5 ms·
Sad reflection of the realities of manufacturing, I suspect. They won’t ever achieve the kind of scale you’d need to make it cheaper. IMO it is what it is. Esp
by afavour 3y ago
Sad reflection of the realities of manufacturing, I suspect. They won’t ever achieve the kind of scale you’d need to make it cheaper.
IMO it is what it is. Especially when you consider the hardware kill switches etc this is a niche product that the right small audience will pay $1.2k for.
- stonogo 3y agoTwo generations of pinephone disagree. I think the price is due to labor costs for software.
- asddubs 3y agopine also puts $0 into software though
- finitestateuni 3y agoAre you trying to contradict or agree with the post you replied to? That’s exactly what they are saying.
- asddubs 3y agoNeither, really, just spell out what that means more explicitly
- pengaru 3y agoI think pine64's business model is to pursue sales volume, but it's unclear to me if there's enough buyers of linux phones for that approach to be sustainable long-term. Maybe if they can keep refreshing their model with regular hardware upgrades, they can milk their base. Having a pine64 style competitor is problematic for Purism since it's cannibalizing their sales. It's likely contributing to the even higher prices needed just to keep the lights on. Which just creates more pressure diverting potential sales towards pine64. Would Purism even move more product if their prices better matched pine64's? Is there a queue of would-be librem5 buyers waiting that just can't stomach the price? How many people are there really who want a chunky phone with work-in-progress software, regardless of price? My prediction is after Purism implodes Pine64's prices start climbing.
- seba_dos1 3y ago> I think the price is due to labor costs for software. Mostly, but not only. There's also user support, and PinePhones are much cheaper to build.
- selectodude 3y agoIt was $700 two years ago and has almost doubled. I have no issue with a $1300 phone (I own one) but generally tech things get cheaper as time passes.
- crazygringo 3y ago> but generally tech things get cheaper as time passes. I don't think that applies at all to super small high-skill manufacturing runs.
- Matl 3y agoThere's the USA edition and the standard edition. AFAIK it's the US-manufactured one that's so expensive, they're also short of parts AFAIK.
- srgpqt 3y agoThe USA edition is/was over $2000
- martin8412 3y agoUSA edition is around $2k
- Tommstein 3y agoNot cell phones. I remember when the most expensive phone you could get was like $700. Then all the stories about how prices were about to hit a ludicrous four figures. Now there's a wide variety of phones that cost four figures.
- LoganDark 3y agoMan, I miss the days when you could get a rootable phone that could run the latest LineageOS for like $80. (That's how much it was for my Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE which was extremely rootable.)
- chunk_waffle 3y ago
- Zetobal 3y agoI am just going with a Fairphone 5 and if the need arises pull out the module. Cheaper, more performance, repairable and if you really wanted you could probably even fit microswitches.
- macinjosh 3y agoWith labor costs skyrocketing across the globe (for good reason) I sometimes wonder how long it will be until we get "flat-pack" electronics, i.e. where things come largely disassembled and you must put it together before using. Framework is kinda heading in this direction with laptops.
- ansible 3y agoThe final assembly, while it doesn't cost nothing, isn't that expensive. What does cost more is final testing, to make sure all the components work together. It is cheaper to do that well at the end of the assembly process before starting packaging, than to deal with a high rate of returns. The testing done throughout the manufacturing process is a significant cost.
- 95014_refugee 3y agoFlat-pack furniture is not an efficiency due to the cost of assembly, but shipping, as furniture is mostly air. You will note that most flat-pack furniture designs somehow fit incredibly efficiently into cubic prisms that themselves fit suspiciously conveniently into standard shipping containers. By contrast, consider a modern smartphone. There is very little volume to be won by shipping it as parts, and there is greatly increased risk of customer dissatisfaction due to customers-at-large being clumsy, untrained, unequipped and unaccustomed to the assembly task. Just look at how popular it is to complain about assembling Ikea furniture, compare/contrast with e.g. PC assembly, and then scale that up...
- wmf 3y agoThe Framework DIY model is fully assembled at the factory, tested, burned in, then disassembled back into kit form.
- fevangelou 3y agoThe PinePhone guys must be marketing geniuses then to sell a true open source device for 150 USD.
- free_glamorgan 3y agoThey sure are. They are selling budget, cobbled-together hardware that "supports FOSS", when in reality you are the one providing that support.
- Hackbraten 3y agoPurism paid for all the development and the PinePhone folks took it for free. Which is perfectly ok – it’s open source. But that doesn’t make Purism’s business case any less valid.
- free_glamorgan 3y agoIt's probably coming for us all. The increasingly saturated smartphone market will not provide the sales that manufacturers need to maintain the current economies of scale. That is, unless they perfect the art of phones engineered for a very particular lifetime.
- aidenn0 3y agoHow do volumes compare to say the Unihertz[1] phones, which are also niche phones, yet all list for under $400? 1: https://www.unihertz.com/collections/smartphones https://www.unihertz.com/collections/smartphones
- asddubs 3y agoWithout looking into this further, a lot of smaller manufacturers license standard designs from chinese companies as a base. I don't know if that's the case here, but it's one explanation. This is obviously not a good option for an open source phone.