- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
Fairphone’s latest repairable device is for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone more than they like buying a new one.
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As someone who knows a good portion of the Fairphone staff in person, and knows they have a great atmosphere and are mostly great people: Fuck you @Fairphone for leaving my perfectly working FP1 dead in the water without SW updates, and removing the spare parts for the FP2 from the store around the time my FP2 needed them (USB charging port, battery), and for making every new fairphone larger, not offering a SINGLE phone in a proper pocket size (like the FP1).
For users who can live with the tablet-size of modern smartphones: Yes, repairability and longterm support for more recent phones appears not too bad, certainly better than most competitors, but still - if you are someone like me, who treats a phone well, you can not expect to be able to find spare parts by the time wear & tear from normal use will make it necessary.
If you can’t buy parts a decade after something is purchased, the repairability is a gimmick, a sales trick.
I’m not making a joke, that’s the truth of it, imo.
That’s how old the fairphone is.
My lgg3 is a year younger, and it’s a pain in the ass to find a real battery, but LG didn’t sell the thing with the idea of users being able to repair and upgrade. You expect an LG phone to have poor parts availability after a decade.
Like you said, a phone under normal use should last a decade plus. Barring failure of the main board, which is kinda where replacing that part means it’s a new phone rather than a repaired phone, if you’re still left with a device that you can’t get parts for, it’s landfill waste. Kinda puts a damper on sustainability as a factor.
Fairphone is a gimmick, and it always has been. A good gimmick to be sure, but a gimmick.
is a smartphone not a gimmick to begin with.
Ehhhh, depends on how much you stretch the meaning, but I can see where you’re coming from for sure
That’s interesting. Can parts be found on other resellers or sites or is Fair phone the only suppliers for these parts?
This kinda defeats the purpose of buying one.
From other people you would only get used parts. To be fair, the Fairphone community is quite good and supportive, and there are people there that collect broken phones from users, salvage them for parts & repair phones for users. But if you would like to procure original, new parts, you should not count on the FP company to provide any beyond the support duration that they promise in writing (not sure what that is right now).
Why would anyone ever expect any company to provide more support than they provide in writing? They are still trying to make a profit and not supporting a more than 10 year old device is perfectly reasonable. They only shipped 60,000 of the thing and it’s got a GB of RAM. The second model, the 2 still has parts available ~9 years on. I’m really not seeing the issue here.
I have a feeling you did not read my comments. The second model does NOT have parts available, that’s just plain wrong. They’ve been out of stock for more than 3 years.
And as for the why, that’s because not everyone is a capitalist piece of shit, and that’s exactly the image that Fairphone is aiming for, and therefore when they advertise for sustainability, not supporting old devices is a dumb move.
Companies and people who put profit first are a cancer to this world.
If I pay about a 100% premium for the service, over a comparable phone, I expect service.
Fuck them for removing the headphone jack, it makes no sense at all
punish them by not buying their phone
I see so many be “angry” at them and yet they still buy the phone
They have literally an explanation for this on their website. You might disagree, but saying “it makes no sense”…makes no sense.
Also, they discontinued the earbuds and still no jack on FP5, so the idea that “they wanted to sell their own buds” doesn’t seem to be likely.
It makes no sense to me, their whole deal is sustainability, by removing the headphone jack it forces me to buy Bluetooth headphones that all have batteries in them and are presumably not up to Fairphone standards of sustainability.
And saying we’re just following market trends sounds like a shitty explanation to me. I have the 3, I’ll use it for as long as it works but after that no Fairphone for me.
Even after switching to a wireless headset (because the previous ones all broke at the wire), I would rather not use a device with no headphone jack. My headset has a very long battery life and can apparently have its battery changed fairly easily (big enough to be held together by screws). But neither of this can be said about earbuds, so my earbuds are staying wired.
USB-C earbuds exist. No one is “forcing” you to do anything.
Which is still having to buy a second set of earbuds/headphones when there’s no need for it. Or buy a separate dongle (a major pain in the ass over time).
This is not “sustainability” friendly design.
Headphone jacks also exist, so I won’t be buying this phone.
It makes perfect sense. They wanted to sell their own branded ear buds.
