I applaud this accomplishment. I think there will be a push to manufacture more semiconductor-intensive products in the US over the next several years as tensions with China continue to heat up and Taiwan is left as a single point of failure. I know progress is already being made with TSMC building new fabs in the US.
I will note that Purism do not say what their production capacity is, and that it would probably be a different task entirely to manufacture a significant percentage of iPhones in the US. I’m not surprised that manufacturing thousands of extremely expensive phones in the US is possible. I would be a lot more surprised if they had managed to manufacture millions of reasonably priced phones in the US. The big question is whether the federal government will embrace the industrial policy required to rebuild our manufacturing capacity in high-tech.
This reminds me of pushback in the early days of Tesla. Sure they can build 1,000, but can they build 10,000. Now we’re at “sure they can build 500,000, but can they build 5M.”
I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there. And I agree with you that industrial policy could help jumpstart that demand.
> I think the answers “yes”, if the demand is there.
It's not a question of demand. A negligible number of customers care where their product is manufactured. They care only about price, which is why manufacturing moved overseas in the first place.
What is needed to manufacture phones in the West is protectionism and mercantilism. Our governments would have to subsidize domestically manufactured products, require the use of domestic products for various industries, and tariff those manufactured in countries with lower labor standards and incompatible civil rights.
Unfortunately such policies lead to higher costs for consumers and lower economic growth. It's politically unpopular for the same reason action on climate change is unpopular: it makes everything more expensive. It's no wonder that virtually all western politicians support neoliberal globalism. Goods are cheap, even if it means some of us lost our jobs in the process.
Worse, these policies also tend to lead to war. One of the big reasons we've had relative peace between world powers for the last 75 years is that our economies have become closely intertwined, so no politician or corporation can stomach the economic costs of war. If global trade starts to break down we'll head directly into World War 3.
Personally I think we should embrace protectionism anyway despite the cost and risk. I'd go so far as ripping up NAFTA. American labor standards are so shit that Canadian companies can barely compete, and it's holding us back from progressive policies like a 4-day work week. Ontario can't even mandate paid sick days! I'd rather we have a well-paid labor force than cheap groceries and electronics. Unfortunately no politician agrees with me.
> It's politically unpopular for the same reason action on climate change is unpopular: it makes everything more expensive.
You've got this backwards. Both taking action on climate change and buying American are popular [1][2]. Furthermore I don't know of much evidence that suggests taking action on climate change will raise prices. But you are right about protectionism in that way. That's the biggest problem here.
In the abstract I see no reason that global trade should breakdown if a significant majority of people in the world can agree about labor standards, human rights standards, etc. In the specific, I believe this was one of the major original purposes of the UN, though unfortunately the world we live in remains one in which the abuses of great powers go unchecked because the cost of nuclear war is too high.
Of course everyone wants the government to do something about climate change. They're not thinking about what they'll have to sacrifice in order to make it happen. Almost no one is willing to suffer even minor inconvenience in favor of stopping climate change.
Let's see the results of a poll that asks if people would be willing to take climate action that doubled the price of airline tickets, or that doubled the price of most fruits and vegetables in the supermarket. I would expect a very different result, yet this is what is necessary to offset the emissions in air travel and international shipping. (I pulled this "double" number out of a hat, but it seems to me to be far less ridiculous than your assumption that action on climate change won't affect prices.)
It's the same issue with domestic manufacturing. Of course all Americans want their products to be manufactured in America. But virtually no Americans are willing to pay a higher price for them. Stores long ago stopped bothering to stock American made products next to their cheaper foreign counterparts because no one bought them. What people say they want is irrelevant; what matters is what they actually buy.
> In the abstract I see no reason that global trade should breakdown if a significant majority of people in the world can agree about labor standards, human rights standards, etc.
If a majority of the world agreed on labor standards and excluded the rest from trade, there would be no need for protectionism. Manufacturing would be a level playing field so Americans could compete directly with foreign companies on price. Unfortunately this isn't the world today. It's not possible to compete in manufacturing with countries where laborers are paid under a dollar an hour, so as long as we have free trade with such countries our manufacturing will never be able to compete.
> If a majority of the world agreed on labor standards and excluded the rest from trade, there would be no need for protectionism
The average American does not want to buy stuff from slaves, at any price.
It's just that if I want to record a factory in China and show people how kids and prisoners are making their shit, it's not that they won't watch - it's that someone in China will shoot me.
It's very hard to show someone what slavery looks like, even though it's pervasive in the offshore supply chain.
People become vegans when they see what happens to animals at slaughterhouses. There are a lot of vegans. The reaction from the meat lobby isn't, blah blah blah prices. It's just to make it illegal to record in a slaughterhouse.
> But virtually no Americans are willing to pay a higher price for them.
This is some really myopic thinking. Just decide: would you pay a higher price to not get stuff from slaves, or not? Just you personally. I don't care what Americans think. How could you possibly say, "Yes, I'm okay with lower prices enabled by slavery." You wouldn't!
I just go and buy American. So I pay four times more for a pair of shoes, setting me back to 2001 prices. A time when quality of life was still very high. Boohoo. I don't want to fucking profit from slavery.
The argument you're engaging in is almost always made in bad faith. While you aren't saying it in bad faith, you're being co-opted by people who are. No CEO or politician sincerely blames Americans' sensitivity to prices for slavery in China, they just want to reap the profits of that status quo.
