Yeah, my issue with Fairphone’s branding/marketing/reputation here is that I know a lot of people who buy a fairphone because they want to save the planet, and that’s really not what this phone is doing.

Almost* every alternative hardware company asks much more for a (hardware wise comparable) product for a whole slew of reasons; “Fairness” rarely plays into it.

In other words, even if the Fairphone wouldn’t claim to be fair, it would cost just as much.

This is exactly it. Running a tiny company with nothing in-house making a custom phone with custom hardware is expensive.

To be fair (haha, pun intended) their phones are also about modularity.

That’s where the whole concept falls apart for me. I own my phones for a long time, and battery longevity has gotten much better in the last 1-2 decades. If you own a phone for 5-7 years, you will likely need to replace the battery one, or at most two times. Even if in the worst case this is going to cost you at max maybe €135 per swap (that’s what Apple charges for a battery swap on their most expensive phone). On a cheaper phone using 3rd party repair shops we are talking about less than half of that.

I’ve never destroyed a screen before, but some people do, and also then you’ll likely pay maybe €150-200 for a phone in the same range as the FP5. Now consider that Fairphone spare parts really aren’t cheap. They want €40 (plus shipping) for the battery and €100 (plus shipping) for the display for an FP5, so you aren’t saving that much on DIY repairs with the Fairphone.

Now consider that buying a mainstream phone comparable to a Fairphone is usually ~€300 cheaper, and the calculation completely breaks down. And it becomes even worse if you never destroy the screen.

So where does the money go? In 2024 they had an EBITDA of just €1 745 840, or €16.94 per phone. That’s not a lot at all, so it’s not like they are pocketing huge sums of money.

Yes, they are profitable, though barely so. Then again, their profits per device is much much more than what they pay for fairness.

How fair is a Fairphone? (Or, how much of the sticker price does Fairphone spend on fair/eco?)

https://lemmy.world/post/32013987

Read through the whole report, sum up all the money they mention. It comes out to $16 000. Double that for the stuff where they don’t mention money (because they surely would mention anything that costs more than the things they do mention). Double it again, for a safety margin. Double it again, because we are really generous. Now we are at €128 000. Divide that by the number of devices sold in 2024 and you get $1.24. Now add the $1.20 (Page 29) they pay as a living wage bonus and you arrive at $2.44 per device.

And now let’s be super generous and double that guess again, and you end up with the <€5 per device that I quoted above.

The picture becomes clearer when you look at what they say about their fair material usage.

Take for example the FP5 (page 42 & 67). Their top claim here is “Fair materials: 76%”, which they then put a disclaimer next to it, that they only mean that 76% of 14 specific focus materials is actually fair. On the detail page (page 67) they specify that actually only 44% of the total weight of the phone is fairly mined, because they just excluded a ton of material from the list of “focus materials” to push up the number.

The largest part of these materials are actually recycled materials (37% of the 44% “fair” materials). The materials they are recycling are plastics, metals and rare earth elements. That’s all materials that are cheaper to recycle than to mine. You’ll likely find almost identical amounts of recycled materials in any other phone, because it makes economical sense. It’s just cheaper. Since these materials cost nothing extra to Fairphone, we can exclude them from the list, which leaves 1% of actually fair mined material (specifically gold), and 6% of materials that they bought fairwashing credits for.

Also, the raw materials of phones are dirt cheap compared to the end price. The costly part is not mining the materials, but manufacturing all the components.

With only 1% of the materials being fairly mined and only 6% being compensated with credits, you can start to see why in total they spend next to nothing on fair mining/fair credits.

They only did that once for the FP5. It was a terrible choice, leading to high battery usage and compatibility issues. They only did that because when it came out, 5 years of software support wasn’t something crazy any more. Samsung already provided the same on their mainstream flagship phones. So to top that they chose that embedded chip with 10 years of support from Qualcomm. But 10 years is practically speaking really hard overkill, especially considering the very impractical downsides of that chip.

By now, most major phone brands have support times rivalling what Fairphone is bringing to the table, and for that to work, Qualcomm has to support their mainstream phone chips for longer.

and a UBI replacing all welfare programs

I’m actually against that. Not against an UBI per se, but against it replacing all welfare programs.

The main issue here is that needs vary a lot, and depending on your specific needs, an UBI might not begin to cover them.

One of my kids has Cystic Fibrosis, which leads to frequent hospital stays. One of the main medications (Kaftrio, that stuff is a miracle drug, it’s crazy how well it works) costs ~€350k per year.

UBI would be a drop in the ocean in this regard.

