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Comment by kwiens | Hacker News Reader

Main board failures are hard, they'll kill just about any phone and it's pretty challenging to make the service part economically viable.

For what it's worth, I don't know of any systemic problems / higher than usual error rates with the Fairphone 3 main board. You got unlucky.

Consider giving them another shot sometime!

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What’s the point of a repairable phone if parts are out of stock?

One of dozens of parts is out of stock and as the other comment points out itself it is also the part that makes the least sense to replace.

I was looking into Fairphone seriously recently and got repulsed by this parts out of stock thing. It's not just one occurrence, peolle are complaining about different parts out of stock for prolonged period or times (or still not available to this day). What's the point of repairability if parts cannot be acquired? Not much of used market, either.

And their support tells you to pretty much f-off without are purchase receipt, even if you want to buy the part. It's garbage.

The only way this model would work is if specs are completely open, there is optional certification/audit for parts and third parties are encouraged to freely compete selling the parts.

Like in a PC?

More or less, yep.

Having access to donor parts from cheap used models?

Unless they are not popular that much, then not much access either.

As much as apple (seemingly) tries to actively make repairs harder, they're some of the easiest devices to source replacement parts for, due to their popularity.

It's just the kind of part that doesn't merit repairs... it's unfortunate, but with any equipment there will be such parts.

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