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.
Not 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.
Man, 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.)
I miss the days when there was hardware differentiation at any price. There is literally one brand of phone right now that both A) has a headphone jack and B) doesn't have some kind of screen cutout for the selfie camera, and that's the Sony Xperia line. Despite the price (their entire line of current models is >$1000), I would probably pay it (or buy an older year model on ebay) except that they are not compatible with my provider (or at least uncertainly so, the internet has mixed things to say and they are 100% for sure not _officially_ supported.
I ended up going with a 3 year old phone from a different manufacturer that is officially supported but still had to give up the headphone jack.
B is super important to me, so my phone right now is a OnePlus 7 Pro. It was one of the last models ever made that can still pass SafetyNet while rooted (due to being whitelisted for "basic" / non-hardware-backed attestation). Unfortunately now it's several versions out of date and will stay that way for the foreseeable future, on top of the fact that nobody's figured out how to lock the bootloader on a custom ROM, despite the fact that it'll get you back Widevine L1 keys (the 7 Pro doesn't erase them on bootloader unlock like most phones do).
But this all stopped mattering to me when something accidentally activated a "feature"[0] of TWRP that erased my device and the maintainers have so far been completely hostile to the notion of adding an option to disable that functionality. ADHD now permanently bars me from any form of tweaking because the risk of TWRP suddenly erasing my device one day cannot be mitigated whatsoever. Even making backups from TWRP is off-limits because I'm afraid of it erasing my device instead.
Now I just use my phone because OxygenOS is great, the hardware mute switch is great, lack of camera cutout is great (fuck rounded corners though), and it has some serious flagship specs. Not an advertisement or anything, but this was $300 refurbished from Back Market.
Yikes, that issue you opened is like the exact opposite of proper etiquette for asking maintainers of open source software to help you. Basically what you’re doing is making a feature request, there is no bug or issue with TWRP as multiple people told you on GitHub. It’s absolutely not cool to continue to hound open source contributors for timelines like that. You’re not their boss, if it’s such an important issue to you fix it yourself and create a pull/merge request.
This is not just a nice-to-have thing, this is their project proactively running something that I did not authorize without informing me or giving me any chance to prevent it. I absolutely consider it a huge problem, not just a bug, that this functionality cannot be disabled in any way. Therefore I did not file a simple feature request for the setting because the deeper problem is that this functionality exists in the first place in a non-disableable manner.
I don't feel safe, no amount of discussion about etiquette will make me stop seeing this as a critical vulnerability that needs to be fixed, and it could take days or weeks of work for me to figure out how to compile TWRP properly if I were to fold at this point to the ten people telling me to just do it myself, which is a really stupid (imho) time investment that isn't compatible with my disabilities, sorry.
Something you did caused it to happen. Again, what you’re asking for has nothing to do with their project and is not a vulnerability in the slightest. It’s a feature working as intended, you should be focusing on what you did to cause it to happen. You’re also free to not use TWRP it if it doesn’t work for you.
I saw the issue you created and the comments, and they're pretty demanding IMO. It may be a grave problem and hypothetically the devs missed it and you're correct, instead of constantly adding new comments you can try forking and adding that option yourself.
The devs will be grateful, your problem will be resolved and you'll probably feel better about the whole situation.
The problem is that I'm absolutely not an Android developer and the process of building images for these devices is super convoluted. I have no idea how the official builds work nor can I find any consistent documentation on exactly what I need to do in order to configure everything properly to build for my device. It seriously is a mountain of work compared to someone who already has a development environment and my ADHD says no.
I almost said something along those lines too, how the skyrocketing prices have come alongside increasingly homogeneous boring phones with fewer features, but absolutely. I was recently going through my old HTC EVO 3D, and I would give my left nut to get that 3-D technology back in a new phone, the pictures and videos put you back in the moment in ways 2-D can't. Incidentally, I also just upgraded last week from my old Sony Xperia 5 II to a Sony Xperia 5 III. Which hopefully lasts a long time, because Sony is also removing features; the 5 III added a second zoom lens, but the 5 IV regressed to a single smaller one, and the just-announced 5 V removes the telephoto lens completely.
Not when you had to split already relatively small production batches into even smaller ones because the entire supply chain has collapsed and you couldn't obtain components in any helpful quantity for about two years.
With 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.
Flat-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...
The 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Without 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.
It'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.
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.