auntieclokwise

Alot of these sellers on Alibaba aren't nearly up to what an ODM is. They're sorta more like middlemen that do stuff like take generic phones from ODMs and customize them or just grab parts off the local market and slap them together. To work with somebody like Foxconn, you'd better have some significant volumes - they just won't talk to you otherwise. Now, maybe Trump is an exception there, but they're still not going to want to do business unless there's decent volume in it for them. The volumes I've seen for this phone is the sort of thing that wouldn't even register for them. They'd only even think about it as a way to buy favor.

The word Unix sounds very close to the word for a castrated male.

And there's lots where they use frequency doubling to make the laser light while having very poor filtering. Meaning that not only is the visible part of the light very dangerous, but the invisible light (which may have unpredictable patterns) can be even higher wattage and far more dangerous because you don't even know its there.

And you can get it from the side where there won't be video of you doing the deed. A little target practice is a nice bonus.

I mean they could have jumped on Alibaba, had a customized firmware, had the "gold" color, had a logo or something screen printed on the outside, and probably spent less than $100/phone, at least if current listings are correct. Sell the things for like $299 and they clear $200 profit on each with nearly no effort.

No need to fight Cruz for the last scrap of rat liver. You've got a whole pig right there.

Some of them are built so the front doesn't fall off at all.

As long as you live frugally and in a reasonable COL area, this isn't crazy expensive. Doable with a couple million in net worth. Huge difference between that and what many of the rich are worth. The reality is that a million dollars isn't what it used to be and the fight isn't with people with single digit millions, it's with people with triple digit millions and up. Yes, having single digit millions feels like being rich in today's economy to many, but, in the eyes of the truly wealthy, a single digit millionaire might as well be a destitute homeless person.

There's not really a reason to be upset with a phone running a privacy focused version of Android. Android, at heart, is Linux with some runtime stuff on top. The runtime stuff has open source versions that Google is involved with, but its still open source. There's also independent reimplementations of some of the proprietary Google stuff.

The thing is, there's really only 2 mobile platforms with any sort of application support: iOS and Android. iOS will probably never have open source versions. If you go outside those 2 platforms, you end up being very limited. You can talk to Amazon, Mozilla, Canonical, Microsoft, Palm, BlackBerry, and others about what that world looks like. So, if you want to have any application support and therefore any traction, the best bet is to take something that's already mostly open source, reimplement the non open source bits, and make sure what's left doesn't depend on Google (though most have a way to use Google services, often is a restricted way, if you need that). That's what /e/OS and GrapheneOS do.

Could be plated copper, unless you have better information - I've seen similar components in breaker panels and the like that are plated copper (plated because raw copper likes to corrode and get ugly looking).

If they're plated copper, they might actually have decent value. Several of the components there are electrical, so they genuinely might be. A couple of them just look like coupler nuts, so cheap mild steel.

Me too! It's my favorite song!