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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

People preorder something like this with missing specs? I like the philosophy of it but I'm not handing over $600+ without knowing all the hardware info. I'm not interested if all the specs don't exceed those of my Pixel 2, which will be at least two years old when the Librem 5 is released.

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Yes, I did. And I fully expected the schedule to slip. And I fully expect it to slip again. (Hardware is hard, been there, collected the scars.) And I fully expect the software to be glitchy. And I fully expect the user experience to underwhelm.

So why preorder? Because I want to support the mission of a security-first, user-freedom-first, phone. I want to support the idea of a Linux phone. Unless those of us that want something like this, and can afford to front $600 to help the first iteration happen, do so, there will never be a second iteration.

Yes, I am one of them. They are not a fly-by-night company with a random Kickstarter. Of course it was a calculated risk, but it was worth it at the time, and it seems to be panning out in my favor. If you consider everything that people preorder on Kickstarter without due diligence, it would stand to reason there are some people that do due diligence and preorder something like this.

If risk/reward ratio is too high you could wait when they'd ship them and order one for yourself, I don't think they'd stop the production afterwards but the price would be the same due to the batch size.

I can tell you right now that traditional specs will be worse, but freedom specs will be better e.g. runs mainline Linux, hardware baseband isolation, kill switches etc.

I don't care one bit about the specs. The Librem 5 has so much more to offer.

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