the phone should be priced at a premium level because it will appeal to a demographic that will pay more for a phone that lets them break free from the closed ecosystems of Android/Apple. It also gives them extra cash to re-invest in the company and doesn't require them scaling their manufacturing just yet.
I have no interest in Android or iOS. I have no interest in phones that make it difficult to run non-android systems on them. I have no interest in devices I have to break into in order to make them do what I want them to do.
Phones that I've been using for more than 10 years now make it easy to run Debian GNU/Linux on them, baremetal, straight out of Debian repositories. Those devices don't require me to run any proprietary binary blob on my system. Those devices are supported by community years after their manufacturers abandoned them, as mainlining makes that task actually manageable. That's the kind of phone I'm interested in and its OS plays a big part in it.
And that is?
Just two examples: removing Google apps from Android devices, installing non-store apps on iOS.
If you run a web search along the lines of "best apps for rooted Android" or "best apps for jailbroken iPhone" you will find many more examples of useful things that you can do with rooted/jailbroken devices.