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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest the specs of the Fairphone are middling and the device is rather expensive for what you get. The Pixels are a much better value, especially with a series. If you want something truly high end, wait for the Motorola with official GOS support.

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Isn't the whole idea behind Fairphone that they are more expensive because the parts are responsibly sourced? That they pay a fair price for labour and materials? And that the phones are highly repairable?

Why would that mean it could compete with a Pixel which generally has none of those goals?

There's nearly no information available on the working conditions, pay or environmental impact of Fairphones. T2Mobile is the company designing and making Fairphones since the Fairphone 4 and little information is available on them. Fairphone provides a long list of companies involved in the supply chain without more details than their location and website.

Pixels have long term availability of official parts for repairs and also official repairs.

Unlike Fairphones, Pixels have very good updates over the long term. Fairphones do not provide anything close to decent updates and it greatly degrades over the lifetime of the device. Fairphone 5 and earlier have an end-of-life kernel without security support. The devices start out lagging months behind on partial security backports and a year or more behind on full security updates which gets worse over time.

Without support of alternative OS Fairphone is basically a landfill. Why would anyone buy this apart from novelty factor.

Supporting an alternative OS wouldn’t change the fate of Fairphone, imo. Most people don’t care to move away from the stock version of Android that comes with their phone or iOS.

This isn't a hypothetical, Fairphone supports alternative OSes. Heck, you can even buy it with /e/OS in their store:

https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus-e-operati...

tbf that was just more so me insulting fairphone and kinda unnecessary from me

Can I flash my own?

Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667725

I mean, aside from /e/OS as a first-party option, there are also official Lineage builds[1]. And they're at least a target for PostmarketOS[2], even if that wiki doesn't actually describe something daily-driveable yet.

[1] https://forum.fairphone.com/t/official-lineageos-23-for-the-...

[2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_(Gen._6)_(fairp...

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