> Just decide: would you pay a higher price to not get stuff from slaves, or not? Just you personally. I don't care what Americans think. How could you possibly say, "Yes, I'm okay with lower prices enabled by slavery." You wouldn't!
Since you asked: For me personally, it depends. I bought a lab grown diamond for my wife's engagement ring some years back (before they were generally socially acceptable) since we weren't comfortable with diamond mining. I buy free-run eggs even though they're more expensive. We have a community-supported agriculture subscription and we buy Ontario apples when Costco stocks them.
But like the vast majority of westerners, I buy cheap shoes, despite not knowing where they are manufactured, and despite knowing that almost all shoes are made by questionable labor. I even eat chocolate even though it's virtually impossible to get chocolate that doesn't come from child slave labor. I eat all typical meats despite seeing videos of slaughterhouses, of baby chicks being shredded, etc.
Does this answer your question? I think it proves my point: I consider myself knowledgeable on this stuff and it barely affects my purchasing behavior. No one cares. No matter how many videos of slaughterhouses and labor camps you try to shove in my face, I will still eat steak and buy shoes. People want meat, people want gas, people want cheap goods, and people want to ignore all negative externalities. Information is more accessible than ever, and yet like the sibling comment says, there are not a lot of vegans.
I have kids that need shoes and limited funds. I have to give them a standard of living comparable to their peers. Of course I don't want to buy products made with questionable labor. No one does. But I don't feel like I have a choice.
Can you honestly say you don't buy anything made with questionable labor? Can anyone? Do you know that America has a slave labor force of millions of prisoners? Slavery never really went away in the US; you can't avoid it even if you buy American. For example if you own a car, odds are your license plate was manufactured by American slaves.
For what its worth, we bought my daughter a very nice pair of boots made in Quebec. But it's the only pair she owns that I know are manufactured domestically. They also proudly employ special needs workers, which sounds great except I have my suspicions that it's just a ploy to pay them less. It is absolutely impossible to avoid labor inequality in the modern world.
> The average American does not want to buy stuff from slaves, at any price.
This is a pretty bold claim considering the American history.
> There are a lot of vegans.
No there isn't. Only a small fraction of people are vegans. So I'd say that according to your example, most people in world are meat eaters despite the sufferings of animals.
China is winning at manufacturing not because of slavery. The Chinese infrastructure is advancing much faster than that of the US. I'm sorry but Your fringe view is clearly out of touch with the rest of the world.
> Almost no one is willing to suffer even minor inconvenience in favor of stopping climate change.
People aren't taking minor, inconvenient, personal, moral steps to solve these problems because it's obvious that won't do anything to solve the problem. It's irrelevant whether or not I shut the water off when I brush my teeth when the farm over in the desert is subsidized to run a center-pivot irrigation in system in the middle of the desert that pulls 800 gallons per minute. Collective action is required, which means that instead of moralizing we need to fix the incentives. The only incentive that is universal is price.
A few people deciding not to fly or buying produce at a local farmer's market instead of the grocery store because they're concerned about climate change is not a signal that's audible to The System.
What do you think happens when we stop giving water to fertile lands? Oh, that's right, people are forced to buy produce from local farmers. It's a defeatist attitude to say that buying at a local farmer's market does nothing. At the end of the day, that's what needs to happen. You prefer for it to be government mandated (stop giving them water) whereas others prefer that people make the individual choice and vote with their dollars. More nuanced is that government action doesn't cause fundamental changes in culture. Look at prohibition. Governmental action also makes the new profiters (local farmers in this case) heavily invested in keeping the legislation. This large societal change needs to start with people taking individual responsibility. By actively saying that individuals are inculpable, you are part of the problem.
I wasn't suggesting we solve this problem through individual action. I'm not sure how you got that impression from my post. For what it's worth I agree with you: the focus on individual responsibility and personal guilt over climate change is the great distraction that has allowed corporations to continue polluting unabated.
The problem, and the point of my post, was that collective action can only be done by legislation, and in a democracy politicians are beholden to the electorate. Most people don't want to suffer higher prices for goods and services, so most people won't vote for any politicians that support policies that will have real impact on climate change.
I just found it funny that your provided link starts with a sentence containing "has not made Americans more willing to pay extra for U.S.-made goods."
Tariffs and subsidies are tools we can use if we want to make sure that domestic products can compete with those from abroad - but the current wide allowances for lobbying in the US make any sort of move in that direction extremely difficult.
Well, I think the government buying American is probably a precursor for anyone else doing so, because they're not at the constraints of the market to find the cheapest viable product.
> It's not a question of demand. A negligible number of customers care where their product is manufactured. They care only about price, which is why manufacturing moved overseas in the first place.
Your first paragraph contradicts itself. Not enough customers demanding their product be made in USA is the very definition of a demand problem.
> Not enough customers demanding their product be made in USA is the very definition of a demand problem.
The context was Teslas. The parent comment suggested that Teslas can be manufactured in volume because there is sufficient demand. While true, the demand for Teslas is not due to the fact that they are manufactured in the US. Tesla buyers mostly don't care where they are manufactured; they just want a fast and stylish electric car. The demand is not for US-manufactured Teslas. It's just for Teslas.
