Why I'm not getting a Fairphone*

They said they’re treating their workers fairly, sourcing from ethical sources, renewable claims, repairability claims, and supporting foss projects (they donated a fp4 to CalyxOS to support development). All of these are amazing, so adding a little headphone jack shouldn’t be that hard in the grand scheme of all this.

lol wtf

All of those things seem vastly more important than a headphone jack!

Wireless earphones/headphones are more expensive and sometimes inconvenient. People defending companies say "you can get a pair of wireless buds for like 20 dollars" you can, but how much are they going to last and how shitty will they feel and sound? Even when buying them for a high price, their batteries will wear out. The worst thing is adding this port doesn't affect you in the slightest if you don't use wired headphones, so couldn't you just shut the fuck up if that's the case?

So I thought to myself…why?

Why? There are various arguments as to why the old audio jack standard is obsolete, but this discussion was essentially settled with the Fairphone 4, which was the first one that did not have a headphone jack. And they released a detailed article describing their reasoning..

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/9836188988049-Audio-jack-3-5mm

The community has been requesting this for a couple years

The community? It's not as if Fairphone just willy nilly decided to get rid of the headphone jack, this was done with feedback from the community in mind.. Just because you are loud and passionate doesn't mean that your opinion is the only one that represents the community's.. As a fairphone user and "member of the community", I say fuck the 3.5 mm jack.. It's an ancient standard that was obsolete years ago,

And just to be clear, this isn't a discussion about wireless vs wired earbuds. You can have wired USB earbuds, you can even use your old 3.5 mm jack headphones with an adaptor. This is a discussion whether we should switch back to an ancient and inferior standard just because you are used to it..

Just add the headphone jack, shouldn’t be too hard.

And this entitled and wilfully ignorant attitude will make people take you even less seriously.. You can't "just add the headphone jack", decisions like that have an impact on all of the design of the device and have to be carefully evaluated.. You simply going "come on just do it, how hard can it be" will not convince anyone..

sony still retains headphone jack on their flagship phone

I have a few better (in my opinion) motives to why I am not getting any fair phone:

• There's not such a thing like ethical consume under capitalism.

• It isn't environmental good to change from a working phone to anything.

• The new costs above $600 and the old ones costs around $400. This is a bunch of money and here in my country is almost 2 monthly minimum wages, without taxes, of course.

So I am sticking with my old Samsung, thank you.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You don't really need to make a post about not buying a produck ya know?

TLDR: Long rant about modern smart phones.

I've concluded that it is impossible to get a new phone that has the features I want. Some phone manufacturer always seems to arbitrarily declare useful features/form factors obsolete, maybe replaces it with some new gimmick and gets the hype machine going so all the other manufacturers do the same in fear of becoming irrelevant.

I just wish that some day some company is going to create a smart phone with a reliable fingerprint reader on the back again where it is reachable by fingers on BOTH the left and right hand. Or that some manufacturer will create a phone with a smaller screen than 6 inches. Or god forbid a normal aspect ratio like 16:9 instead of the ridiculously long lightsabers they're making now. Then maybe it would be possible to get it out of my pocket while sitting down. Missing headphone jack is just a drop in the ocean IMO. There are so many other annoyances that I didn't use to have, but now is an issue with modern smart phones.

If I got the chance to dictate what the manufacturers should do. I would tell them to stop. The camera is good enough. Make it smaller and not protruding out the back of the phone so much. The SOC is fast enough. Make it more power efficient instead of chasing for the next GHz. The screen is large enough, just stop. If I wanted a larger screen I would use a tablet. Do some damn QA. Test the main functionality of a phone, which is communication, not game benchmarks, not who can take the prettiest picture of the moon. Is it possible to take the phone out of the pocket without accidentally hanging up on whoever is calling you? Is it possible to send and receive to/from SMS/MMS groups? Does the fingerprint reader actually work or does it just say "sorry too many tries" every time you take the phone out of the pocket before even touching the fingerprint reader?

Just had to get that out of my system :P

Edit: forgot ewaste link, added dates

Always great to be cautious of corporations and what PR they say until proven otherwise.

At the end of the day profit is the goal of corporations to a certain point.

We decide what we want to support, if they don't have what you want then you do not buy it.

Louis Rossmann videos on subject:

Fairphone thoughts & commentary with Louis Rossmann [Oct 11, 2021]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhLtyrRwGcg

The fairphone reduces ewaste - by removing the headphone jack.... [Sep 15, 2022]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRdL0StldJM

Why I was wrong about fairphone [Jan 3, 2023]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAogtqyN22M

edit: words and sentence

It's even wilder that they didn't learn the lesson after fp4. Did people really just complain and then buy it anyway? How many phones can they sell that they can afford to piss off their customers like this? I just don't understand how is the smartphone market so borked.

the headphone jack community is like the vegans of smartphones

because they sell their own earbuds. its sad to see though. Asus and cheaper xiaomi phones have headphone jacks and unlockable bootloaders.

This was a reason to not buy a phone 4 years ago. It's a bit late to complain now.

Wtf? You can use a $1 usb-c to audio jack dongle and use any headphones or headsets that you want. You don't have to use Bluetooth.

Headphone jacks are not little. They take up a huge amount of board space on a device that people want to be small and light. They're also fragile and they open up a big hole for crud to get in.