Fairphone’s latest repairable device is for people who hate saying goodbye to an old smartphone more than they like buying a new one.
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.
Sadly yes, I like the company philosophy, and I understand that - with regards to device size - due to them being small, they can only run 1 product line, no parallel small phone. But what I do not understand then is how they feel they have to release a new model every 2 years, which also drives switching the production lines for older model spare parts. That’s not sustainability in my eyes. I was severely disappointed after Fairphone advocated for repairability with “the most sustainable smartphone is your old one, if you continue using it”, and still having my Fairphone 1(!) in tip top condition (the only part that broke was the power button, which I repaired myself with an iFixit tool & a soldering iron) but no longer being able to use it because SW support is discontinued. I was even more disappointed when my FP2 finally started having problems charging because the USB port was becoming wobbly / loose, and not being able to purchase a new bottom module because “sorry, we’re on FP4 now, only spare parts we still ship are FP3 and higher”.
So now I am on shiftphone 6mq - which is not necessarily smaller, but might be usable with free OS + docking station sooner than a FP ever will.
As you say - a good gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless.
I always think about auto repair when repairability comes up. I could still get parts for my 30yo jeep. Hell people make parts for collector vehicles, even 90 year old Model A cars.
Now, you might say modern cars are less repairable but I can also get software to diagnose and configure my 5yo Toyota 4Runner. And if I upgrade some parts it doesn’t void the warranty because of consumer friendly laws.
Tech would be very different if it followed these patterns.
It’s my primary computer these days, so it’s definitely a useful tool and not a gimmick for me…I do still own a laptop, but I only use it for the very few things I do that require a KB/M combo. I’d say >95% of everything that requires a computer/digital access I do with my phone.
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.
My understanding is that they alone can’t give driver updates, which is why they choose a chip for FP5 which will get supported longer. (That doesn’t explain regular software not getting updates)
I assume you looked elsewhere for Fairphone 1 parts?
You mean FP2 parts? I could have gotten them only from the Fairphone community. But I spent some time waiting for an opportunity where we would have met anyways, and I found no battery replacement, because tjat was the first component in most FP2s to fail (apart from a Display problem which was early on though and fixed under warranty)
Well you convinced me to avoid them. I use my phone’s for about a decade each.
Same here, they lost me after fp1 which didn’t receive security updates anymore. FP2 had this weird rubber band that got loose quickly with everyone I know who had one. Stopped following after that.
Ultimately the problem is Google. The minimum system requirements for Android keep going up with every release and Google stops providing updates to older releases at some point (typically 5 years after that version was initially released). That effectively puts an upper bound on the lifespan of any phone as at some point the phones CPU and memory aren’t good enough to run the latest Android version at acceptable speeds. The lower end a phone was at original manufacturing the faster this all happens as well.
Apple is just as bad (far worse in some ways).
I’ve tried to find a solution, and the best I’ve seen is Linux phone, but that comes with some major downsides that are going to be deal breakers for most people. The two biggest ones are that battery life is abysmal unless you enable hibernation, but doing so, at least a year or so ago when I looked into it, disables your ability to receive calls while the phone is in hibernation. And secondly that NFC essentially doesn’t work, or at least not for anything you care about like being able to make payments.
I tried a Pinephone with postmarketOS and I concur with the battery life - I could never use the pinephone practically, because in standby laying in the shelf, the battery is dead in about 30 hours.
I so wished there was a Linux distribution with proper phone support & tuned to sustain the battery power, but usable with a docking station.
My dream is to no longer have to carry a laptop anywhere, just my phone, and a keyboard (if needed) and mouse, and a USB-C hub with HDMI cable, mouse & keyboard USB ports, then plug in that phone to a hotel TV or a monitor at a business partner’s place and work directly on the phone.
Laptop stays reserved for stuff that requires more computing power than LibreOffice.
Well, with fp1 specifically Google was not the main culprit. The phone used a chip (I think by mediatek?) and the producer didn’t publish the drivers. The Fairphone team promised to reverse engineer that for a while and at some point just said they won’t do it after all. That was the reason you couldn’t install other images on it, not cpu speed
The FP2 rubber casing was discontinued for that reason, but the cheap plastic shells also broke quickly (well - from falls, mostly :D so they did accomplish what they are there for: protect the phone itself from breaking). I think beyond the initial rubber shell (which also disconnected from the harder plastic shell for me) I went through 3-4 hard shells, all of which I got for free from FP though on community meetings @ the FP HQ.
Yeah, but I’m not convinced by their approach anymore as a sustainable solution. Luckily the phone feature race has mostly come to a halt, so there is a chance now for free OS options to come up (which is what we’re seeing at the moment).
The part about tracking where the material comes from us good in principle, but mostly as a proof of concept so regulators can increase pressure on big manufacturers (if Fairphone can do it, apple/Samsung should also be able to). But regulators don’t regulate, unfortunately
I’d prefer a smaller phone too but my main problem is fairphone ditched the headphones jack.
Then sold Bluetooth earbuds.
They don’t care about electronic waste, they want their customers to throw away wired headphones and buy earbuds with batteries and wireless.
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 😂 🤪 😆 😜 😋
At this point I don’t even know what vanilla android looks like lol. I kinda want to get a Nokia
Yeah. Buy Nokia.
Let’s also support European companies over Chinese ones.
Except Nokia isn’t European anymore since Microsoft ruined them and sold the brand to the Chinese company HMD Global. You’re welcome.
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https://www.piped.video/watch?v=kh-7sMEDxyw
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
punish them by not buying their phone
I see so many be “angry” at them and yet they still buy the phone
Maybe the best part of the FP5 that is talked about little is that the main SoC is not a consumer grade Qualcomm chip, but an industrial grade one that will get driver and firmware upgrades for a much longer time than the consumer ones.
In addition it is fairly similar to other slightly older Qualcomm chips that already have main-line Linux kernel support, so the prospects of running Mobian or PostmarketOS on it are quite good.
- extremely slow updates
- incomplete updates as component lifespan is shorter than advertized
Yeah, its about what comes in the Future
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?
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 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.
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.
