this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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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.
No Lineage support for Fairphones?
Sorry, I meant with a Linux-like OS usable as a (albeit low performance) desktop computer
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.
is a smartphone not a gimmick to begin with.
Ehhhh, depends on how much you stretch the meaning, but I can see where you're coming from for sure
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.
I have a feeling you did not read my comments. The second model does NOT have parts available, that's just plain wrong. They've been out of stock for more than 3 years.
And as for the why, that's because not everyone is a capitalist piece of shit, and that's exactly the image that Fairphone is aiming for, and therefore when they advertise for sustainability, not supporting old devices is a dumb move.
Companies and people who put profit first are a cancer to this world.
If I pay about a 100% premium for the service, over a comparable phone, I expect service.
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.
But tgats stupid, since no manufacturer has parts available for that long. And fairphone released an update for the FP2 after 8 years of being available. Thats crazy! I think it got out around the same time as the Samsung S3. Try finding a genuine battery for that thing.
And also the FP1 and FP2 were sold in really low quantities. The FP3 was the first proper product, which therefor has much better support and will have parts available for much longer
That's a fair perspective, but that is also not what I consider "sustainable" as they themselves claim to be. I fail to see how that is stupid, stupid is calling ones company sustainable, when it's not ten years down the line.
Trust already broken.
Well, android itself is only 15 years old. To put that into perspective.
But yes, I would also be hella mad if they stopped supporting the FP4 or FP5 after "only" 8 or 10 years.
Not proud of that but it is an honest report of my user experience, sadly.
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.
Absolutely, Pinephone is an awesome project for tinkering, but it's not a practical alternative to just buying a cheap phone.
A pity since I love the convergence package + phone, but battery is dead before I have used the phone...
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
Regulators gonna ~~regulate~~ take bribes, I guess
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.
Oh did they? That is insanely dumb.... :(
This is why I've been holding off on getting one myself. I know murena sells the phone in the US, but last I checked they didn't sell parts, so there's no point in a repairable phone if I can't get parts.