I agree with you that demand specifically for domestic products does not exist, but this is obvious. Demand for domestic products is not really a thing in the first place because the place of manufacture is not a product differentiator for most consumers. There are very few ways to realistically control direct demand for domestic products; laws that force the government to buy domestic are about it. You have to create demand for domestic products indirectly by making them cheaper than the alternative because that's all that consumers really care about.
This is why it's pointless to talk about "customers demanding their product be made in USA". It's not a question of demand because the vast majority of consumers do not and will never care where a product is manufactured.
> Unfortunately such policies lead to higher costs for consumers and lower economic growth.
Money circulates faster with more well-paying jobs which would result from increasing on-shore manufacturing.
I think the key is to phase tariffs in linearly over several years (perhaps even decades). That gives the domestic economy time to adjust wages for the higher price of domestic manufacturing and doesn't have an immediate negative result on foreign countries. It should drive foreign countries to improve human rights and labor laws to avoid tariffs and stay in the market. Domestic investors should see increasing tariffs as an investment opportunity instead of a cost, and balancing the rate of tariff increase could be another tool for the central banks to encourage growth.
> Worse, these policies also tend to lead to war. One of the big reasons we've had relative peace between world powers for the last 75 years is that our economies have become closely intertwined, so no politician or corporation can stomach the economic costs of war. If global trade starts to break down we'll head directly into World War 3.
That's why increasing tariffs slowly is appealing; it doesn't destroy global trade by disruption. Countries with minimal labor laws would face a choice; fully isolate (like North Korea) or gradually improve human/labor rights to remain a functional part of the global economy.
There's a hell of a big difference between producing 10,000 cars and 10,000 of anything electronic.
10,000 cars is real manufacturing volume. 10,000 electronic something hasn't even reached volume discount status.
There is a reason we call 100,000 units "The Valley of Death" in the electronics industry. Your volume is large enough to hit all the problems but not large enough to get the discounts.
> This reminds me of pushback in the early days of Tesla. Sure they can build 1,000, but can they build 10,000. Now we’re at “sure they can build 500,000, but can they build 5M.”
The fact that they succeeded doesn't mean there wasn't a significant chance of failure at each order of magnitude.
I can only hope we in the EU can buy from the US without some ridiculous extra fees.
In the past 10 years, it became cheaper to buy the same products from China than the US, which is in part due to US shipping companies (DHL, UPS, FedEx) dramatically scaling down their overseas shipping business.
I could get a 5KG box of electronics in a week for $50 ten years ago. Nowadays, there's only USPS, it takes two weeks and still costs more. Kinda sad.
There is also debate on if the US should invest in that. Political tensions with China are one factor. However remember there are limited resources so investing in this means something else can't be invested in. Really this should be a world wide concern: if China is so bad how can we build up someone more friendly - it need not be the US. Could be Germany, could be Kenya (I understand China is investing there)
I agree, but part of the problem with manufacturing in China is that American companies have become complicit in the abuses of a brutal authoritarian regime. The manufacturing efficiencies cannot be ignored, but it would be wise to take this into consideration as well moving forward. I’m just not sure if there’s a reasonable way to do so. This may be an inevitable consequence of globalization in the short-term.
Why is complicity in abuse of populations suddenly a problem? The US imprisons more than China does, forces citizens to work through a yet-unresolved pandemic that disproportionately impacts already marginalized and abused segments of the population, and furnishes private companies with prison labor for $1 an hour when the prisoners are not being made to fight forest fires or being abused (or killed) by law enforcement or each other.
I think the companies have the stomach for more and that it’s mainly a marketing and public relations issue.
> Why is complicity in abuse of populations suddenly a problem?
It's always been a problem, but it's best to make whatever strides to resolve it that we can.
> The US imprisons more than China does
Sure, but it is not currently engaged in a genocide. Standards for due process are also stronger in the US than in China, and you don't get thrown in jail for criticizing the government either.
The US prison system being bad does not make China's abuses any less serious. They are still much worse than what the US does.
> The US is the one with widely documented concentration camps on the border.
That's for people crossing in, and on average they're only in there for a couple days. The current population is around 10k people. It's a problem but it's absolutely nothing compared to putting entire groups into concentration camps. We did that once, but it sure wasn't any time recently.
> And last year showed us just how much due process is ignored and political prisoners persecuted, if previous history wasn’t enough.
You're correct about Zenz. Not only is Zenz a far right Evangelical but he also has made statements that he is "guided by God" and on a "mission" against China. His work is full of cherry-picking and distorting source material and sometimes creating his own shoddy data. For example, he only interviewed 8 people to come up with the 1 million in internment camp figure.
I've bought a few non-consumer electronics from Germany all manufactured in Germany including the housing/plastic parts. Quality is exceptional and everything is to the spec and well documented.
The advantage of having semiconductor/electronics manufacturing in the US would be cheap land/labor, quantity of labor, gov incentives, regulation waivers, particularly in the American Southwest: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-southwest-is-americas-new-f...
Specifically - I think that, at the end of the day, the economic flow is the only thing that matters and all the other considerations are sort of moot. What the US offers to the world is a gigantic consumer market, and it's quite difficult to actually control a consumer market since any applications of force or restriction of goods flow ends up deteriorating the market faster than it yields control. If the US embargoed Chinese imports tomorrow the Chinese government would receive a lot of domestic pressure to take action but, logically, there isn't an action it can take overtly to actually reopen the US market - instead we'd see this war play out in propaganda within the US trying to force politicians to reverse the decision by causing mass discontent. And, honestly, it's likely that companies affected by any such embargo would just act independently of the Chinese government to those ends - so, essentially, the only real forces Chinese businesses would have to oppose an economic breakdown are their personally contained forces. I think, essentially, that the Chinese government would be impotent to deal with such a situation buuuut... that's just like my opinion man.
