4 ms·

Was just thinking about this the other day. Why were the librem and the pinephone never updated? I'd like to get a new one, but am sure not going to buy somet

Was just thinking about this the other day. Why were the librem and the pinephone never updated? I'd like to get a new one, but am sure not going to buy something 10+ years old at this point. (Would be happy if a new one was comparable to my old iPhone 6s.) I know there's not a lot of money in them. But if you want sales at all you better update your hardware more often than never.

curtis3389 2y ago
Pine64 updated the PinePhone with the PinePhone Pro.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Guess I thought of that one as more like a "fix," since the first one was not fit for purpose. Still not good enough, needs spec bump and driver support.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    I was looking at potential linux phones the other day, postmarketOS has ports for phones as new as fairphone 4 and OnePlus 6. They don't have any phones with decent camera support though. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Hmm, I saw the fairphone 5 on another page and the hardware support is not substantially worse. Install page says you need fairphone.com to give you permission to unlock. :-/
      - beeflet 2y ago
        yeah most android phones do, it has to do with the modem I think
  - throwaway74354 2y ago
    >driver support It's Pine64, their whole business model is «Here's the hardware, you're on your own now».
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Not a good business model if they can’t afford to rev the hardware.
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  It was more like making the PinePhone catch up to Librem 5. I'm writing this on my L5 and I still have no prospects if I wanted to upgrade.
fsflover 2y ago
What exactly do you want to upgrade? See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/ https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
seba_dos1 2y ago
Librem 5 is starting to get old, can't argue with that, but it's not quite 10+ years old yet. It's a 2018-2019 design based on a SoC that went into GA in 2018. Even though its ARM cores weren't state-of-the-art at that time already, it has bigger caches, stronger GPU and faster DDR that what you would usually find paired with similar cores earlier, giving it a solid boost when compared to, say, PinePhone, which uses a CPU that seems very similar from a quick glance at specs on paper until you actually try to use it. I've been using L5 as my daily driver for years now and I don't feel very constrained with its performance just yet. The most painful things are related to lack of features in its SoC rather than its age - such as no hw video encoding or camera ISP, which means that things that other phones do efficiently in hardware have to be done in software. i.MX 8M Quad isn't the best suited SoC for mobile phone use-case, but it was the best that was available back then given other constraints of the project. Today there's still no abundance of such choices, but there actually are a few more interesting ones on the market. I hope we'll see some projects following through soonish, as I'll eventually need an upgrade path for my Librem 5 indeed.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Maybe not in years, but my iPhone 6s debuted in 2015 and Android of the time was competitive. These phones don't match it. It's not so much bad performance I object to but spending top dollar on something that's already long obsolete. Qualcom is supposed to have competitive CPUs now. An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux, charge an extra $100/yr for drivers and support, and start a nice little business. Believe Purism already has a subscription where they provide vpn, matrix, and other privacy tools, so they are almost there. Maybe they need an investor, but honestly the capital outlay should be tiny for the amount of goodwill and eventually business it would bring. With the trillions sloshing around with nowhere to go at the moment, it could change the world for the better.
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    > An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux Good luck with that. Unless you settle for Android middleware underneath your OS (like some existing projects do), it's a massive undertaking. You still need to invest a lot into R&D while you lose what's differentiating you in the process (in case of Librem 5, there are things like hardware kill switches, PGP card reader, replaceable M.2 modules etc.) so you can chase SoCs that will already be considered obsolete once you're done with the software anyway. Even Purism with their prices couldn't afford to use an unsupported SoC and relied on NXP's upstreaming efforts. I suspect that if I was wrong and it was actually a viable path it would already be taken by someone. Maybe we'll see something appearing in coming years, as these days more vendors actually started to care about mainline support, but as it is today the landscape is still not that great, especially when it comes to SoCs that are actually targeting smartphones.

curtis3389 2y ago

Pine64 updated the PinePhone with the PinePhone Pro.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
Guess I thought of that one as more like a "fix," since the first one was not fit for purpose. Still not good enough, needs spec bump and driver support.
- beeflet 2y ago
  I was looking at potential linux phones the other day, postmarketOS has ports for phones as new as fairphone 4 and OnePlus 6. They don't have any phones with decent camera support though. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Hmm, I saw the fairphone 5 on another page and the hardware support is not substantially worse. Install page says you need fairphone.com to give you permission to unlock. :-/
    - beeflet 2y ago
      yeah most android phones do, it has to do with the modem I think
- throwaway74354 2y ago
  >driver support It's Pine64, their whole business model is «Here's the hardware, you're on your own now».
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Not a good business model if they can’t afford to rev the hardware.
seba_dos1 2y ago
It was more like making the PinePhone catch up to Librem 5. I'm writing this on my L5 and I still have no prospects if I wanted to upgrade.

fsflover 2y ago

What exactly do you want to upgrade? See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/ https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

seba_dos1 2y ago

Librem 5 is starting to get old, can't argue with that, but it's not quite 10+ years old yet. It's a 2018-2019 design based on a SoC that went into GA in 2018. Even though its ARM cores weren't state-of-the-art at that time already, it has bigger caches, stronger GPU and faster DDR that what you would usually find paired with similar cores earlier, giving it a solid boost when compared to, say, PinePhone, which uses a CPU that seems very similar from a quick glance at specs on paper until you actually try to use it. I've been using L5 as my daily driver for years now and I don't feel very constrained with its performance just yet. The most painful things are related to lack of features in its SoC rather than its age - such as no hw video encoding or camera ISP, which means that things that other phones do efficiently in hardware have to be done in software. i.MX 8M Quad isn't the best suited SoC for mobile phone use-case, but it was the best that was available back then given other constraints of the project. Today there's still no abundance of such choices, but there actually are a few more interesting ones on the market. I hope we'll see some projects following through soonish, as I'll eventually need an upgrade path for my Librem 5 indeed.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
Maybe not in years, but my iPhone 6s debuted in 2015 and Android of the time was competitive. These phones don't match it. It's not so much bad performance I object to but spending top dollar on something that's already long obsolete. Qualcom is supposed to have competitive CPUs now. An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux, charge an extra $100/yr for drivers and support, and start a nice little business. Believe Purism already has a subscription where they provide vpn, matrix, and other privacy tools, so they are almost there. Maybe they need an investor, but honestly the capital outlay should be tiny for the amount of goodwill and eventually business it would bring. With the trillions sloshing around with nowhere to go at the moment, it could change the world for the better.
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  > An business should be able to buy cheap Android phones in bulk, install Linux Good luck with that. Unless you settle for Android middleware underneath your OS (like some existing projects do), it's a massive undertaking. You still need to invest a lot into R&D while you lose what's differentiating you in the process (in case of Librem 5, there are things like hardware kill switches, PGP card reader, replaceable M.2 modules etc.) so you can chase SoCs that will already be considered obsolete once you're done with the software anyway. Even Purism with their prices couldn't afford to use an unsupported SoC and relied on NXP's upstreaming efforts. I suspect that if I was wrong and it was actually a viable path it would already be taken by someone. Maybe we'll see something appearing in coming years, as these days more vendors actually started to care about mainline support, but as it is today the landscape is still not that great, especially when it comes to SoCs that are actually targeting smartphones.