Last updated on March 9, 2021
The Linux manufacturer Purism increases the prices for its smartphone Librem 5. As of January 2020, it should cost $ 750, from official availability it will be $ 800. At the start of the crowdfunding campaign to fund the device around two years ago, the Purism team asked $ 600 for the device.
In a blog post , the manufacturers of the Librem smartphone explain the price increases: the originally issued prices were very rough estimates. However, over time, various factors have led the project to have to calculate the prices higher than initially planned.
The original plan to offer a cheap off-the-shelf device simply didn’t work. Instead, the Librem 5 had to be developed from scratch, which included the hardware design and kernel drivers. At the beginning of 2019, the price was still optimistically estimated at $ 700, but it has now come to the realization that $ 800 is a realistic price.
However, the price changes do not take effect immediately: The company plans to offer its device for $ 700 by the end of 2019, after which the price will rise to $ 750, later to $ 800. The latter happens as soon as Evergreen, the variant for the mass market, is delivered. The Librem 5 is sold in different production phases of different quality. The first customers have already received devices.
Librem server announced
Regardless of the work on the smartphone, Purism is also working on other projects. The company now offers its own server . Thanks to Pureboot, this should be particularly secure, because Purism’s boot manager deactivates the built-in Intel Management Engine, replaces the BIOS with Coreboot, and it becomes possible to measure the boot process, i.e. to detect manipulations. It also includes a USB-based security token and various enterprise support packages.
The server, equipped with Intel’s Broadwell generation Xeon-D CPUs, can be ordered in three different technical versions . The cheapest option starts at $ 2700, the most expensive version $ 6000.
