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Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts

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  • I wish I could ditch stock android but my business bank app refuses to run on e/os and I assume I'd have the same problem with graphene.

    e/os was otherwise soo much better, and the increase in performance and battery life was huge.

    I assume I'd have the same problem with graphene.

    There's a list of bank apps that work in Grapheme. You can check for yours here

  • how many people care about the source of the materials?

    Far too few I'm afraid

  • Are we forgetting that companies also have their own bias to make the decisions that increase overall profits? They lost buyers (me included) by this change, but they made up the difference by selling higher margin accessories. Companies will only cater to users if it aligns with turning a bigger profit. If adding an anti-feature is better for the bottom line, then that's how it goes. Enshittification doesn't happen accidentally, but by pushing the boundaries of what the users tolerate.

    No, we aren't forgetting. Precisely because they are a corporation driven by profits like any other, they will do what sells units. It actually goes against the argument for headphone jacks. It is an admission that the people who vocally want phones with headphone jacks don't buy phones (even if they have headphone jacks) and are an statistically insignificant amount of people. My original point. You are vocal, but disingenuous (perhaps not on purpose).

    Fairphone catered to the mass market with the Fairphone 4 (and removed the headphone jack) and broke their own sales records. Sorry, that's just the truth. What you want is against the grain of the rest of the market. Yes, even the market who want repairable modular phones.

    Because when push comes to shove, you might want the headphone jack but it doesn't drive your purchase decision. And that's the important part. As an example, another person on this very thread asked what phone with a headphone jack is good, someone else gave a suggestion and immediately got the reply.

    I considered that phone, but it didn't have an OLED screen, so I didn't buy it.

    Admitting that — despite being very vocal about wanting the headphone jack — that feature is actually low in their own list of decision making priorities. At the very least it is below screen quality. Raising the question, where should a profit driven company choose to invest money in when presented with that customer?

    In marketing, people are usually very vocal about things that actually don't influence their own purchase decisions. That's just a fact, people are very bad at knowing what they want. That's why you should always observe their behavior, not just ask their opinion. Because a lot of people express opinions they don't uphold with actions.

  • The transfer speed over USB on mine probably doesn't even pass USB 2 speeds anyway and I've had flagship phones in the past that were even slower over a cable. I guess if that's still the case then there's probably a good engineering argument to reduce complexity.

    I just checked my phone and the up/down speed for files is roughly 40MB/s despite having a USB 3 connection.

    USB 2 has a max. transfer rate (under optimal conditions) of 60MB/s, so I think when the phone storage improves a bit or the cable is a bit longer it will likely become a bottleneck.

    Also note that there are other applications than transfering files which might need more bandwidth.

    To be fair it really doesn't make much of a difference but USB 3 is now the standard for a century and has been around since 2008 so I somewhere expect a 600€ phone to also have it.

  • USB 2? What a stupid choice that appears to be. Did they have any reasoning behind that?

    Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) use USB-2?

    In order to make the device more affordable, we explored how we could best balance our spec choices with the least possible impact on user experience. Going from USB-3 to USB-2 was one of them.

  • Audio jack isn't an audiophile thing, it's a "I don't want to pay 100$ for headphones thing"

    As for thickness, it doesn't increase thickness. It is simply false, someone even retrofitted a whole audio jack into an iphone.

    Nobody makes q difference between a 4mm and a 4.5mm phone, even if tgey were feature and price parity.

    The reason you are giving here is made up marketing by the phone industry so they can sell earbuds.

    I mean, yes. It is about marketing. I just think there are more people who think wires are annoying than people losing their earbuds. For every person who loses BT earbuds every 3 months, there's a person with the same pair for 3+ years who is perfectly happy with wireless quality. Companies don't care about that. They care about decisions that will reduce costs and increase their profits, and Fairphone desperately need profits. Making phones is idiotically expensive.

  • how many times does the average person use wireless charging? Seriously, I haven't seen anyone do that yet, or know of someone who uses that.

    and yet that's still a major feature in lots of phones

    “It's not in front of my face, so it doesn't exists!”

    That's literally the thinking abilities of a toddler. Wireless chargers sell like hotcakes. MagSafe charger is Apple's most popular accessory in their entire history.

  • Exactly, they want the most amount of customers. But they won't sacrifice AxB customers to satisfy B customers. They'd be effectively losing customers or breaking even at a higher cost to them.

