it should be easy to do the right thing and complicated to do the wrong thing
I conclude they've not encountered many humans
Fairphone has retained top marks for repairability, with the Dutch manufacturer's fifth iteration scoring high for software longevity, even if some components are starting to get a little more "conventional." The iFixit team pulled apart the latest in the line of modular phones with little more than tweezers and screwdrivers …
"WTH cares? You need AI Assistance to send a Tweet FFS? It's a phone, not a Cray Y-MP."
True, today's phones are quite more powerful than Cray Y-MP were. Unfortunately, you can't sit comfortably on them, which shows how technological progress sometimes comes at the cost of personal comfort.
Question: does this phone run hotter or cooler than a Cray love-seat?
If you had one phones in each back pocket, things may feel surprisingly familiar. And, being more powerful than a Cray, modern phone love-seats can, in real time and without using vector arithmetic, control a vibration interface :-)
A Pixel 8 is regularly on sale for cheaper than this thing. Much, much more powerful. Much, much better camera. Waterproof. And support for 7 years, only one less.
Yes, you can't repair it as easily but I've never had a phone that I've needed to repair beyond replacing a battery. You give up a LOT to get that repairability. Whether or not that's worth it to someone is really up to the user to determine.
Alternatively, you can get a Redmi Note for 1/3 the price with the same performance and get a performance upgrade every three years by buying a new one. (should you want to) Wasteful, yes, but on pure value to the consumer seems a lot better bet, and you can always opt to keep it for a bit longer.
I like the concept of the Fairphone, but they need to find some ways to cut corners while keeping it repairable. For the most of us, it is simply too expensive for what you get.
I agree with you about the repairs part. Just because my phone never leaves a flat surface inside my home unless the expected happens. I am one of those people that attempt to refuse to participate in the All-We-Can-Slurp Data Buffet built into Apple, Microsoft, and Google software. I know for a fact that there are large communities of people that focus on custom Android builds for specific devices but these have a small audience due to the lack of scrutiny they get from the press. How can I know that Dev Alice's LineageOS release is more of less trust worthy than Dev Bob's Lineage OS release if I don't have the time to do my own homework on the matter? Why should I have to be a Linux security expect to know? This an information space that is ignored because it's small, and in my opinion it is also small because it is ignored. Great things could happen there if the right people cared to care.
You have to make a real leap of trust to install third party software on a handheld computer that contains so much PII.
I have a FP3+, now four years old. Got Android 13 this fall. This will certainly be the last update, no matter how many Fairphone might offer: The CPU is beyond its useful life now, performance fell off a cliff with Android 13.
This will be the same fate an FP5 will suffer five years down the line. Latest, given the medicore Processor at launch. Google will make sure of that.
"I like the concept of the Fairphone, but they need to find some ways to cut corners while keeping it repairable."
While repairability is will play a part in the costs I'd guess that the cost could still come down quite a bit if they could produce in bigger numbers. Right now they really don't come close to the scale other manufacturers have.
I did. Did it say that having a motherboard meant you couldn't replace it? It said that the design wasn't as good, not that repair of that part was impossible, and given that you can disconnect basically everything that connects to the motherboard, it shouldn't be hard. More expensive, more time, but still possible in a world where it's generally impossible on anything else.
You can't buy the replacement motherboard now. That may be because they just released the devices, so the motherboards they have are all going into new units. It may be because I've never seen anyone who actually broke a motherboard, so they're probably not that in demand. However, if we had these phones and decided motherboard replacements were important, we could probably contact the company and find a way to obtain one, and if enough people asked for it, nothing prevents them from putting them on the parts list and a user replacing them.
The major difference is that that device is, as far as I can determine from the internet, still running the Android 8.1 it shipped with. I don't have any data about the security patch level, but I'm guessing that's not much better. Maybe you don't care about those things, but they do matter to me.
Are you David Cameron?
You didn't reckon on the price of B****t though, did you.
There are some "plug into the USB connector" style extensions, which I really do NOT like.
I don't understand why they left out Qi charging. I hope it will come. This is the missing feature for me, I dislike plugging in a cable when I can just put it on my table with the builtin Qi charger.
Qi, if implemented the right way, is near 90% efficiency. Far from the 70% it had in the beginning, or what the first generation of Apple Qi had.
Above 95% was achieved in lab environments over five years ago, even before Apple started with Qi. Above 97% was achieved with 120 kw power too, but not with Qi standard of course. See Oak Ridge Laboratory report from 2018. And you can check it manually: If a phone gets charged wireless with 50 Watt or even just 25 Watt, with only 70% efficiency the phone would be too hot to touch. Just use the available numbers and think.
I don't get it how so many people are still stuck in the past with their numbers. It is like comparing the fuel efficiency of today's cars with the fuel efficiency from cars 'round the 1960s... Or comparing the energy usage of 20 year old computers, rated by their computing power per watt, with today's machines. Or comparing the solar cell efficiency from 2003 with the current typical efficiency.
So you can replace a USB port and display and some other modules and that gets 10/10?
You can't even buy individual parts, not to mention the motherboard.
Seems like a misleading and sponsored article.
It's like saying you can 10/10 repair your TV remote, because you can replace AAA batteries. LOL
You can't even buy individual parts
Hmm... this page must be a figment of my imagination. My imagination's integration with my web browser surprises me sometimes.
It's huge, and there's no headphone jack. It's also quite expensive.
If they could make a smaller version (preferably no bigger than 140x70), with a headphone jack and two physical SIM card slots, i'd be interested.
One physical SIM and e-SIM is no good for me. Oh well.
This whole thing about phones needing to be huge to have big batteries is a lie. A Xiaomi Redmi 4X is 139x70x9 and has a 4100 mAh battery. And it has a headphone jack. and an IR blaster.
Heck, my RAZR MAXX HD is 136x68x9 and has a 3300 mAh battery. I miss its form factor badly.
It also doesn't need to be huge to have a removable battery and two physical SIMs and a microSD. A Galaxy XCover 5 is 147x71 and has a removable 3000 mAh battery (I admit, that's small, especially compared to the previous two examples with fixed batteries), but it has a headphone jack, two SIM slots and a microSD slot.
Yes, it cost more to buy than a similar spec mid range phone. Yes, it doesn't fulfill the 'Shiny! Shiny!' that some people require.
But it does everything that I ask of it. And it is NOT pre-loaded with so much bloatware that you're straight into micromanagement of the phone just to keep enough performance to be usable.
And considering that my last two phones were replaced because non-replaceable components (battery, GPS aerial) failed, I am quite happy with the purchase that I made.