Linus reviewed (roasted) our phone | Fairphone reacts

I think their point about framework laptops is actually a stupid one. The fairphone is not a modular device (although they always seem to be trying to claim that), which the framework laptops are. The fact you have to remove the battery to do anything kind of proves that it's not modular, we've seen modular phones so we know what they look like and they don't look like this.

So it just seems a weird comparison to have made. The fairphone is easier to repair than your average smartphone, but it's still a lot less repairable than phones from the early 2000s. It's not a simple repair unless you're talking about a battery replacement. It doesn't have swappable buttons, It doesn't have swappable chassis. Basically it's a cheap Android phone that costs more money than it is really worth with the justification of environmentalism. I would take a truly modular and easy to repair phone over this any day of the week if one existed, and since one doesn't yeah I think i'll go for a Pixel.

For a customer who wants the best phone for their money, the Fairphone is objectively worse

Objectivity worse in performance, sure. Some people consider more things than just being a fastest bang for the buck. Unethical mining, forced labour, e-waste, data mining, and lots of other things. If you care at all, that is.

If you want to compare that to a product made by a billion dollar company, no one is stopping anyone. There is cost associated with doing things ethically. Small companies aren't financed to eat those costs to gain the market. It speaks more about principles than anything else.

I don't disagree with Linus' suggestion at the end: even the fairest phone is environmentally costlier than rescuing an old second hand phone

is it? The person who sold the phone is most definitely going to buy a new phone and if they sold the phone released last year they will most likely do so every year. The reason there's a second hand market with a year old phones is because people obsessively buy new phones. How exactly is that environmentally friendly than starting to use a phone made by a company with higher ethics? Surely the later stacks higher in being environmentally and morally friendly?

Duchebag is spouting capitalists "trickle down" economics. Rather than fix the cause, find the flex tape to hide it. Rich people buy new phones, less rich buy phones from the rich, and so on. No one needs to look past the marketing into ethics in how they were made and companies keep profiting in billions by exploitation of the poor. So so environmentally friendly.

but half the battery life in video decode means charging your phone twice as often even if you don't watch Youtube all day

Most of the power goes into the screen. The Pixel 8 has a ridiculously power efficient screen. I have one. It also costs $300 to replace. The Fairphone's is $100.

other phones have sliders or slots that will let you live swap either card without even taking the back off

Slots and sliders inevitably weaken the phone frame making it easier to break. They also cost more to machine.

even the fairest phone is environmentally costlier than rescuing an old second hand phone.

Replacing a battery to rescue a Pixel will run you $100-200.

Many design choices make a lot of sense when looked through the repairability, durability and cost of repairability lenses.

I think Framework and Fairphone are solving similar but different problems.

Fairphone is "keep this phone as configured working."

Framework is more "I have this laptop but it can become this other newer laptop without me needing to buy all the parts again AND I can buy replacement parts."

It's really not even remotely the same calculus in my book.

7 years is only for Pixel and S24 phones. The vast majority of existing Samsung phones will only get 5 years of security updates.

https://www.howtogeek.com/797200/how-long-will-my-android-phone-be-supported-with-updates/

Chiming in on the SIM/SD: as far as I can remember, my phone didn't let me hotswap neither SIM or SD, always required a restart to handle it properly.

but other phones have sliders or slots that will let you live swap either card without even taking the back off

Modern phones on purpose dropped SD card support but yeah, slimmer phones still have those sliders. To be fair you need a tool for that, unlike their option.

especially for a company that small

We really have to keep that in mind. When they planned the FP5 they likely had no idea Google would do the same. They take what Qualcomm offers, unlike tech Giants Google and Samsung that can basically dictate update lifespans.

relatively spotty history when it comes to patching

They are the ODM unlike GrapheneOS and comparing them to Google is really unfair. Google makes Android, so they know the code best. They patch very quickly, the updates work for their phones out of the box, less work for GrapheneOS.

Fairphone on the other hand has to maintain a unique device which is way more work, they get early access because of that though.

And their noncompliance with all the GrapheneOS security demands is the reason I dont use it.

seems to take issue with seem to be the LineageOS/Android defaults

Fairphone is Google certified and thus needs to ship unmodified Android including all the Google crap. There is a company called Murena that creates some hacky LineageOS-based OS and sells Fairphones with it preinstalled.

This /e/OS looks nice and has very nice integrations, but is fundamentally flawed and less secure than GrapheneOS for example (microG, depending on unmaintained apps, even slower updates,...)

even the fairest phone is environmentally costlier than rescuing an old second hand phone.

Regular phones dont get 8 years of updates so they will be outdated and should not be used. This argument makes no sense.

I got a used Pixel 6a with 2 years left, so used but way less long updates, so I hope on getting a used Pixel 8 which means roughly 1,7 phones instead of one, should be equally sustainable.

You're making a lot of good points here, but I feel like this last bit goes against how most people would evaluate purchasing such a phone after the fact.

For a customer who wants the best phone for their money, the Fairphone is objectively worse. It's marketed at the niche segment of people who are willing to spend extra for a mid-tier phone to get more environmentally and socially conscious hardware. (...) Most people will be incredibly unhappy with a Fairphone 5 if the alternative would've been a Pixel 8.

People don't walk around comparing what they have to what they don't have based on specifications alone (that's just successful marketing). Their actual experiences are what matters. The FP is a good enough phone that most people will experience no issues having one. Most people simply don't need the best of the best, and whether it's a FP or a Pixel doing what they need their phones to do is of very little consequence to them.

Don't get me wrong. If you're price oriented, and you want to get the most bang for the buck, there's better options. But I would argue that this doesn't matter all that much for most people's satisfaction, which is probably much more by affected long support and repairability (even if it's just that you can swap the battery).