If given a choice, as a person that lives 99% of the time in the US, would you rather have a US device that is backdoored by the NSA/CIA or a Chinese device that is backdoored by the Chinese government?
I personally think the latter is preferable. Not sure why anyone buys US made equipment post Snowden/Assange.
> I know progress is already being made with TSMC building new fabs in the US.
Worth noting that TSMC started building the 5nm fab this week in Arizona and said last month they would build a 3nm or 2nm fab at the site as well, and were in the research phase for a potential third fab that would focus on older/cheaper nodes.
Intel is also building a fab in Arizona and in March announced a further $20 billion investment in 2 more fabs at its Arizona site.
I'm not sure if they've started building or even committed yet, but it seems likely that Samsung will build a 5nm fab in Texas as well, in addition to its existing fab there.
So there's quite a bit of progress happening on US-based fabs already.
> I’m not surprised that manufacturing thousands of extremely expensive phones in the US is possible. I would be a lot more surprised if they had managed to manufacture millions of reasonably priced phones in the US.
I'm pretty naive on the subject, but in this case why would cost of local labor affect which product is manufactured at any given plant?
Lets say employees A and B are payed $50 and $20 respectively for each product they manufacture. If employee A manufactures product X, which is sold for $100, and employee B manufactures product Y, which is sold for $50, the company makes a net profit of $80 ($150 revenue - $70 manufacturing costs). If employee A makes product Y instead and employee B makes product X, the net profit is still $80. Is there something I'm failing to take into account here?
I don't quite follow the question you're asking, but the argument I was making is one about economies of scale. Manufacturing small quantities of expensive products is comparatively easy, at the extreme end you could have a single craftsman building every phone and selling them for $5000 each. If you need to manufacture a million phones though, you're going to need more than one guy, and the facility is going to be radically different as well. The reason phones aren't manufactured in the US is not because nobody in the US knows how to make a single phone or even thousands of them, it's because factories like Foxconn which employ over a million people to churn out millions of phones and other products just do not exist, and there might not even be enough excess labor capacity to build them.
I must have misunderstood your point. I thought you were arguing that manufacturers who produces a variety of products with plants in the US and Taiwan can only afford to make their expensive products in the US because only those products have the margins to offset the relatively high US labor costs.
But from your response (and on re-reading your original post) it sounds like you're actually pointing out that high-volume manufacturers with thin margins have more trouble justifying high US labor costs - in contrast to low-volume manufacturers with high margins.
The question was basically "If you have a fixed pool of employees at fixed compensation-per-output (ie fixed net expenses) and a fixed product throughput with fixed values (ie fixed net revenue), why does it matter who makes what product since the net profit will be the same?"
Although it sounds like that question may have been borne out of my own misinterpretation of the post to which I was responding.
$800 (down from $900) for the Librem 5; $2000 for the Librem 5 USA edition.
(Edit: I'm leaving this paragraph here as it attracted comments that would no longer make sense if I edited/removed, but it was a result of a flawed premise [bad math in my head]) That seems a significant premium over the actual cost differential, but they self-admit "this is for customers who have hard requirements on sourcing" rather than "this is what it costs to make something in the US".
Seems like this is priced for military & contractors.
Genuinely hope they can find success in that niche. Even if their products never compete with the iPhone in ubiquity, having a domestic company with full stack hardware manufacturing experience is a tremendous asset both to the country and to other companies who aspire to bring their own manufacturing stateside.
>Seems like this is priced for military & contractors.
You would normally expect to see the magic words "Berry Compliant" if the target market includes that. Not super-clear how mobile phones would fall into that particular regulatory tranche.
EDIT: no, my bad, that only applies to (broadly defined) fabric products.
> Seems like this is priced for military & contractors.
there are already a series of south korean manufactured, Samsung DoD approved android devices for that market. And similar from General Dynamics, as I recall.
"this is what it costs to ALSO make something in the US"
you aren't just paying to the difference in labor, you are paying for the difference in requirement, documentation, redundancy, small market segment, etc.
It's like bolts for aircraft. I can buy the bolt for a couple cents at my local Ace. But to buy the certified one costs 10x+ because of the work involved in getting it certified.
I find binning fascinating when this topic comes up. You start with a pile of 1 cent parts with a 10% tolerance, go through it and measure each and every one, and you magically end up with bins of 1% tolerance parts that now cost a dollar. The parts didn't change at all! And yet merely the fact that they are sorted gives them so much more value.
Another interesting story is that in the 50s and 60s, light aircraft shared a lot of accessory parts with cars of the era.
Cessna used the same voltage regulator as Ford. Ford accepted statistical process inspection for their parts. Cessna required 100% parts inspection for the exact same part.
Solution: run the assembly line for the voltage regulators normally, do the greater of the number of inspections required by Ford or the volume required by Cessna. Ink all the inspected parts with an inspection stamp. Now, Ford can use any of the voltage regulators. Cessna can use any of the stamped regulators. Both companies get parts more cheaply than if the lines were separated.