Nokia has decent phones dirt cheap that you can repair yourself, and you can buy spare parts cheap too, and it runs completely vanilla Android, with good multi year upgrade policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh-7sMEDxyw
My wife has her eye on a Nokia G42, and it has both Micro SD slot and minijack. So you can use a 1TB MicroSD and laugh all the way to the bank at those who bought an S24 Ultra with 128GB 😂 🤪 😆 😜 😋
No offence but I don’t think this phone will be any good in a few years because of the CPU choice.
If it’s already sluggish now, what will it be like in 5 years? Unusable.
I’m typing this from a smartphone with Snapdragon 765g, a basically older version of the 778g. The 778g is better in every way compared to the many years older 765g and my phone does not feel sluggish in any way for my use cases: messaging, phone calls, video calls, media consumption, but no gaming. For me the 778g would be the perfect chip (like the 765g was): a perfect compromise between battery life, capabilities and price.
It’s not about the processor, it’s about the official software support. Some people don’t want to have to flash a custom ROM to get decent performance, some people want good performance out of the box from the official software
How is the CPU choice and official software support related? Genuine question, I don’t follow smartphone tech news, I just look up stuff whenever I or someone in my family needs a new phone.
The comment I was replying to said that this Fairphone was going to be sluggish because of the CPU choice, with which I disagreed because I’m basically using an older CPU from that CPU family without issues, so I know that it doesn’t have to be sluggish. Not in a Fairphone though, but in a Motorola edge, so the software will indeed be different.
sometimes a phone with a good CPU performs poorly because of poorly optimized software
Often people on the internet will respond to that “well just find a custom ROM and a custom kernel, flash that and it’ll be butter smooth!”
So I was assuming that you were implying that “only the CPU spec matters because you can always flash any software” and to that I respond that maybe some people don’t want to flash aftermarket software
I’m writing this comment on a Fairphone 5 right now and it doesn’t feel sluggish at all.
It doesn’t seem to me like the increased performance of phones has had much effect on the actual experience for a while if gaming or content creation is not done on the phone. As a daily driver I think this phone will last me a while.
I mostly can’t get over paying more for worse specs. It doesn’t have to feel bad now but with 8 years of support it could very easily not feel good in the future. It’s a $760 phone that benchmarks close to the Samsung A54 a $400 phone.
The selling point is the ethical value of the phone but it’ll never top how much waste buying a used phone saves.
Other phones can be much cheaper because they don’t care about slavery or child labor in their production line and don’t support their phones that long
But iPhones get long support, pixels now get 7, and S24 get 7.
Fairphone themselves even admits they can’t fix everything in production so a phone that was about to be waste is more fair.
If they built their phones in Germany or something I could accept the price but they’re made in China where labor standards aren’t exactly great.
Yes they are obviously not perfect but they are at least trying to change something, while the massive cooperations just dont acknowledge that problem at all.
And the updates thing: Apple controls the ecosystem and are a huge company. They dont have to worry about manufactures for a processor or other parts not supporting it longer and stop giving it driver updates. Same with Samsung and especially Google. They are huge companies that can basically do what they want. They will be able to get a hold of drivers and firmware because they are a huge customer to the manufactures. And they only just started promising those long updates. Meanwhile Fairphone has been trying for years to support their devices that long and had to struggle because they are not a massive cooperation that can influence manufactures like that to the point they now dont use normal consumer grade chips but ones with extended support.
Do they pay you to “yeah but” for them or are you just a simp?
No headphone jack means fairphone now encourage Bluetooth earbuds and electronic waste.
They’re dead to me.
what phone do you use?
- extremely slow updates
- incomplete updates as component lifespan is shorter than advertized
Yeah, its about what comes in the Future
Don’t forget the fact they manufacture it in an oppressive authoritarian regime, where the sales tax goes to fund over 1 million Uighurs being held in literal concentration camps.
Imagine if 80 years ago there were products labeled “Ethically Made in Nazi Germany”, and the marketing team said it’s important to help the individual small businesses there so that the good people can have a higher standard of living.
It’s mind boggling to me that people are falling for this.
If you want something manufactured in a country that isn’t commiting human rights violations then you are not going to find it (not even the US, which is also funding a genocide right now)
So “Occasionally sluggish performance” now at launch? Surely it won’t be much better 5 years from now
Wow a site that doesn’t fill up 90% of your phone’s viewport with ads? Color me impressed
why wouldn’t you use AdBlock?
