> If they're going to release a new flagship every year, how does that make them any better (from a sustainbility POV) to the morally and ethically bankrupt companies they're competing with?
By removing many reasons for you to buy a new smartphone every 3 years:
- when your screen breaks, you won't have to pay the price of a new smartphone to replace it
- your apps won't stop working because they want the shiniest OS you don't have (because you'll have it)
- when you're out of storage because apps will have inflated 5 times again, you'll be able to extend storage
- they give you financial incentive to keeping your device (see their subscription model) -- and they give themselves the incentive to make the longest-living product!
- when your battery gets lower charges (which I believe they already efforts to make slower)
Even if you want to buy a new fairphone in 3 years for a shinier camera, your previous fairphone will still be perfectly usable, and still be repairable for a long time.
I agree that it's a bit sad they don't have "plus upgrades", but reducing their work to just the plus upgrades is very extreme.
Also I agree that releasing a new device every year doesn't exactly sound right, but at work we work a huge lot on sustainability (for money reasons), and the conclusion remains that we need a new device every year. Basically the reasoning is that we can't foresee 10 years ahead what will make current devices obsolete. Maybe RAM price will plunge and all devices will have ten times the amount of RAM (and apps will eat ten times more RAM). Maybe some stupid instruction-set will become mandatory. Maybe apps will no longer be usable on sRGB screen. Maybe /that/ Vulkan extension that requires specific hardware will be used by Unity and thus breaking all new games. So one way to reduce the risk (as in total cost of obsolescence), is to make new products regularly, so the amount of devices in production with obsolete hardware is reduced.