Fairphone Is Finally Selling Its Repairable Phone in the US
2 days ago by floofloof to c/technology
They have a great team, sadly they continuously aimed for a broad target audience in lack of support for degoogled OSes (only doing the bare minimum) and the headphone jack indeed. Also, sadly, the long life thingie is a joke when you are a cautious user and you don't break your phone. 5-7 years after purchase, spare parts are no longer available :/
Even if you don't have the need for spare parts, don't forget that they deliver security updates longer than any other manufacturer that I've heard of. So longevity is not just about the hardware.
EDIT: Also, they just newly stopped selling fairphone 3 spare parts. That's 7 full years of stocking parts. Not bad IMO. And you can probably still find them in stock at resellers. I see display modules on ebay (from china) and at least one german eshop
They deliver security updates for the pre-installed OSes they support. Those updates are no good for most users that load their own flavour of OS. What counts is hardware that has open source drivers (Also - holy fuck - the homepage almost gave me a seizure and I am not an epileptic). Where they are doing OKish, but not great.
As for "7 full years of stocking parts" - the first 3-4 years are next to useless, almost no phone breaks that fast unless physically damaged. And it only becomes relevant for most people who take care with their phone after 5+ years. And that's exactly when the support period ends. Which is unfortunately, the opposite of the "sustainable phone" that they promise.
As said, they do have a great team, and they do do Fair Trade, and they do engage with the community - all good things. But I am quite disappointed in the "by the time you need a replacement part, it's out of stock" lesson learned.
Having worked in a smartphone after market organisation, I can assure you that phones do break due to user error also in the first few years. Screen breaks, phones are dropped, charging ports are subject to user violence... while this is apparenrly not true for you, there are probably hundreds of thousand of fairphone users, so I think their spare parts availability is really good. And as I said, even now you can buy spare parts for discontinued fairphone models from ebay and other 3rd parties.
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I'll be that guy. No headphone jack, no sale. As others have said, I'd love GrapheneOS as well, but I know why that isn't in the cards.
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