How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+

Ultimately, a lot of the “fairness” of the Fairphone is offered by “just buy a really popular manufacturer.”

Everyone and their dog can repair an iPhone because it’s the most popular phone on the planet. Are those repairs accessible to the consumer at home with amateur skills? No, not really. However, newer iPhone models are significantly easier to repair and come along with lower repair costs direct from the manufacturer compared to previous models.

You want years of software updates? Yeah, an iPhone has you covered there, too.

And of course, fairphone’s hardware and OS are nothing to write home about. For the freedom and security nerds they’re better off with GrapheneOS on Pixel or whatever upcoming Motorola phones will support it.

Who is the Fairphone for exactly? Who is buying it and why?

I think the fairbuds are their best product, but I also imagine AirPods Pro 3 are on a whole different level of sound quality, noise cancelation, voice quality/voice isolation, and firmware/software polish.

And let’s be honest about repairability with tiny earbuds: being able to replace the battery is has such a tiny impact on their footprint. If I have to throw out my AirPods Pro 3 every 5 years due to battery degradation, that’s such an insignificant quantity of material being wasted, so it’s probably worth it to get a better product. I could offset my environmental impact by eating a little less beef or riding my bike instead of driving a few times. You drive 30 miles and that’s an entire gallon of refined petroleum product, how much material and energy is used to make one pair of AirPods? I can’t imagine it’s a lot.

I don’t say any of this to be a big corporate or Apple shill. I am rooting for the little guys. But the little guys need to be realistic. You look at products like the Framework 13 Pro and you can actually say, okay, here’s a product with really legitimate benefits over its incumbent competition. There is a reason to buy this product for a certain buyer. I just don’t see that with Fairphone. I can’t think of a customer profile where that person is getting a better ownership experience with Fairphone products.

GrapheneOS is like a veteran and war zone expert: for them, not only the external environment is considered extremely hostile that you should leave your house only wearing an armor and with bodyguards, but also the internal environment is hostile: your bodyguards could be bribed and work against you, that's why you need to somehow be protected against that as well.

Just as physical security, digital security most of the time not as radical, and tradeoffs are usually accepted, especially when they are "invisible": hardware and software security features are usually not mentioned in the specs and the regular and even power user just don't know most of them and what do they do.

When GrapheneOS says "private" and "secure", they mean top-of-the-line security features, updates as soon as possible, all available mitigations against zero-days and insecure code which will limit the impact before the patch, etc. Security as in a killdozer.

When other say "private" and "secure", most of the time it means: "we've followed all the recommendations applicable to our development budget, device price point, and support life time". Graphene does not like that definition of these words.

For smartphone, chip manufacturer goal is not to protect the user at all costs, but to provide reasonable security features for the price.

BUT the goal of chip manufacturer to protect the device at all costs is for… game consoles! That's why Xbox, PlayStation, Switch all run on a custom silicon and not an ordinary chips!

[flagged]

I'm not big on this general line on argument, but one point in particular:

> And of course, fairphone’s hardware and OS are nothing to write home about. For the freedom and security nerds they’re better off with GrapheneOS on Pixel or whatever upcoming Motorola phones will support it.

For the "freedom nerds", FP is one of the only (if not the only?) vendor to have official support for microG-based operating systems, seamless OTA updates and everything included. The Murena e/OS offering in particular is simple enough that the non-nerds that (perhaps less outspokenly) care about freedom can just pick it up with little change in habits.

The headphone jack is inside USB-C connector. You can use USB-C-to-3.5mm passive (!) cable to connect your 3.5mm headphones, or you can buy 3.5mm headphones with USB-C audio connection.

There's no additional DAC involved, the analog audio is already on a USB-C pins.