theoretically software support

This. And it’s not only due to drivers and much more due to them not having insourced software development and their outsourced developers not using Fairphones as their daily drivers.

In their 2022 report (page 40) they said that their living wage bonus for that year was $305 000 paid to 1926 factory workers, which comes to $158 per worker, and they said that this covers 6.5% of the living wage gap. That means, the whole living wage gap is $2436 p.a. per worker.

Now what they are paying is down to $60 per year, so even if the living wage gap didn’t change over the last two years, that would mean the $60 would only cover 2.4% of the living wage gap.

That’s apparently what makes this phone “fair”. It’s like tipping your delivery driver $0.20 and asking them to be grateful for that.

Well, that’s exactly what they are doing. That’s literally what these “fairness compensation credits” are that Fairphone is using.

They can’t (or don’t want to) source their materials from sources that actually employ people fairly. So they buy regular stuff made on the backs of disenfranchised people and donate some money to some random third-party organizations, that use the money to make sure some other people somewhere else are are employed more fairly.

Guess what: You can cut the middle man and do the same thing yourself.

And they aren’t even doing that for their whole supply chain. They are only doing that for the mining of some very specific minerals, specifically cobalt, gold and silver. They don’t do that for all the other materials in their phones. They don’t do that for any of the work that goes into processing these materials. They don’t do that for the people who transform these minerals into components. And at the end of that chain they do pay a very small amount to the people who do the final assembly.

In the end you are annoyed at the brand name plus the higher price evoking larger expectations in some of your friends. Join the club. But that’s a far cry from your original statement. Glad we could clear that up.

Yes, I am annoyed that Fairphone does incredibly false advertising. Take away the “Fair” part, how many sales do you think they’d lose? Look at Shiftphone if you want to see a Fairphone competitor that doesn’t have the “Fair” branding, and guess how many devices they have sold.

People need to know that the higher price stems from Fairphone being a boutique manufacturer, not from Fairphone actually spending a lot of money on Fair/eco things. That’s really important for a phone like this.

It’s pretty much equivalent to hypothetically finding out that the Fairtrade seal doesn’t actually mean that the banana farmers are paid fairly, but that the price markup actually stems from the ink being used in the Fairtrade seal is incredibly expensive to make.

It’s not an on/off either/or thing; every little bit helps.

That’s too simplistic. We don’t have unlimited resources, so if you want to help with something it’s very helpful to know how much what you do helps and if there’s better ways.

For example, since Fairphone is mostly using credits, you can just directly donate to the right organisations and have the same result. So if you buy a regular phone and donate €5, you will have done more than if you spend an extra €200-€300 for getting a Fairphone over a mainstream phone. And you will have done much, much more if you buy a mainstream phone and donate the €200-300 directly.

Are you expecting a Fairphone to be only as much more expensive as the extra (“fair”) wages paid would cost? But your own quote above proves why that cannot be.

That is true, Fairphone wouldn’t be able to do much more with what they got, but at that point it becomes misleading marketing.

It doesn’t make sense to make a product that is 7% “fair” sourced and make “fair” so much core of the branding that it’s right there in the company name.

It’s like rebranding Coca Cola to “Recycling bottle cola” if they include 7% recycling plastic in the bottles. Even if they really can’t do better than 7%, that’s ok, but then you can’t use that as THE main marketing point.

If their brand name was “Repairablephone” I wouldn’t have said anything.

But at that point “Fairphone” is as much fair as the “Trumpphone” is “100% made in USA”.

Accuracy and hallucination are two ends of a spectrum.

If you turn hallucinations to a minimum, the LLM will faithfully reproduce what’s in the training set, but the result will not fit the query very well.

The other option is to turn the so-called temperature up, which will result in replies fitting better to the query but also the hallucinations go up.

In the end it’s a balance between getting responses that are closer to the dataset (factual) or closer to the query (creative).

On non-Fairphones, which tend to have larger batteries and lower power consumption batteries tend to be usable for much longer. We are talking 3-5 years there.

So what’s the better deal? Get the battery replaced once in the phone’s lifetime at a local 3rd party repair shop for €100, wait for half an hour and get your phone back, or pay €200-300 extra for the privilege of a phone where you only pay €40+shipping for the battery, if you are lucky enough and they still have them in stock when your battery dies?

(Fairphone tends to have availability issues with spare parts. For example, right now the FP5 battery is out of stock.)

