Purism Planning For Three Hardware Kill Switches With The Librem 5

[haploeco]

I think these are welcome features. I am more curious about when...

[tg--]

caligula, the RAM is probably sufficient for it's particular use case. I guess it does also support an external monitor (according to their marketing), so yea. But my point with the 802.11ac is that it wouldn't cost much (if anything) more to use an 802.11ac chip. That would allow for faster data transfer (for more than just video, but also files and synchronizing.) Also, wave 2 of 802.11 generally includes MU-MIMO which prevents the client from hogging the airtime.

Cost likely wasn't the issue here.
I'm fairly certain they just didn't find a WiFi chipset with newer spec support that has the firmware in memory on the chipset itself, instead of being loaded as a blob by the OS driver.
The reason they need that is, that they strive for FSFs "respects your freedom" certification, which in turn depends on Stallmans old firmware philosophy.
Firmware that's fixed to the device and not changeable is considered part of the hardware, firmware that's loaded is considered software and has therefore to be free software to be acceptable.

Personally I don't think that adds any actual value, but I can see their point.
For Purism that basically means, that the can chose only within a very limited number of actual chipsets, and an 802.11ac one likely just wasn't among those.

[Jaxad0127]

Wifi/Bluetooth is on an M.2 card. You can replace the one it comes with with a newer one later. Same with cellular.

[tg--]

Wifi/Bluetooth is on an M.2 card. You can replace the one it comes with with a newer one later. Same with cellular.

While this is true for the devboard (which is a devboard, not a phone), I can't possibly see how this could be true for the finished product.
Adding 2 m.2 sockets and 2 cards would make the device enormously large (it's going to be pretty hefty anyway), and that's just not going to happen.

I know this has been repeated many times, but purism never commented on it. Most likely because they're not actually that sure how they will actually do it since they haven't even selected a mobile chipset yet.

Anyway, whatever they do, it won't be replaceable m.2 cards.
The Redpine WiFi will be a System-on-Module using a direct SDIO connection to the i.MX8, very likely the RS9116 B00 LGA package.
The Mobile chipset will likely be a Gemalto PLS8 using a direct USB 2.0 connection to the i.MX8; it too is a LGA package.

No hardware replacement of those components, besides a full replacement board, will be possible.

This is not based on any information given by Purism, it is an educated guess based on no inside information.
It is however based on my knowledge on how phones tend to be built by anyone else, and on how Purism laid out the devboard, which gives some insight on what they are actually planning.

[Eneni]

I don’t see the point in the absence of a headphone jack, for example on Iphone 7