(12-01-2020, 03:08 PM)bcnaz Wrote: I have family/relatives who in the past few months have spent $1,200.00 $1,400.00 and $1,500.00 USD for "Android" phones,
Well everybody will buy what he likes, I mean.. people are probably still buying those new $1200 iPhones even though Apple is repeatedly ripping them off and now even the charger and earbuds disappeared from the box "for the sake of environment" (yeah right... said the $39 charger that is being sold separately).
Those $1500 Android phones probably cost less than $300 each to produce (including development, marketing etc..), and this is a free market. so Companies can sell at whatever price they believe their target audience will pay, heck, Apple now charges for an aluminum monitor stand that probably costs them $50-60 to manufacture $999 USD, and yeah some people will of course buy it because it is tagged as "Pro" (coolness factor) and it has the apple sticker on it.
I think good profit is important, without it a company can not sustain it self, but greed is another thing, Apple is a good example for too much greed.
Anyway back to the topic
I would pay $800 and even $1000 for a phone with real privacy features such as the PinePhone, Liberm etc.. but such price should only be asked when the device is market-ready, which means other than small bugs it must already have a solid working OS with all important features of a phone, no issues with calls or texts, or waking up from sleep, or camera not functioning properly, or problem getting out of deep sleep, or battery/power management issues etc.. that is why people will pay the premium, because the costs of paying people to take care of all that needs to be taken care of.
With the PinePhone, I actually like the fact that the community and developers together are working on it voluntarily, I mean yes I make donations to linux-arm teams because I want to help them with the small expanses they have to face while working on this project, but most of the resources are people's free time which they give away for the good of the project, we all purchased devices that are not yet market-ready, and we are the testers and somehow also the contributors to push this project forward so that is why we got it "for cheap", this is not yet the phone for the Average Joe but with time it will be.
that is IMHO, anyway.
(12-01-2020, 03:08 PM)bcnaz Wrote: The more pressing question "I think" is, : will the new radical government, outlaw privacy phones ?
That is a very good question, I think that once privacy phones get traction, governments will be interested in an least finding way to infiltrate into them , god forbid if they have a million turned-on devices on their landscape that they can't ping apple or google and get whatever information they want about those devices and their owners.. but I do not think they will try to ban such devices, because governments never want you to actually know their real intentions - such an act will reveal the fact that they are anti-freedom of choice, and even if they are (and there are many hypocrite governments that act like that) they will not want you to know.
We will need to protect our right to own and operate such phones, including watching out for any funny looking application that is offered, or "custom kernels" that might appear, or "developers" that will try to make pull requests to certain code repos, all of those will be trojan horse attempts. I know it sounds like fiction, but it is not too far fetched IMHO.
