What would be the use cases for such a easy repairable phone? Compared to other phones not so easily repairable (i.e. 6/10).
If an easily repairable phone breaks, it's not a big deal.
It was most expensive model at the time. I know people who have dirt cheap laptop 10 years, this macbook pro crap is like 3 years. Unbelivable. My macbook pro from 2014 is starting to get bloated battery I think as well.
I don't understand the distinction. The MBP is hard to fix because most repairs require a 2-week ground shipment both ways.
I've had my Pixel XL for about 2.5 years. I'm planning to replace it in the next six months only because the battery is getting worn out—the performance of the device is still very good.
Awful. Who came up with the idea of going through the front? Took me like 10 minutes with my last two Xiaomi phones.
With enough maturity there could be a new market to sell modules for very different purposes than phone manufactures intended (ie: you can use the drive bays in PC case for a variety of components, not just “drives”, and it will work as long as it interface with the motherboard)
People throw away phones that work perfectly well except for one simple component. E.g. the body and all the electronics are sent to the landfill even if it's just the screen that's broken.
That is to say, a mainstream phone’s production is so optimized and streamlined, that the weighted average environmental impact of making 10 more (e.g. iPhones) is significantly less than the weighted average environmental cost of making 1 Fairphone.
Maybe if you factor in the value of performance art and political proselytizing then you can justify it!
(Would be interested in any links to studies or economic models in this area though.)
It’s sort of a backwards way of thinking about the “Marginal Abatement Cost Function” (MAC) which is non-linear at the point you decide to go from producing 1 unit of output to shuttering the factory entirely.
At the point where you are producing 36 million phones, the marginal economic cost is at its lowest. The marginal economic cost of your first unit, by comparison, is a massive step function.
Which is why I started by saying it’s a morose way of looking at things, because you get stuck in a local minimum that way.
Economically, sure—manufacturers optimize to be as cost-effective as possible.
Environmentally? Doubtful.
In the end the core module also started becoming unstable (I have to emphasize though that the phone had endured a lot of physical abuse, as well as certain apps that probably overheated the CPU more than a few times) and I had to replace it two months ago. If the FP3 had been announced earlier I would have bought it instead of the phone I ended up replacing the FP2 with.
I agree that the lack of repairability requirements and the sheer volume of production make it plausible such optimisations could have happened. But we know neither whether they happened, nor the scale of the benefits. Unless you're Tim Cook I guess, in which case bring back iPhone 5S form factor.
For myself, I would have no problem popping it open to replace parts. It would be great to get 5-6 (planned) years of use out of a single device. For family, that I regularly provide "tech support" for, it would be great to repair their phones instead of being beholden to some "bar", on the other side of town, requiring in-person visits/appointments for $100+ repairs.
We could just get it done at the kitchen table.
Readily available and easily installable replacement parts are certainly useful for anyone planning on keeping a phone for more than a few years, just like with cars.