It's still a great way to do it. Instead of 3D printing a custom pulley for your hobby build robot, you could just use a standard VW part that costs much less and will last a lifetime.
This multiplier (800x2.5) seems much lower than I'd expect.
For prototype quantities (<100), I have consistently seen a multiplier of 8 or so, for the exact same spec (and verified within-spec after receiving the parts).
That actually seems about right to me, at least for the type of mfg I'm used to. Compare low-run CNC quotes from Hubs (China) and Xometry (USA) - Xometry is usually ~2-3x the price. I've seen similar for IM prices although I have less experience there. One caveat is that in China it's relatively cheap to move stuff between factories (Say the part is made in factory 1, then painted in factory 2, then laser-etched in factory 3), whereas in the US as soon as you try to do that setup and freight gets really expensive really fast.
I don't know anything about PCBs or components, so I can't really comment there - maybe the multiplier is worse in that case.
One additional thing to consider is there are often grants or tax breaks for US or in-state manufacturing that can be VERY appealing depending on where you are and what you need done.
Given the ultra-integrated supply chain over in China for high-tech parts & the comparatively low economies of scale here, this is almost a worst-case scenario - and the multiplier is 2.5? Surely that isn’t worth all of the deleterious consequences outsourcing has wrought.
They need a lot of customers to make it worthwhile to bring US costs down. Right now US production is mostly used for prototypes where high production costs don't matter as much as flexibility to make changes. If you need 10 made in the US that is good enough. If you need millions made in the US then it would be worth investing in all the things needed to manufacture something cheaply. With enough investment per-unit costs in the US can be lowest in the world - but few things are worth putting that much investment in when China already has most of what you need and the supply chain is shorter.
Everything I said about the US applies in some form to every other country to some extent.
The amount of overhead to spin up a US based manufacturing process for an already niche item is going to be expensive. If someone has that type of hard requirement, they must not have many alternatives and should pay the premium for it. I'm sure if there was enough demand the cost would come down.
I am not surprised at all by the price considering the need to manufacture something that's a totally bespoke design in very low quantities. The economy of scale factor that a giant manufacturer in east asia has access to is not available for this sort of project.
What's the basis for your impression that this "seems" a significant premium over the actual cost differential? I have zero idea of what it costs a company to manufacture a phone in China versus the USA, so I'm genuinely curious.
I've priced out PCBA (of a handful of boards substantially less complex than the Librem, of course) in the US and overseas. In volumes of 1K, the US suppliers were closer to 2.5-3.5x overseas rather than 5x.
In writing this, I just realized that I can't do math. I was thinking it was a 5x multiplier rather than a 2.5x multiplier, which seems pretty reasonable.
I purchased the LibreM phone when it was being crowdfunded. I waited years for the thing to be released, and what they came out with at the end was beyond disappointing. It's nearly three times heavier and 2.5x thicker than a normal phone- by today's standards, the thing is a brick.
If I had been told that I was going to get a developer device, that would have been one thing, but I (and many others) were sold the LibreM as a consumer device, and it's just not.
Along with that, there are reports of how working within the company was, such as this one:
Not sure why you are disappointed exactly. Because of the size? It's the only phone with usable kill switches, running fully free software, recommended by the FSF, with good working convergence mode and so on.
It's huge and because of that, it's not in the same category as a normal phone. If it had been sold as that, that would be one thing, but it wasn't.
I bought an MNT Reform laptop knowing it won't look like a normal laptop- that's fine. But if they had shown something that looked like a Dell XPS 13 and then shipped something that looks like the MNT Reform does, I'd be just as upset.
> usable kill switches
Physical kill switches, not usable. I believe the Pinephone also has software kill switches which function much the same way.
> running fully free software
Yes, no binary blobs is good, but that doesn't change the issue of the form factor making it unusable.
> I believe the Pinephone also has software kill switches which function much the same way.
Pinephone has hardware kill switches which are not usable/convenient. You have to open the back cover to access them and they are very tiny. You won't be able to switch the microphone on when you receive a call, unlike with Librem 5.
Yeah it’s 2021 and Chinese manufactured are more reliable and higher quality than anything American made. As an anecdote I build PCBs for a hobby and I’ve purchased PCBs and chips from both cheap Chinese fabs and suppliers as well as Americans ones. The only issues I’ve ever had were with American ones (which were many times more expensive) and I’ve stopped using them completely.
I would be curious if librem will ever release data regarding failure rates of their American made phones versus non-American made ones. But considering how they’re branding this and the kind of person who will spend the premium to buy it, I doubt they will ever say anything.
Also after the Snowden revelations, I laugh at the idea that American made products are somehow more “secure”. Sure we (as in US intelligence community) think China puts back doors in things but from the Snowden revelations we KNOW that American companies like Cisco puts backdoor into things.
It crushed me last year when we ordered extrusion/machine work samples (a lot of 10 pieces) from a major American brand and some from "Ricky" a Chinese machine shop connect one of the guys here heard of through doing other parts sourcing in China.
The Chinese ones were better machined, had no issues, and were 1/3 the price. I weep for American manufacturing.
Even assuming that all hardware is backdoored, it can still make sense to use hardware from your own country, since your own government probably doesn’t want to harm its own economic interests.
