Kind of - 800$ is somewhere in a reasonable range that can be accomplished with small batch sizes. Unfortunately, privacy-focused devices are niche products because the majority of phone users are actual sheeple and only care about price for the megapixels.
At least I can no longer find the upcharge for customers abroad in their shop, that was in the order of a ridiculous 25% with no explanation given.
Still, I mostly wouldn’t buy a phone from another country because warranty cases suck to handle with customs even when the vendor is cooperating.
My main interest in this phone was because it can be used instead of a laptop, with USB-C monitor and keyboard/mouse hooked up. Unfortunately they only support their own, overpriced monitor.
Pinephone has a “convergence package” (adapter, think KVM switch), but unfortunately with postmarketOS, the pinephone battery drained so fast that it has been collecting dust in a drawer since a week after I got it :(
Unfortunately, I do need a phone that can run apps. I can argue all day about how coercive and how much it sucks that so much services that I have to use regularly need only run on mainstream OS phones.
Try to boycott all non-standard interfaces whenever you can. If not boycotting means becoming complicit in establishing totalitarian regimes world-wide (and if you consequently think this through, this is the unavoidable outcome of surrendering all our data to truly empathyless and greedy billionaires), then the hoops you have to jump through to make a boycott work do not seem such a bad trade-off after all.
Using corporately configured smartphones is a very strong support of totalitarian monsters, if not outright fascists.
Kind of - 800$ is somewhere in a reasonable range that can be accomplished with small batch sizes. Unfortunately, privacy-focused devices are niche products because the majority of phone users are actual sheeple and only care about price for the megapixels. At least I can no longer find the upcharge for customers abroad in their shop, that was in the order of a ridiculous 25% with no explanation given. Still, I mostly wouldn’t buy a phone from another country because warranty cases suck to handle with customs even when the vendor is cooperating.
My main interest in this phone was because it can be used instead of a laptop, with USB-C monitor and keyboard/mouse hooked up. Unfortunately they only support their own, overpriced monitor.
Pinephone has a “convergence package” (adapter, think KVM switch), but unfortunately with postmarketOS, the pinephone battery drained so fast that it has been collecting dust in a drawer since a week after I got it :(
Unfortunately, I do need a phone that can run apps. I can argue all day about how coercive and how much it sucks that so much services that I have to use regularly need only run on mainstream OS phones.
Try to boycott all non-standard interfaces whenever you can. If not boycotting means becoming complicit in establishing totalitarian regimes world-wide (and if you consequently think this through, this is the unavoidable outcome of surrendering all our data to truly empathyless and greedy billionaires), then the hoops you have to jump through to make a boycott work do not seem such a bad trade-off after all. Using corporately configured smartphones is a very strong support of totalitarian monsters, if not outright fascists.
if we were to boycott all the tools we need to fight the system we will never be able to fight the system.