Fairphone’s latest repairable device is for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone more than they like buying a new one.
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 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?
Fuck them for removing the headphone jack, it makes no sense at all
It makes perfect sense. They wanted to sell their own branded ear buds.
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.