I’m more worried about the other state understanding the topology of my state in higher resolution than my own state does. The ramifications are endless, and I believe that to be the more grave threat (aka undermine society at its cultural fabric while stealing/undermining the economy and crippling the military).
> Also after the Snowden revelations, I laugh at the idea that American made products are somehow more “secure”.
Be that may, but as a US person I’d rather have US intelligence snooping on me than a foreign hostile entity. There are no ifs and buts about it. For folks in other countries, I leave it to them if they are more comfortable with a democracy, with relatively good relations with most countries in the world, snooping on them or a communist regime, which has issues with each and every one of its neighbors.
The error here is the assumption that only foreign entities are hostile. A "foreign hostile entity" may have lots of information and malicious intent, but they lack legal jurisdiction and the ability to take open, direct action where I live. The most worrisome threat is that they manage to uncover a common interest with some domestic entity and share what they learned—and from that perspective domestic snooping just cuts out the middleman. I'd rather keep the entities doing the snooping and the ones with influence over me as widely separated as possible.
If you had actually looked back through my comment history you would have seen that I never defended China or claimed that the USA was worse. I am not a fan of governments in general but I will freely acknowledge that the US government is far from the worst example. My comment was purely about domestic snooping vs. foreign from the perspective of the one being spied upon—if one lives in China the roles will obviously be reversed, and in that case one should prefer a foreign entity like the USA gathering intel over the domestic Chinese equivalents. Either could wish you ill but the domestic power will almost always be the more immediate threat. (Not being spied upon at all would be ideal, of course.)
Which of the two countries has more invasions, coups and occupations in its history? Which one is still occupying several countries and has military bases in many others?
It’s the US the rest of us fear, with good reason.
Is their claim about electronic components 'origin declaration'[1] credible or is it just marketing sleight-of-hand? Aren't they just buying the same components made in Taiwan/China/wherever from a U.S. distributor such as Digikey and then saying 'Made in U.S.A.' in the same way other manufacturers do? (which would seem to seriously undermine their 'secure' supply chain claim) I've been under the impression that we don't have fabs in the U.S. making anywhere near the variety of components needed for a complete modern smartphone. I don't ask to be pedantic, but rather if it would be more accurate to say 'assembled' rather than 'manufactured' in USA.
> The Librem 5 USA will have a user-replaceable assembled in USA modem. The Gemalto modem chip itself is supplied from Germany, and we will be manufacturing our premium Gemalto M.2 modems in our USA facility.
I think he's referencing how some of the chips on the boards are unlikely to be US sourced given Librems low volumes, but seem to be consolidated as USA because they were soldered on a PCB in the US.
For example, from Librem's spec sheet at the bottom of that page lists 2 components from STMicroelectronics:
> Aren't they just buying the same components made in Taiwan/China/wherever from a U.S. distributor such as Digikey and then saying 'Made in U.S.A.' in the same way other manufacturers do?
Considering how fuzzy their language has been on the subject + the fact that they never cleared it despite many people asking for clarification + their track record on "embellishing" reality, we can rather safely assume that what they call 'Electronics' is in fact a dumb PCB, and that most of the components are the same as on the regular version.
In fact, I am even highly suspicious when this post talks about "in-house", "our facility". They have basically never manufactured anything so far, they are not a hardware maker (not even designers, this is outsourced too), there is no sign that they have qualified personal for such operation, the facility they have been talking so far was in fact a warehouse with a bit of final assembly and a bit of warranty service (just last month they said they had no personal there qualified to even simply check or fix the laptops motherboard they get from China), and they have zero cash. This is not consistent with suddenly buying PCB making and assembly line tooling and operating it for a single small series of product. The only possibility is if they got some government contract or something like that.
With this company, you should never forget that the boss is a bullshit artist, and that you should take anything he says with a large grain of salt. It doesn't mean that their projects are complete vaporware, or that they never deliver, but there is great difference between what they claim, what they promise, what they drive people to believe on one side, and what they actually do and achieve on the other side. He says what people want to hear, and it doesn't matter much whether it reflects reality or not. For example, in late 2019 he said that they would produce 50,000 Librem 5 before the end of Q1 2020. Well, as of the end of Q2 2021, they will have produced less than 2,000 unit (IIRC). And of course just a few months before, they completely faked the release in September 2019.
As a small US contract manufacturer working largely in Opensource Hardware I applaud their efforts. It is a step forward...even if it costs more.
There are many people in the US who would pay more for a phone made in the US. It isn't just military/govt. Although, they are not the majority.
I got into electronics in the mid/late 90s when there was still a lot of development and production in my area. I watched it largely move out of country and quite a few mid/high paying jobs largely disappear.
It still costs quite a bit more to have boards made in the US (unless you get your own equipment) but with the tariffs, shipping and possibility of further issues between our governments it starts to become fairly close to being worth the effort, at least for some things.
It would just take one or two lot rejections or a batch lost in shipping to make it not worthwhile for a mid sized producer. Large companies can absorb and plan in advance...small companies the loss may not be sizable...but the mid size company very well may have most of their eggs in the same basket so to speak.
I have had fairly good results with our Chinese manufacturer over the last 8 years or so but doing our own in house QA/Test is absolutely required. There has been very few batches where we could have got away with not doing so.
In our case we are doing small batch production in house while doing larger batches from China but since we have the machines in house and we can order parts from anywhere there is very little reason to not do our own in house production entirely. This allows for much tighter control over the process as well as defect mitigation on the fly during production.
