The Fairphone 5 is modular, made with recycled & fair materials and fair working conditions. I review the phone, the company behind it, the sustanibilty claims & explain their shortcoming.
The Fairphone part of that review is great but it also includes a lot of Greenwashing from short term garbage producers like Apple and Samsung in a very uncritical way, I can recommend it as a Fairphone review but be aware that the rest isn’t great!
He misses the point that companies like Fairphone and Framework and system76 have proven that it’s possible to support devices for a very long time when the bigger manufacturers told us it wasn’t possible, or even if it were possible that there was no market demand for seven years of software support. In 2016, sustainability and longevity were not words associated with new tech. They showed us the way.
Nokia sells a couple of phones with a screwdriver now. Pixel 8 is going to receive updates into the next decade. Lenovo is trying to make 80% of devices repairable, a remarkable pivot from where they were trending. The demand is there and the ability is there. They also made us think about things that we had never considered before in terms of impact, educating us along the way.
If Fairphone folded tomorrow, they left the smartphone market a better place than they entered.
I disagree with citing Framework for now since they've only existed for 3 years. They are certainly exciting and genuinely seem to be dedicated to long term support and repairability but in my opinion they need to exist longer than that before they can be cited as example of supporting a device for a very long time.
Even if they shut down today, the parts are out there. You can swap in from a donor laptop in ways that would be impossible for most others. Not to mention the fact that the critical parts are upgradable with standard parts from 3rd parties.
They supported the same hardware upgrade cycle for three full generations.
Even if they don’t keep going forever, they still succeeded in a huge way.
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