Oh sure, that's the problem. Instead of improper engineering, they should've gone with proper engineering. They really should've known better.
In all seriousness, if you expect such a small company could build a decent phone, on a new Linux platform, on their first try, on schedule, then you're divorced from reality.
Version 1 of this thing was going to suck, no matter what. Remember, the first Android handsets by reputable manufacturers were utter garbage.
I used the original Android handsets -- the first first ones that never made it to market. I remember their quality (still have one), and I'd fully expect that as the first thing coming out of the gate from Purism.
Oh no, of course the individual(s) that promised those things aren't divorced from reality. It's the consumer that paid money and expected the product they were that's divorced from reality...
Funny how quick you are to point the blame at someone who just went ahead and thought they'd get what they paid for, on time.
What a skewed perception.
I didn't say that. From a business standpoint, it seems like a very long shot.
What did you expect the advertising campaign to be like?
"We don't really know what we're doing, we're going to fuck this up, give us your money!"
CAVEAT EMPTOR (Kickstarter terms of service, paraphrased)
Maybe you could help them to prevent the next "glaringly obvious" issues ?
Because people keep hounding them!
Do you do your best work when people keep interupting you asking when it'll be ready? You would still complete your task if people weren't interupting you, right? The interuptions might cause you to say 'fuck it' and just ship just to get it over with, even though you wanted to spend 10% or whatever more time to make it 50% better.
That's what I'm getting at.
What does every boss say? Please communicate as soon as possible if you think the date is going to slip. Then everybody can recalibrate their expectations and you might get another little period of not being hounded. Though unfortunately it won't be as free of hounding as before, because your 2nd estimate will be trusted somewhat less than your first one, which turned out to be wrong.
Some bosses, not the good ones, will say "You will meet the date, end of story." But what no boss ever says is "You need to meet this date, and if you can't, I don't want to know about it. Please obfuscate."
Everybody knows a completely open phone is a hard job, but that ironically is the reason nobody believes the happy-face blog posts saying "Hi, everything's great!" I backed this project and I smelled something fishy as soon as they announced the "iterative shipping schedule." Not because I'm a crybaby who wants his phone now (in fact I opted for the latest possible shipment knowing the earlier ones would have "issues"), but because of how they tried to cloak the obvious and expected ("We're not ready") in terms of something straight out of Animal Farm ("We always planned it this way.") You tryin' to say you ain't ready dawg? Just say that.
As usual the missing ingredient is leadership. You need somebody who's a compass needle, not a weathervane. You need somebody who's confident enough to tell the truth, warts and all, and who knows how to get everybody to love the warts. People will dump even more money and manpower in to help you if you do that.
I'm a backer. I have a devkit. I opted for Aspen, Birch, and Chestnut, in that order, just like the author. I had also been figuring I'd also end up buying a batch Fir (mech v2, Q4 2020) when it came out because I can't imagine there won't be shortcomings with the versions before that. I also already own a Neo Freerunner and a Firefox Flame. I say that all to show that I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is when I say I want an open source phone.
However, even I am considering requesting a refund. I've been burned on kickstarter before and this project is so far following the "this project isn't going to deliver" manual to a t.
Thus far, Purism has been omitting facts such as RAM performance, and sidestepping directed questions. These don't instill confidence in customers for an "open" company.
Moreover, hardware cannot be shipped this way. Schedules and the needs of the hardware dictate the control of the schedule. You literally cannot ship a PCB until regulatory requirements are satisfied and the boards are assembled.
My big concern right now is that they're pushing hard to release before things are ready, and with this SOC, that can easily be a death knell for the product they release.