The same goes for a lot of other conditions. For example, a nursing home costs way more than any UBI would cover, but also if you have a disability that would require frequent assistance and/or a modified home or some special kind of transport, UBI would be just not enough.

Unless you use an RT kernel, Linux is not a realtime OS and certainly not a true one.

Don’t worry, it fails in Europe too. I ended up giving away my FP4, because it fails to do even basic stuff like make a call after 3G was switched off in my country.

Worst phone I ever had, with quite a margin. And the only one I ever kept for under 2 years and the only one I replaced while it was still physically ok.

Have a look at their impact report. They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff.

You are only paying more for that phone because they are a tiny boutique manufacturer who has to outsource everything. The fair/eco stuff is just fair- and greenwashing.

If you buy a phone because you want to look fair/eco, buy a Fairphone. If you actually really care for fair/eco, get an used phone and donate some money to the correct NGOs or charities.

This. Most of the movies from the 80s and 90s are great, because we haven’t watched them for a few decades and as kids we just didn’t know better and thought any movie we watched was great.

I recently watched Star Wars 4-6 again and these movies were boring as hell. They were just about right to have some background noise while doing the dishes, but it’s really not good enough to warrant sitting down and watching it, let alone spending money and going to the movies for it.

But there was no switcharoo

Wait for it ;) It’s gonna get you like anyone else.

Except if you stay childless and then you are the rando with too much time while everyone else you know just disappears into sleep-deprivation-induced zombie mode.

Yeah, and sometimes they don’t reach different instances at all.

You are mistaking the direction of evolution. Software started out with as much freedom as the hardware could afford.

In the 80s you ran your program in real mode (or whatever the equivalent mode was on your hardware). No kernel, no OS, nothing in the way. The software ran on bare metal with the ability to do literally anything the computer could.

In the 90s and early 2000s, safety features were introduced, but customizability was still king. Remember how you could accidentally remove some toolbar from Eclipse and never find the way to get it back? That kind of UI was considered normal back then.

You had stuff like the BlackBox system that allowed the user to customize the UI like a developer. The user could not only move buttons and other UI elements wherever they wanted, but they could also create their own and use scripting to make them do whatever they wanted.

Then came the iPhone and Windows 8, and from then on the target became simplification. The downside of the customizability of yesteryear was that things could get complicated and that most users didn’t use or even want these systems. Getting back to the Eclipse example, it was incredibly common back then, that people accidentally closed part of the UI and never found a way to get it back. So that’s when the minimalisation and “less is more” mentality came in. They moved everything that wasn’t used all the time into submenus and to a certain extent, it kinda worked.

But of course, with MBAs being MBAs, stuff like adding AI buttons to force people to use the next big monetizable thing became more and more prevalent.

I hope you didn’t take that as being mean, that’s not what I wanted to be here.

If you spend 10+ years with an asexual partner, anything that could provide a chance of sex starts to look appealing.

It only ever shows the timestamp of the last time you edited your post. And the post first containing the word “admins” and then “devs” does have the “edited” mark next to it. We don’t know when or how often it was edited, only when the last edit was made.

Seems like your sexuality is “sexual”. You just want to have any action, but socially you have the chance for none.

I wish I would see any of my friends monthly. I haven’t seen my best friend in like 4 months or so.

Weekly meetups with 3+ friends, that’s something you can do before you have a wife, kids and a job.

10 years ago, I had a really large social circle, with a group of ~15 people who met 1-4x per week. That was all fine and easy when the only commitment was university and part-time jobbing. But with a full-time job and kids, all that just disappears.

A week only has 168h. With work, sleep and family, there’s not a lot left.

It’s not evolving backwards. It’s being carefully crafted to turn into exactly what corporations wanted from the beginning but couldn’t do due to technical and legal limitations.

Examples:

• Microtransactions instead of asking for the price up-front
• Using gambling mechanics in non-gambling games (e.g. loot boxes)
• Eliminating potential stopping points in the user interaction, like e.g. endless scrolling instead of pagination
• Using big, visually engaging buttons for the actions they want the user to perform (“Accept tracking”) while using tiny, grey links for the actions they don’t want the user to perform (“Reject tracking”), or even worse, hiding the action they don’t want the user to perform behind multiple menues.
• Using wording that creates fear or other negative emotions to stop users from performing such actions (“If you cancel your subscription now, you will lose access to this, this, and that. Everything you did will be lost. Do you really want to do that?”)
• Disguising ads and other non-organic content as organic content. (“I found this product and it cured my hair loss, my potency issues and made me rich at the same time! ~sponsored ad~”)
• Disguising ads as notifications
• Disguising ads as the download button
• Agreeing to do one simple action contains a hidden agreement to a ton of other things

And many more things like that.