"It's better than the Fairphone 4" doesn't really matter when I'm comparing the Fairphone to a Pixel phone.

What, why?

I first reevaluated my perception of him (shall we say) after that AWFUL “let’s try Linux” series, and it didn’t exactly get better from there.

The Microsoft ball gargling is ridiculous on its own

I gave up a while back, and can't really nail down what actually got me over the edge to stop watching.

Really didn't help that the one time I checked back in, because I hadn't seen anything from him in a bit (prior to the latest scandals), all the latest uploads was him being totally unrelatable and barely even tech-relevant while trying to heat his pool with his water cooling loop.

What a dumb take. Linus is one of the primary tech reviewers. After he got blasted by GN they got their shit together.

That's honestly my biggest problem with him as well. He makes such a big thing about having 900 videos a week or whatever that it just makes you think that he can't possibly put any real effort into any of them, it's literally not possible. Why not reduce the number videos and actually produce better quality content.

Part of the problem is that he has to be in every video or almost every video the channel producers. If you look at something like Corridor Digital they have a number of people who are regularly on camera so individuals don't have to do a bunch of videos one after another. So each individual video gets more focus.

What's the point in putting out a badly informed review, all it does is weaken your brand.

Or their point about using a Qualcomm industrial chip instead of a Snapdragon chip as a point against Fairphone, when they have previously stated that it is to get a longer time of support.

Of course the support is great, but some other phones also achieve that without a slow and old SoC.

The Fairphone seems pretty nice in theory but the performance is pretty poor and the price is high.

To me, the profile thickness is a benefit. Tiny thin phones scream "compressed electronics, overheats fast, difficult repairs"

Yeah. He took flack. It was more about the completeness and accuracy of the reviews rather than being unfair.... at least from what I recall.

They did a whole show of the matter, suspended uploads for a week or so, did some internal restructuring, hired a new CEO. Linus is now chief vision officer or some such nonsense.

Bluntly, I liked LTT videos more when they were a scrappy bunch of nerds working out of a house, putting out a couple videos a week...

You knew the information wasn't perfect and that was fine. It was enough to give you an impression of what to expect. They did a recent comparison that confirmed something I already knew, by taking a smattering of the "same" CPU and testing them against eachother. They found that some were quantifiably better than others. To me this was proof that all reviews are skewed. You never know which way they'll be skewed, and it really doesn't matter. The fact remains that all tech reviews are going to be different than personal experience. They're also going to differ from reviewer to reviewer since, even if they're using the "same" hardware, that hardware might be slightly faster or slower than other reviewers by a small margin. Once upon a time the hardware was so similar and the differences were so small you could effectively ignore this variance. Modern hardware is so fast that even a small variance can make a pretty significant difference to benchmark performance.

So you have to take literally everything posted as a review with a grain of salt. It's not accurate to what you would experience buying the exact same stuff off a shelf. As lithography gets smaller and smaller the relatively minor variance will have a larger and larger impact to the final products performance.

It's the way of things. All things. Whether it's a car or a computer, some just roll off the line different.

Sounds like you didn't watch the video

More people than are active on Lemmy

The point is; he wants a Framework-like approach to modularity and feature set. That means a phone that's good enough to actually holds its own without retreating to being "ethical" or "modular."

Fairphone is just the worst deal you can get even if you consider the ethical side of it. This is because rescuing an old phone gives you a much better experience for less than half the cost and keeping tech from the landfill is a lot more ecologically friendly as the work and sourcing was already done regardless of you purchasing the device.

Nice, cc in case this gets hoovered up into a llm?

12 yo's, probably.

Yeah, I was expecting something like "Yeah, this is an issue, we know. It's that way because we had to make a trade-off to enable ..." but it was mostly just lame excuses or just talking about something entirely unrelated to the point being made.

Like the thickness of the device and bezels. Just accept it, the FP is thicc. It's a conscious trade-off you made. Be open about it. Don't whine about measuring with the camera bump included (if anything, measuring from the bump gives the FP an advantage since its bump isn't as thic as others?). If the bezels are a little thicker than the competition, just state why that is (i.e. to make it easier to replace).

Had to stop watching after that or I would have died of cringe.

Lemmy as usual disregarding pragmatism to be as dogmatic as possible

The second biggest dealbreaker for me after the small battery.

Ok, they have a USB-C to jack dongle, but guess what USB-C port's wearout is the reason I was looking for a new phone in the first place.

And?

Energy lost as heat during the power transmission. It's what makes the phones warm during wireless charging. That heat decreases the lifespan of the battery and makes the phone uncomfortable to use, which is why wireless charging speed is limited once the phone reaches a certain temperature. I specifically avoid using wireless charging on my Pixel to extend its battery lifespan since it will live for 7 years and battery replacement is expensive. New wireless charging standards could probably play with frequency and other parameters in order to reduce energy lost as heat, similar to how increasing the voltage in a circuit decreases loss to heat for the same cables.

The long and short of the lower efficiency of wireless charging is a concept called Free Space Loss

In order for energy to pass through an open space it has to use some energy. Unlike a cable where the pins are contacting and the loss is far lower.

My latest phone is a xiaomi note 12. It has 120 watt charging and I never knew I'd love this so much! 0 to 100% in 30 min. No need to plan charging any more. Just give it 10 min and you're good to go. Charging efficiency is maybe the greatest feature I look for now, besides connectivity

I can't even imagine how you can possibly say its a bad take. They were all fair criticisms of that phone, if it doesn't apply to you very well, but the fact that it's slower than an old phone it might matter to some specially in the optic of keeping that phone for 5/6 years or more...