I just discovered this and was about to post when I saw you beat me to it!

I get the idealist approach taken by Purism. I’m glad they are there, and that they are seeing support. But for me, completely open source hardware ends up being quite expensive for what you get. When comparing the same price point to System76 there is a clear difference. While I have not seen the criticisms leveled at the PinePhone I infer from the rebuttal that this is what Pine64 is running up against.

They have managed to make an affordable phone, compared to the Librem 5 nearing flagship price of $750, that is being supported by an open operating system. While it might not be a perfect reflection of priciples, it may fair better in the market due to the pragmatic decisions made. Many Linux users make the concession to include binary blobs because they want their hardware to work.

I don’t know if Pine64 has a roadmap to completely open source, but in the current smartphone ecosystem I agree with the pragmatic choices they’ve made. And I don’t see a case where this isn’t heralded as a step in the right direction. The price point poises it for market traction. The open operating system doesn’t sell your data. And it addresses privacy from a point that you have to send data for a modem for it to have access. And, of course, the hardware switches to help put the user back in the driver seat when determining boundaries with their mobile carrier.