Comment by danielfgom@lemmy.world on The Fairphone 5 is less about what comes in the box and more about what you get over the years

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?

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

I have a phone with 732G, it’s already super smooth on my phone with the official OS and it still has perfect software support. A newer snapdragon wouldn’t have much issues.

Offtopic: (MediaTek on the other hand is actual and absolute garbage. Don't look at their (probably cheated) benchmarks, they provide absolutely no proper support for their chips. There is a reason why anybody who wants to do custom ROMs or android development tries to get an snapdragon.)

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

No, I wasn’t, my phone is still completely stock. I use a custom launcher which could slow it down, but no issues there either. The processor just works smoothly in all my use cases and I blame all my connection issues on my network provider (they suck and I have no way of knowing of it’s 100% of the time their fault, or only 90%, so I just blame them for every connection issue).

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

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