The next few years are going to be very interesting for manufacturing worldwide. I expect it won't just be the US who is looking to bring at least a portion back to their country...or to countries which are cheaper/easier to work with.
Maybe I'm missing it, but it doesn't seem obvious if the parts they're using were also manufactured in the US? Which, if they're not, makes sourcing them still an issue if global supply chains were to break down for example.
Am I missing something or does that not say where the SoC/processor is made? TFA does not seem to say where the NXP CPU is made either. Or is that categorized under the "Electronics" category?
Maybe you don't know, but Purism tends to publish misleading information.
Most of the stuff in that product listing is trivial stuff to produce. The PCB/PCBA entries can basically all be ignored, and all the ICs on those PCBs can basically be assumed to be made in China, except for the NXP i.MX8M which is made in Korea
Do you have a source for where the i.MX8s are made? I tried to figure that out a while back and didn't find a clear answer, although Korea seems likely. (Samsung process which is done at fabs in the US and Korea, but origin documents I found list China for packaging/testing, which is more likely for a Korean fab - but not 100% certain, since chips get flown stupid distances sometimes for packaging, and not 100% if there aren't US-made ones too)
The NXP i.MX 8M Quad processor in the Librem 5 has "Made in Korea" stamped on them and there have been news articles published about how NXP was switching its foundry work from TSMC to Samsung. By the way, the i.MX 8M is designed in Austin, Texas (by the old Motorola division, which turned into Freescale and then was bought by NXP).
Come on, the Purism people have put up a huge effort. You can't just casually the product "massively underwhelming" without stating your reasons for doing so.
Well.. The CPU is multiple generations behind anything else on the market. Power management is basically non existent. They've only recently managed to get cameras working sorta, but not really. It was sold as a customer device, not a damn development platform. They started crowd funding in 2017, and so far have only delivered less than two months worth of devices to customers. Purism is violating the law on a daily basis.
Yes, the CPU is weak, suspend-to-RAM hasn't yet been added to the mainline Linux driver for the i.MX 8M, camera auto-focus doesn't yet work, and lot of work is needed for full functionality of the Megapixels camera app and use of an OpenPGP smartcard, but you are ignoring all the progress that has been made. Purism started with a new chip that didn't yet have good mainline Linux support and had to make several hundred commits to mainline Linux to support half a dozen new chips. Purism created a new mobile environment for Linux, which 65% of PinePhone users say in a poll is their favorite interface. Purism created the first free/open hardware phone since the Golden Delicious GTA04 in 2014 and manufactured the first phone in the US since the Motorola Moto X in 2013. The Librem 5 contains 6 innovations in the mobile phone industry, which is more innovations than any phone since the Samsung Galaxy S5 released in 2014. This is the first phone ever produced where the manufacturer promises lifetime software updates and the processor will be produced by the manufacturer (NXP) until at least Jan. 2033.
> Let’s say hypothetically that a Texas-based Instrument and parts maker has a part, let’s say that part is something like a TPS65892 (revision AB), and like all parts that Electronics Engineers (EEs) select, needs to be kitted exactly to part number (TPS65892) and package (NFBGA 96). Normally parts vary by part number (I am pretty sure it’s why they’re called part numbers), but in rare instances (I can think of only one) that part is a completely different part if it is appended by what you normally would read as a revision number: TPS65892BB. In this example these are pin-matching parts that do completely different things and where all things work fine with the exception of charging the battery and providing USB connectivity. After a number of hours tracing schematics to board read values, this hunting manifested itself into a data sheet comparison where we learned these are unrelated parts.
Holy moly. I'm glad that I don't have to deal with that.
I don’t know why they won’t just come out and say who the manufacturer was, to give the hypothetical some real-world context. I wouldn’t want to assume that they are referring to Texas Instruments.
Sarcasm aside, I appreciated the humor they put into that paragraph.
Correct me if I am wrong but the choice of SoC was due to the open nature of it and not the origin. All of the other limitations stem from the choice of SoC it seems.
Is it actually more open than a typical SoC? Also asking for the PinePhone. Also, will it ever get firmware updates? Also, I’m not even sure we have source code for the existing firmwares.
> Another misconception is that a machine placed part is in some way superior to the same connected part placed by hand. It’s not. It’s faster and more efficient, but hand (re)placement is equally stable. Electronics off a line are hand repaired more often than people understand. This only increases cost (labor and time), it doesn’t reduce reliability.
I had no idea! Worth the price of admission. Whole article fascinated me tbh
"Fun side story, one brand of 32GB eMMC has test pins on the underside that confuses the optical scanner for SMT parts placement, while another brand does not have the test pins. Since there is no easy way to mask the optical scanner of those test pins, a black permanent marker is a quick fix to blot them out so as not to confuse the scanner."
How many ICs are actually made in the US? They're pretty mum about it. My guess is that none of them are made in the US. So the phone was assembled in the US from all kinds of parts.
It would be almost impossible to make a phone with parts that are entire manufactured in the US. Most silicon foundry work is done in Taiwan (TSMC, UMC, Vanguard) and S. Korea (Samsung, DB HiTek). See: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-w...
Actually, that's interesting in that 1. they imply that it wasn't a "made in USA" issue and that the problem was just that they were only making the Moto X there and it didn't do well in the market, and 2. "Motorola says that the Moto X smartphone will still continue to be manufactured at plants in China and Brazil." -> if they're still making stuff in Brazil, that implies that it's really not as simple as "can't make anything outside of China".
