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 headphone jack means fairphone now encourage Bluetooth earbuds and electronic waste.
They’re dead to me.
Dont get me wrong, Im pissed about the removal of the headphone jack too. But its not really their fault, or to be more precise: its complicated This guys explains it quite well
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EAogtqyN22M&pp=ygUYZmFpcnBob25lIGhlYWRwaG9uZSBqYWNr
Making a modular phone is complicated.
If they can’t deal with complicated things they should shut up shop and get out of the way so someone genuinely ethical can take their market share.
To be clear, if they only failed to produce a phone with a headphone jack I’d be happy to just not buy it.
The fact they went on to produce electronic trash in making Bluetooth earbuds means it’s clear they’ve reached the enshittification point They are just out to make money from their user base now like every other manufacturer.
Man I watched that whole video, it has nothing to do with the headphone jack. It’s about how fairphone releases repair schematics. The title is clickbait, he still says “the removal of the headphone jack is still bullshit and I stand by that, but they sure do release schematics which is nice”.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=EAogtqyN22M&pp=ygUYZmFpcnBob25lIGhlYWRwaG9uZSBqYWNr
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I still don’t get this level of rage. I just have a USB C adapter on the end of my ear buds, problem solved, one less physical port to have to replace as I keep my phones until they’re dead dead.
I guess you could argue you need an extra cable on you to plug direct into a HiFi system, but I cant even remember the last time that was something I’d want to do.
Aldo in the case of a repairable phone and having replaced the USB on this fp4, I struggle to see where they would have fit an extra daughterboard for a 3.5mm jack to make it repairable
Yeah, the rage seems to usually stem from two misunderstandings:
- It forces you to use Bluetooth headphones.
- A 3.5mm jack is cheap and trivial to build into a phone, so there’s little or no reason to not include it.
You already pointed out why neither of those are legitimate reasons. For 1 you just need a simple dongle, not new headphones. For 2, because the Fairphone is modular and repairable, it’s not just the 3.5mm jack but also a custom replaceable daughterboard they’d have to develop and keep in stock.
Not having a 3.5mm jack is a minor inconvenience at most, I don’t get the rage either.
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.
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.)
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
Fuck them for removing the headphone jack, it makes no sense at all
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.
I’m surprised they discontinued their buds. Thank you for pointing that out.
They’re still selling a 250 Euro Bluetooth headset with the phone as a option
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.
Our starting point for design is longevity, which means making our devices more repairable, a very different approach to the electronics industry standard. To support maximum longevity and because of the IP rating, Fairphone 4 does not feature a headphone jack. In the end, it comes down to how we make a product that lasts for at least five years. We needed to eliminate as many vulnerabilities as possible, and the headphone jack is subject to dust and water ingress over time.
Again, you might disagree, you might know better, I don’t know. But this is their motivation when it comes to longevity and hence sustainability. To me, it seems a reasonable idea: if the jack helps reducing the consumption of batteries in headphones but decreases the lifespan of the phones, it seems a bad tradeoff.
punish them by not buying their phone
I see so many be “angry” at them and yet they still buy the phone
- 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.
They are making an effort though. Every other manufacturer also produces in China. Fairphone at least pays the workers better and tries to make the supply chain as ethical as possible.
They make the problem of their supply chain clear. And still, it is probably the most “fair” phone you can get, so I dont understand the critizism really.
Why arent you criticizing all the other manufacturers, that dont even try to do anything positive? Its always the small companies, that try to improve on things and then get shitted over for not going all the way. I dont understand it…
Because there are some other manufacturers, e.g. Samsung, which don’t manufacture in China (for the most part), and IMO the problem of centralizing the world’s supply chain in China is more important than what Fairphone is trying to do.
Google sure is creating a lot of Pixel-fanboys by instilling this myth that if you dont get daddy google’s precious over-the-air updates delivered to your phone in 30 seconds after their release your phone might be at great risk®™ (exactly like if you dont let google play store scan the apps on your device to look for malicious software, like F-Droid, a common known attack vector).
Because surely Fairphone users are all government officials with nuclear codes and Kim Jong-un’s nudes saved in their notes and teams of indian hackers are 24/7 waiting for a security update to release, so they can unpack the zero-day-vulnerabilities before fairphone gets their release-cycle
Can you please elaborate further on this “component lifespan” thing? Because I think they were quite clear on the processor life cycle.
Not all components included will get security updates for as long as their OS will.
Agree that instant updates are not essential for many people, but you dont need 0days to abuse publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.
What components are you talking about? Can you provide some sort of source or reference or something? Are you maybe talking about the data modem?
That title sounds like what you’d say running a Kickstarter scam… yeah sure its not good yet but if enough people keep preordering our not complete product eventually it will be good.