Yeah, it is sad. Turns out, Fairphone is just yet another fairwashing company. People spend lots of money and suffer through using this phone with its trash quality software because they think that they are saving the planet by doing so, and in the end they actually just indirectly donated maybe a few Euros to some random fair credit mill.

Keep your eyes peeled and read what’s beind the marketing, because even companies that look good rarely are.

Especially for stuff like fair/eco/green, where it’s really hard to objectively measure how good something is and where legal standards are ridiculously low.

Yeah, my issue with Fairphone’s branding/marketing/reputation here is that I know a lot of people who buy a fairphone because they want to save the planet, and that’s really not what this phone is doing.

Almost* every alternative hardware company asks much more for a (hardware wise comparable) product for a whole slew of reasons; “Fairness” rarely plays into it.

In other words, even if the Fairphone wouldn’t claim to be fair, it would cost just as much.

This is exactly it. Running a tiny company with nothing in-house making a custom phone with custom hardware is expensive.

To be fair (haha, pun intended) their phones are also about modularity.

That’s where the whole concept falls apart for me. I own my phones for a long time, and battery longevity has gotten much better in the last 1-2 decades. If you own a phone for 5-7 years, you will likely need to replace the battery one, or at most two times. Even if in the worst case this is going to cost you at max maybe €135 per swap (that’s what Apple charges for a battery swap on their most expensive phone). On a cheaper phone using 3rd party repair shops we are talking about less than half of that.

I’ve never destroyed a screen before, but some people do, and also then you’ll likely pay maybe €150-200 for a phone in the same range as the FP5. Now consider that Fairphone spare parts really aren’t cheap. They want €40 (plus shipping) for the battery and €100 (plus shipping) for the display for an FP5, so you aren’t saving that much on DIY repairs with the Fairphone.

Now consider that buying a mainstream phone comparable to a Fairphone is usually ~€300 cheaper, and the calculation completely breaks down. And it becomes even worse if you never destroy the screen.

So where does the money go? In 2024 they had an EBITDA of just €1 745 840, or €16.94 per phone. That’s not a lot at all, so it’s not like they are pocketing huge sums of money.

Yes, they are profitable, though barely so. Then again, their profits per device is much much more than what they pay for fairness.

Read through the whole report, sum up all the money they mention. It comes out to $16 000. Double that for the stuff where they don’t mention money (because they surely would mention anything that costs more than the things they do mention). Double it again, for a safety margin. Double it again, because we are really generous. Now we are at €128 000. Divide that by the number of devices sold in 2024 and you get $1.24. Now add the $1.20 (Page 29) they pay as a living wage bonus and you arrive at $2.44 per device.

And now let’s be super generous and double that guess again, and you end up with the <€5 per device that I quoted above.

The picture becomes clearer when you look at what they say about their fair material usage.

Take for example the FP5 (page 42 & 67). Their top claim here is “Fair materials: 76%”, which they then put a disclaimer next to it, that they only mean that 76% of 14 specific focus materials is actually fair. On the detail page (page 67) they specify that actually only 44% of the total weight of the phone is fairly mined, because they just excluded a ton of material from the list of “focus materials” to push up the number.

The largest part of these materials are actually recycled materials (37% of the 44% “fair” materials). The materials they are recycling are plastics, metals and rare earth elements. That’s all materials that are cheaper to recycle than to mine. You’ll likely find almost identical amounts of recycled materials in any other phone, because it makes economical sense. It’s just cheaper. Since these materials cost nothing extra to Fairphone, we can exclude them from the list, which leaves 1% of actually fair mined material (specifically gold), and 6% of materials that they bought fairwashing credits for.

Also, the raw materials of phones are dirt cheap compared to the end price. The costly part is not mining the materials, but manufacturing all the components.

With only 1% of the materials being fairly mined and only 6% being compensated with credits, you can start to see why in total they spend next to nothing on fair mining/fair credits.

They only did that once for the FP5. It was a terrible choice, leading to high battery usage and compatibility issues. They only did that because when it came out, 5 years of software support wasn’t something crazy any more. Samsung already provided the same on their mainstream flagship phones. So to top that they chose that embedded chip with 10 years of support from Qualcomm. But 10 years is practically speaking really hard overkill, especially considering the very impractical downsides of that chip.

By now, most major phone brands have support times rivalling what Fairphone is bringing to the table, and for that to work, Qualcomm has to support their mainstream phone chips for longer.

Don’t worry, it fails in Europe too. I ended up giving away my FP4, because it fails to do even basic stuff like make a call after 3G was switched off in my country.

