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.

I've never met someone that cared about a thinner phone, they've been too thin since 2015..

People that want their ducking hradphine jacks? They are everywhere.

Just out of interest, because I too love the jack, then what are you buying in the future?

Okay, I'm going to ask... why don't you use wireless?

Edit: some results are in, and the only reasonable answer is better audio quality, although that's probably no longer true. The rest are fairly weak reasons.

Lol'd at the 10m extension cord though, thanks for that one.

Battery degradation. Wired earphones/headphones can be BIFL if treated properly. A typical wireless device will see battery degradation within a handful of years, and I have yet to see a decent TWS solution with replaceable batteries.

I’m assuming they are removing the headphone jack cause the internal components take up too much space. I can’t imagine these companies removing the jacks cause they cost too much money.

I have a Sony Xperia that has both a jack and a SD slot. I shelled out for the top of the line one, but since it has good specs I plan on keeping it for many years.

1.Wired headphones deliver better audio quality
2.Wired headphones are harder to lose
3.Wired headphones don't need batteries, so:
a)less e-waste
b)no need to check if they are charged
4.Wired headphones are more secure, connection cannot be intercepted and phishing attacks with BT are not possible
5.While wired headphones are plugged, no one can take your phone without you noticing

Maybe I chose the wrong $10 adapter but I notice a big drop in sound quality using that vs Bluetooth, to the point that it's not worth using unless there isn't another option. I'm not really an audiophile, though I can notice the general quality of sound.

For real, though, what is it?

Compared to the Fairphone 5 it has some improvements but also a few downsides:

Pro:

• It's a bit smaller (~4mm) and lighter (~20g)
• Slightly better camera (future tests will tell how much better)
• 120 Hz display
• More RAM and storage (although I feel that the previous 6GB/128GB option was also sufficient for most users)
• WiFi 6E Tri-Band (however you will likely never need this speed)
• Bluetooth 5.4
• Slightly larger battery

Con:

• Backpanel now requires a screwdriver
• Display has less resolution/PPI
• Performance of processor will likely be nearly identical to predecessor (however it's more efficient and modern)
• Downgrade to USB 2
• 600€

My conclusion:
Overall the improvements are ok, however just releasing the Fairphone 5 with a newer SoC might have been the better/more cost effective choice.
Sacrificing display resolution for 120 Hz feels also quite wrong.
600€ is very pricy for a phone like this. Cutting some premium features away like the 120 Hz display or a bit of RAM and storage (that you can extend anyway with an SD card) might have saved enough to get the launch price down to somewhere near 500€ which would make it accessible for a wider audience.