There’s been a lot of buzz here about the Fairphone here lately, especially with it coming to the US.
On paper, it seems rather nice. Ethically sourced, privacy friendly stock ROM.
But the skeptic in me does say, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”
What are the drawbacks of Fairphone that seem to be shunned away, or less discussed both by the company and community at large? Why shouldn’t I just buy a Pixel 7a and put GrapheneOS on it instead?
“Useable” is not the same thing as a good experience. These are devices are being used day in and day out. No one wants a crappy old phone.
They’re absolutely not the Android industry. If anything it’s the Apple industry.
I mean usable as in a “good experience” w.r.t. lags, loading times, fluidity etc.
That’s the thing: They aren’t crappy.
Apple is one of the best if not the best when it comes to long-term support for phones. Their currently oldest still supported device is from 2016 which got a security patch last month and you can still get the battery replaced.
Absolutely not.
This is the polar opposite of the truth. Apple does everything within their power to make sure that you can never repair a broken phone (or any other Apple product for that matter).
Software support is completely worthless if the hardware is broken and impossible to repair, or if the software updates they push are actively making the device less useable.
… yourself. I know and that’s terrible. That’s not the point however: You can still pay Apple to do the repair for you.
A phone manufacturer offering to repair a 7 y/o phone is pretty much unheard of in the Android world.
Also, don’t act as if the Android phone industry is any better that Apple w.r.t. self-repair. Outside of niche manufacturers such as Fairphone or SHIFT, it’s just as bad as Apple.
That does not happen.
They once did a thing that was terribly communicated and you can absolute fault Apple for that but the thing they did was actually very good at its core. Not having the phone shut off during peak load a good thing. The user should be able to choose to not have the phone do that if they know from experience that the battery can still handle peak load, even in its degraded state (what the OS can guess the physical state of the battery to be and its actual state don’t always align) but it’s arguably a good and very sane default.
If the battery is replaced (remember, Apple at least gives you the option to do that), this throttle becomes unnecessary and therefore disabled.
If I had the option to enable such a throttle on my old phone, I’d enable it. Remember, this concerns peak load which is not what phones usually experience. The purpose of a phone is to display UIs and do light data processing, not time-critical data crunching.
Sometimes you can. Sometimes they will just flat out refuse.
Other times they will charge you such an exorbitant fee that it makes no sense. They don’t do board repairs, they’ll just tell you you need a new one.
So no, not really.
It is 1 million times better. Any parts I need for my Pixel can be ordered directly from ifixit or taken to ubreakifix to be repaired by a third party. No problem.
It does. It’s been documented time and time again.
No they’ve done this many times.
That was only added after they were caught.