Purism Librem 13 / 15 Laptops Hit GA Status

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Librem 13 / 15 Laptops Hit GA Status

Purism has announced their privacy-minded Coreboot-friendly Librem laptops have reached a general availability state...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Purism-Librem-GA-Target

[muncrief]

While I appreciate and respect the goals of Librem, the price of their laptops are shockingly high. For example, their 15.6" laptop with a Core i7 6500U CPU, 8GB DDR4 Ram, 1080p IPS display, and 250GB SSD is an incredible $1,999.00. This just can't be justified under any circumstance.

By way of comparison a similar laptop, primarily differing with 12GB of DDR4, A 1TB conventional hard drive, and even a Nvidia GeForce 940MX discrete GPU, can be had for $739.00. And that's just one of many I cite because I recently purchased it for a friend. And while it comes with Windows 10 preinstalled, Xubuntu 16.04 installs without a problem.

So wow, I don't know what else to say. If they want to sell anything close to a significant number of laptops they're really going to have to change their pricing structure because their smaller laptops are equally overpriced. I purchase a lot of laptops for friends and clients and could never in good conscience recommend they pay so much for so little.

[arakan94]

While I appreciate and respect the goals of Librem, the price of their laptops are shockingly high. For example, their 15.6" laptop with a Core i7 6500U CPU, 8GB DDR4 Ram, 1080p IPS display, and 250GB SSD is an incredible $1,999.00. This just can't be justified under any circumstance.

By way of comparison a similar laptop, primarily differing with 12GB of DDR4, A 1TB conventional hard drive, and even a Nvidia GeForce 940MX discrete GPU, can be had for $739.00. And that's just one of many I cite because I recently purchased it for a friend. And while it comes with Windows 10 preinstalled, Xubuntu 16.04 installs without a problem.

So wow, I don't know what else to say. If they want to sell anything close to a significant number of laptops they're really going to have to change their pricing structure because their smaller laptops are equally overpriced. I purchase a lot of laptops for friends and clients and could never in good conscience recommend they pay so much for so little.

It's a small company making their HW and providing coreboot support.. They have to pay R&D from something and since they don't sell hundreds of thousands of laptops, it shows on final price..

[Rubble Monkey]

Well, aside from the screen resolution those specs aren't too far off from a similarly priced macbook.

[muncrief]

It's a small company making their HW and providing coreboot support.. They have to pay R&D from something and since they don't sell hundreds of thousands of laptops, it shows on final price..

I understand arakan94. The problem is that with such astronomical prices they are guaranteeing they will remain a small company, if not fail completely.

And building their own hardware was a very bad decision. There's nothing special about it, and they could easily have bought the hardware from a vendor that could supply it at normal OEM prices, and then put their own software on it. This would have enabled them to advance their vision at affordable prices. Heck, they could have bought hardware at retail prices and still been in a better sales position.

[muncrief]

Well, aside from the screen resolution those specs aren't too far off from a similarly priced macbook.

Indeed Rubble Monkey. And Apple is infamous for financially raping consumers. The last thing any company should try to do is emulate them. And not just because it's immoral, but also because Apple was unique in that it was led by one of the most incredible marketing geniuses in history. Despite his lack of ethics, no one can deny the genius of Steve Jobs.

Mr. Jobs was able to convince millions of people that paying two to four times as much for, more often than not mediocre, hardware, combined with outrageously expensive software from a limited and cloistered ecosystem, was rational.

In fact Mr. Jobs was so good he could have sold at least a few horse ranchers Apple branded horse manure, after somehow convincing them that their own horses manure just wasn't as good as his. He could have then offered to haul away their horses manure for free, rebranding it and selling it as Apple horse manure to another rancher down the road. Of course not many ranchers would fall for it, but he could have charged the ones who did so much that he still would have made a good profit.

[starshipeleven]

And building their own hardware was a very bad decision. There's nothing special about it, and they could easily have bought the hardware from a vendor that could supply it at normal OEM prices, and then put their own software on it. This would have enabled them to advance their vision at affordable prices. Heck, they could have bought hardware at retail prices and still been in a better sales position.

I'm pretty sure that they are only designing the boards while chassis and other dumb stuff is pre-made. Designing and fabbing your own chassis too would have been outrageously more expensive than this.
I think Clevo and others allow you to buy empty chassis designs.

That said, I don't know if they could be making their own EFI firwmare (or coreboot) without being the designers of the board.

[chithanh]

While I appreciate and respect the goals of Librem, the price of their laptops are shockingly high.

That said, I don't know if they could be making their own EFI firwmare (or coreboot) without being the designers of the board.

Coreboot supports many (mostly older) boards which they are not the designers of.
Then you have the Chromebooks, which are also running Coreboot (support contributed by the designers of the board) and are reasonably priced.

I agree that this is a too high price for what is essentially another Linux laptop, still with proprietary parts in Coreboot, and questionable advantage over Chromebooks in this regard.

[starshipeleven]

Coreboot supports many (mostly older) boards which they are not the designers of.

If I speak about EFI firmware I'm talking about relatively new stuff, and afaik even coreboot devs said you need more than just reverse-enginnering (they were talking of Intel NDAs ). It's not a conicidence that the most new non-chromebook supported boards had info more easily available due to information leaks a while ago.

Then you have the Chromebooks, which are also running Coreboot (support contributed by the designers of the board) and are reasonably priced.

They are heavily mass-produced though.

[GI_Jack]

Well, aside from the screen resolution those specs aren't too far off from a similarly priced macbook.

Not just screen resolution, but Apple screens are notoriously good. Not just "high res", but excellent color reproduction. Last job I had two 30" apple monitors on my desk. Beautiful picture, looked fantastic. To people who do art for a living, this matters a lot.

The fit, finish, and customer support for Apple have made it a luxury brand.

That said, having factory coreboot support might be worth the premium. Factory coreboot means that all features work with coreboot. With that price, I expect a decent firmware UI ontop of coreboot, and I also expect BOTH SeaBIOS and tianocore to be shipped by default.

If the machine has easily serviceable wifi, hd, ram, etc..., that might be worth it, as that adds many years to the life of a laptop. Especially if it has a second pci-e slot for GSM/Cell