Yeah wow, the problem with the phone that tries to compete with unethical big business is that unethical big entity is cheaper. Who would have thought

You have headphones on in your car, listening to music, while you're driving? I hope you've checked your local laws because that is illegal in quite a few countries. It's also a very niche example as most people would use the car stereo instead of headphones.

how do you charge the phone with a DAC plugged in?

650€ is way too expensive for an unknown phone brand with an unknown OS installed on it smh. i'd love to buy one but considering you can get a samsung for less than 500€

650€ is way too expensive for an unknown phone brand with an unknown OS installed on it smh. i'd love to buy one but considering you can get a samsung for less than 500€

If we revisit the "loud" vs "statistically significant" paradigm, while it is a shame you will not be able to charge the phone with a dac in without buying a specific cable, how often does the average person do so?

They cooperate with Murena, so /e/OS is officially supported and you can buy new devices with /e/OS installed. I am running /e/OS on my Fairphone 5 and it works great.

They also seem to have given developer devices to the PostmarketOS folks, so that they hit the ground running with a working FP6 port already. I'm not sure exactly what is going on behind the scenes between Fairphone and PostmarketOS here - maybe @z3ntu@fosstodon.org can fill us in.

Wirelessly.

Or you switch to your bluetooth buds during a wired charge.

I'm all for audio jacks, but have been using a phone without one for 4 years now, and there are so many options to not be incovenienced.

Also I don't use my audiophile headphones with the phone at all - DAC on it just isn't good enough to get most out of then, prefer to use them with my desktop PC amp only.

C'mon, this is getting childish. No, I don't have headphones while driving, I have an audio input to the car's stereo.

You can get a USB-C splitter adapter.

You can get good Bluetooth earbuds for under $50 and a USB-C to AUX dongle for under $15.

The average person is fine with Bluetooth earbuds or an adapter, and audiophiles would not find the inbuilt DAC/amp on a phone to be adequate.

Fairphone has been a really disappointing experiment in so-called sustainable tech over the years. They keep making new phones instead of continuing to support the old ones, which might be greenwashing. (Whereas if you got a legacy Framework 13, it's still user-repairable and upgradable.) If they wanted to make a non-upgradable device, maybe it would have been wise to make it high-end to futureproof to work until 4G gets phased out. Fairphone still is not making their products available in the U.S., and Murena is a borderline scam company and I am genuinely shocked Fairphone works with them.

And I've heard their logic with the headphone jack, but I do think AUX is the lesser of two evils as removing it will just lead to more e-waste with broken bluetooth headphones that rarely last as long as good wired ones. Fairphone's own bluetooth accessories have gotten negative reviews for their lower build quality, so Fairbuds are likely not the solution to the headphone jack problem.

For the simple fact that non-Europeans can buy them directly off the website, I would sooner recommend feature phones from Sunbeam as it also has user-replaceable batteries and you can send it in for repairs. Or just any phone used.

I've had to swap a lot more cabled headphones out due to cable damage than bluetooth headphones, but i also only use overear headphones, which have enough battery storage for days. Also, there are also overear headsets that are dual-useable with headphone jack or bluetooth (no noise cancelling with jack tho). Also, the issue with the replacement of headphones lies with the producers of headphones w/o changeable power source, not with the phone.

And regarding availability in the US: i have the suspicion that the average european will be much more inclined to pay the 2-300$ upmark in price just for greener tech than the average american. i'm sure that they would love to sell more phones, but it's not ecological or economical to ship them onto a continent where 80-90% of people would either compare specs only and cannot afford to go for a more sustainable phone or - a predominantly USA thing - who revel in the fact that their choice is not ecological.

What about headphones with a replaceable cable? Higher quality cables usually last longer aswell

I've had to swap a lot more cabled headphones out due to cable damage than bluetooth headphones, but i also only use overear headphones, which have enough battery storage for days. Also, there are also overear headsets that are dual-useable with headphone jack or bluetooth (no noise cancelling with jack tho). Also, the issue with the replacement of headphones lies with the producers of headphones w/o changeable power source, not with the phone.

And regarding availability in the US: i have the suspicion that the average european will be much more inclined to pay the 2-300$ upmark in price just for greener tech than the average american. i'm sure that they would love to sell more phones, but it's not ecological or economical to ship them onto a continent where 80-90% of people would either compare specs only and cannot afford to go for a more sustainable phone or - a predominantly USA thing - who revel in the fact that their choice is not ecological.

I had a phone without before, that one came with a simple cheap passive adapter for USB-C to 3.5mm headset. You lose out on using headphones while charging, but other than that I was never really inconvenienced...

You also have to remember to have that adapter with you

Read through the whole report, sum up all the money they mention. It comes out to $16 000. Double that for the stuff where they don't mention money (because they surely would mention anything that costs more than the things they do mention). Double it again, for a safety margin. Double it again, because we are really generous. Now we are at €128 000. Divide that by the number of devices sold in 2024 and you get $1.24. Now add the $1.20 (Page 29) they pay as a living wage bonus and you arrive at $2.44 per device.

And now let's be super generous and double that guess again, and you end up with the <€5 per device that I quoted above.

The picture becomes clearer when you look at what they say about their fair material usage.

Take for example the FP5 (page 42 & 67). Their top claim here is "Fair materials: 76%", which they then put a disclaimer next to it, that they only mean that 76% of 14 specific focus materials is actually fair. On the detail page (page 67) they specify that actually only 44% of the total weight of the phone is fairly mined, because they just excluded a ton of material from the list of "focus materials" to push up the number.

The largest part of these materials are actually recycled materials (37% of the 44% "fair" materials). The materials they are recycling are plastics, metals and rare earth elements. That's all materials that are cheaper to recycle than to mine. You'll likely find almost identical amounts of recycled materials in any other phone, because it makes economical sense. It's just cheaper. Since these materials cost nothing extra to Fairphone, we can exclude them from the list, which leaves 1% of actually fair mined material (specifically gold), and 6% of materials that they bought fairwashing credits for.

Also, the raw materials of phones are dirt cheap compared to the end price. The costly part is not mining the materials, but manufacturing all the components.

With only 1% of the materials being fairly mined and only 6% being compensated with credits, you can start to see why in total they spend next to nothing on fair mining/fair credits.