A couple hours before I was on the edge of getting a Fairphone 5 but I read the specifications and didn’t see 3.5 mm audio jack anywhere. So I thought to myself…why? The community has been requesting this for a couple years ago now so why not. They’re already making money on the phone, they’re really pushing for people to get their wireless headphones? Just add the headphone jack, shouldn’t be too hard.
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.
*Add the headphone jack and I’ll be happy to support and get a fp5.
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
They keep saying that themselves, no one actually tries to sell you one if you have a phone already.
The most sustainable phone is the one you already have
Aham, all the people that are talking about buying one Fair phone these days doesn’t already have cellphones. That’s veeery credible…
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
More and more people are saying it folks.
What’s the conclusion of this claim? That we shouldn’t consume anything at all? That it doesn’t matter what we consume as it all is equally unethical?
Even if you believe that all consumption is unethical, there are still differences in impact and effect depending on what we consume and how much we consume.
Of course not, but who is urging people to replace their new/working smartphone with a fairphone?
From a price/quality perspective, the fairphone has always been “bad”… You pay the price of a upper mid smartphone and get older mid tech. That’s because the fairphone’s main appeal is it’s modularity and their focus on “sustainable” production, which of course has it’s price.
If your main focus is price and affordability, the fairphone is a bad choice.
First: nothing you buy will ever be free from exploitation under this system.
Second: buying one product over another will make no difference in society and the world.
Actually, this second conclusion is also a derivation of another statement: individuals do not change a society, collectives do. Boycotts, which are another attempt at conscious consumption, sometimes manage to shut down companies, but they never manage to end the harmful production pattern that these companies were applying in the first place.
And that doesn’t mean we should stop consuming everything, because it’s impossible to live without consuming.
In the end, conscious consumption only serves to feel good (falsely) about yourself. What is an honest reason to do something.
Ok but again, even if you think so, there are still different degrees of exploitation. Saying “nothing I buy will ever be free from exploitation” can also be used as an argument not to care about exploitation at all…
Of course it will… You can argue that the difference it makes is so small that it is essentially 0, but it still makes a difference…
Just because you buying a more sustainably produced smartphone doesn’t solve all the problems in the world doesn’t mean that it has 0 impact…
No, it also demonstrates a way to improve something, even if that improvement is minuscule… It also shows the potential issues and problems that come with it… I would never claim that somebody buying a fairphone is changing the world, of course that would be ridiculous. Individual consumer choices indeed don’t have a big impact on systemic issues.
Hopefully by the time my s10e is ready for landfill companies will be making reasonably sized phones again. If I wanted a tablet I’d buy a fucking tablet.
The S23 is the same size.
Their software support is also yet to be proven. That’s something they’d have to stick to for a long time before a general trust around their longevity is established.