Worst phone I ever had, with quite a margin. And the only one I ever kept for under 2 years and the only one I replaced while it was still physically ok.

Have a look at their impact report. They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff.

You are only paying more for that phone because they are a tiny boutique manufacturer who has to outsource everything. The fair/eco stuff is just fair- and greenwashing.

If you buy a phone because you want to look fair/eco, buy a Fairphone. If you actually really care for fair/eco, get an used phone and donate some money to the correct NGOs or charities.

You are mistaking the direction of evolution. Software started out with as much freedom as the hardware could afford.

In the 80s you ran your program in real mode (or whatever the equivalent mode was on your hardware). No kernel, no OS, nothing in the way. The software ran on bare metal with the ability to do literally anything the computer could.

In the 90s and early 2000s, safety features were introduced, but customizability was still king. Remember how you could accidentally remove some toolbar from Eclipse and never find the way to get it back? That kind of UI was considered normal back then.

You had stuff like the BlackBox system that allowed the user to customize the UI like a developer. The user could not only move buttons and other UI elements wherever they wanted, but they could also create their own and use scripting to make them do whatever they wanted.

Then came the iPhone and Windows 8, and from then on the target became simplification. The downside of the customizability of yesteryear was that things could get complicated and that most users didn’t use or even want these systems. Getting back to the Eclipse example, it was incredibly common back then, that people accidentally closed part of the UI and never found a way to get it back. So that’s when the minimalisation and “less is more” mentality came in. They moved everything that wasn’t used all the time into submenus and to a certain extent, it kinda worked.

But of course, with MBAs being MBAs, stuff like adding AI buttons to force people to use the next big monetizable thing became more and more prevalent.

It’s not evolving backwards. It’s being carefully crafted to turn into exactly what corporations wanted from the beginning but couldn’t do due to technical and legal limitations.

Examples:

• Microtransactions instead of asking for the price up-front
• Using gambling mechanics in non-gambling games (e.g. loot boxes)
• Eliminating potential stopping points in the user interaction, like e.g. endless scrolling instead of pagination
• Using big, visually engaging buttons for the actions they want the user to perform (“Accept tracking”) while using tiny, grey links for the actions they don’t want the user to perform (“Reject tracking”), or even worse, hiding the action they don’t want the user to perform behind multiple menues.
• Using wording that creates fear or other negative emotions to stop users from performing such actions (“If you cancel your subscription now, you will lose access to this, this, and that. Everything you did will be lost. Do you really want to do that?”)
• Disguising ads and other non-organic content as organic content. (“I found this product and it cured my hair loss, my potency issues and made me rich at the same time! ~sponsored ad~”)
• Disguising ads as notifications
• Disguising ads as the download button
• Agreeing to do one simple action contains a hidden agreement to a ton of other things

And many more things like that.

Sea cables are probably the most vulnerable point of the internet. There are comparatively few of them (on the order of a few hundreds), they are long, and most of their length is not guarded at all. The only reason I can think of, why nobody has targeted them at large is that it would also cut of the attacker.

Read again. I quoted something along the lines of “just as much a development decision as a marketing one” and I said, it wasn’t a development decision, so what’s left?

Firefox released just as frequently before, just that they didn’t increase the major version that often.

This does not appear to be true.

Why don’t you take a look at the version history instead of some marketing blog post? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/

Version 2 had 20 releases within 730 days, averaging one release every 36.5 days.

Version 3 had 19 releases within 622 days, averaging 32.7 days per release.

But these releases were unscheduled, so they were released when they were done. Now they are on a fixed 90-day schedule, no matter if anything worthwhile was complete or not, plus hotfix releases whenever they are necessary.

That’s not faster, but instead scheduled, and also they are incrementing the major version even if no major change was included. That’s what the blog post was alluding to.

In the before times, a major version number increase indicated major changes. Now it doesn’t anymore, which means sysadmins still need to consider each release a major release, even if it doesn’t contain major changes because it might contain them and the version name doesn’t say anything about whether it does or not.

It’s nothing but a marketing change, moving from “version numbering means something” to “big number go up”.

That’s where law is not justice.

I do agree with your sentiment, but if the law defines a driver as a human, which is usually the case, then by definition Tesla cannot be the driver.

It could even be that the passenger sitting in the driver’s seat of a robotaxi would be defined as the driver.

And sure, these laws need to be adapted before robotaxis should be allowed to hit the streets.