Tariffs on some electronics can be insane in Brazil - for example "At a time when the [Playstation 4] was selling for $399 in the U.S., an equivalent system was heading to Brazil for $1,899".
Interesting to note that they started US manufacturing with the Librem Key[1] in 2019 which I imagine has a much lower total labor component than a full phone. Paying double the price for an under specced product is a lot easier to justify at $59 than $2000, especially for something so security essential. I would be happy to pay the premium just for the cool factor and to support supply chain diversity. I just wish they would release a USB-C NFC version of it.
What if pricing was listed in two parts: first, the price at current market rates, relative to its alternatives; second, a share of early adopter stock. The price paid less market rates for a comparable phone treated as an investment, perhaps as much as several hundred dollars per device. The stock pool being a percentage of the company commensurate with network-effects of its adoption. Sometimes crowd-sourced purchases like this are more easily justified, and even rewarded later, if accounted for as investments.
It is an interesting idea to have a USA model. However, I do not understand why do they have two models of the same phone? It is like saying "We have this made-in-China phone which is secure and open source but we also have this other made-in-USA phone which is more secure and more open". Oversimplistic but that is the idea.
It seems nice but I don't think it matters at this point to wave the nationalist flag when it's only a half-measure forgetting the 500 kg gorilla in the room. Where are nearly all the closed-source designs, manufacturing, and firmwares for the chips made? And, absolutely no chances of backdoors there, right?
In this case, that means that it converges with desktop software. From what I can tell, GTK and QT have both been shifting their focus to touch-based, scalable UIs. The result is native code that feels just as good with a mouse as it does on a touchscreen.
Other than US govmt, and other highly regulated US institution, I wonder about the size and social characteristics of the group that both can/doesn't mind paying 2000USD for a understating (and in many ways underpowered) and rejects the non-USA model.
My only gripe with bringing desktop Linux to phones is that desktop Linux is a security nightmare. Someone with more experience please chime in, but the whole thing is C, no usable sandbox (a bug in firejail will make the untrusted code run root..) and the old xkcd comic is still true: the only thing a malicious actor can’t do is install a video driver. That is, your user account with all the important data is basically left completely open. Compared to the iphone, and android (especially graphene os) it is laughable.
And while basically noone uses pinephone/librem 5, there are plenty of people running desktop linux (myself included), but I don’t sleep well knowing how unsecure the whole thing is, and seemingly it is not a priority to anyone. Is my paranoia based on facts?
> When we develop security solutions, we develop them without looking down on the user or thinking of them as som[e]body that we have to protect almost like a parent-child relationship. We try to build a solution that gives them control over their own security.
That's many words for saying we don't have any sort of security measures.
> Because all the code in the root file system of the Librem 5 is free/open source, all of it can be reviewed to verify that it doesn't contain backdoors and doesn't do anything that the user doesn't want it to do
At most it answers privacy but not security. Also, non-existent security can so easily add a "backdoor", especially on top of an all-memory-unsafe environment where memory bugs are everywhere.
But I will give them that they do list basically all my gripes with it:
> It lacks a secure boot process to verify that none of the boot files have been changed.
> It lacks a hardware-backed key store.
> The apps are not run in a secure sandbox.
> PureOS doesn't have shim kernel drivers that do most of their execution in userspace libraries like Android and iOS.
> PureOS doesn't have low-level protections such as Control Flow Integrity and ShadowCallStack in Android and Pointer Authentication Codes in iOS.
> Most of the operating system and applications are written in memory unsafe languages like C and C++.
> The Librem 5 lacks a permission system where each app is required to ask the user for permission to access parts of the phone like Android has.
And unfortunately the answer to these is that there are some distant plans for some of these. Hopefully both desktop and mobile Linux will improve heavily in this area in the coming years.
Off topic I guess, but the font that article uses is throwing my eyes for a loop. The lower-case 't' in particular, but I am also not fond of the number '3' either.
The West in general has been on a downward trend when it comes to manufacturing. Areas that were relatively wealthy decades ago now have high rates of unemployment, crime, drug abuse, shortened lifespans etc. If projects like this work out it could help reverse that trend.
This is really cool, but it's $2,000. The problem is the specs don't quite justify a $2,000 price tag. The iPhone 12 Pro Max is $1,099 for 256Gb model. The Librem 5 has 32Gb built in. Granted you can expand storage on the Librem 5, but that's added cost on top of the $2,000. There are other specs to compare, but storage is an easy target.
I think the project is awesome, and I'd be very inclined to purchase one, but I can't justify $2,000 for a comparatively subpar device.
Yeah I definitely see the value in privacy and respect for the user, and Librem is king there, but that still doesn't justify a $2,000 price tag to me. I wouldn't pay $15,000 for a Ford Pinto because it has bulletproof windows.
I will note that Purism do not say what their production capacity is, and that it would probably be a different task entirely to manufacture a significant percentage of iPhones in the US. I’m not surprised that manufacturing thousands of extremely expensive phones in the US is possible. I would be a lot more surprised if they had managed to manufacture millions of reasonably priced phones in the US. The big question is whether the federal government will embrace the industrial policy required to rebuild our manufacturing capacity in high-tech.