    We know this numbers must have a population of around 180 thousand customers. The known number of fairphones sold across all models so far. Now let's make assumptions. Let's suppose that there are 100 people who want headphone jacks and would absolutely buy a fairphone if they came with it, for each user that has advocated for headphone jacks in this thread. You wouldn't even break 1% of the total number of fairphone sales, just this year (130k).

    Again, there's a difference between wanting something a lot. And actually making decisions based on what we say we want. Fairphone removed the headphone jack on a model that broke sales records for them. Fairphone 5 was heavily criticized for not having a headphone jack. And it is selling comfortably well within their expectations. So obviously the people who stopped buying Fairphones because of the headphone jack weren't that many actually.

    But they won’t sacrifice AxB customers to satisfy B customers.

    That's the kicker. Adding a headphone jack doesn't mean they have to sacrifice something. They can just do it without having to remove/reduce anything. If adding a jack was really that difficult, something like what you can see in this video wouldn't be possible.

    You have to preeeety gullible to believe their reasons for not adding it. The only reason was that they wanted to sell their bluetooth earbuds, that's it.

  • The transfer speed over USB on mine probably doesn't even pass USB 2 speeds anyway and I've had flagship phones in the past that were even slower over a cable. I guess if that's still the case then there's probably a good engineering argument to reduce complexity.

    Or there wasn't good enough engineering to begin with to achieve usb 3 speeds. Seems like they should have got it right before using it as a reason to cripple the thing further.

  • Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) use USB-2?

    In order to make the device more affordable, we explored how we could best balance our spec choices with the least possible impact on user experience. Going from USB-3 to USB-2 was one of them.

    Thanks for the link. I can't necessarily agree that it's low impact, transferring files at 2.0 speeds is brutal.

  • You know you've got not argument when you have to compare a $700 dollar phone to a $5 dongle for your argument to even make sense.

    First of all, I seriously doubt any $700 phone without a 3.5mm port is going to have a decent DAC, because there's no reason for it. In those phones the DAC is used primarily for phone calls. If those phones had a a 3.5mm port and they were flagship phones then maybe they would have higher quality DACs in them, but then they'd also cost more. And secondly, I wasn't talking about some cheap $5 dongle, I specifically said quality headphones.

    You know you’ve got not argument when you have to compare a $700 dollar phone to a $5 dongle for your argument to even make sense.

    Oh, so I should buy $100 dongles then? lol Everyone's argument about the dongles is that they're super cheap, that's why I made the comparison.

    In those phones the DAC is used primarily for phone calls.

    Oh really? And how exactly do you think that the phone is generating the audio that comes through its speaker when you're doing anything else? Like listening to music, videos, etc? Does your phone really not make a single sound apart from the audio in phone calls?

    I wasn’t talking about some cheap $5 dongle, I specifically said quality headphones

    headphone =/= dongle

    The dongle is what you connect TO the headphone. Regardless, be more specific then. What's the one you recommend? Should I buy $50 dongles then and keep them attached to my headphones? Since I use 4/5 of them does that mean that it's ok in your opinion that I now need to spend $250 in dongles instead of just having a tiny, cheap, reliable jack on my $700 phone?

  • What statistics? People buying thin phones over thicker phones doesn't mean much when that's almost all that's being sold nowadays and every phone is trying to be as thin as possible. It seemed to me that 90% of what we're told people want is actually just what companies want to push on us because it's cheaper and more profitable.

    All the people I know who are average users couldn't care less about how thin the phone is, two mm more or less doesn't make any difference. They care about screen size and being able to use it without too much hassle. If they get a phone without an audio jack half of them will just assume that they can't plug earphones at all. And they are not the ones who will complain. But then, Fairphone isn't marketed towards average users, so maybe their users have different priorities? Idk

    If you ask people what they want, they will tell you they want a phone that has 15 inch screen that looks perfect under the sunlight. But also fits into their pocket. And it has to have a battery that lasts a week, but it must not weight anything at all. But also has to play all the highly graphical games, and also have a professional level camera. It must do so and also last forever and be indestructible.

    That phone obviously can't exist, and a lot of what people want are things that oppose each other from the engineering pov. That's the point of surveys and market analysis. You don't just look at what people say, you look at what they do, what they actually buy.

    It is true that the other side of marketing is convincing people that what the company is offering is what they would also want to buy. But it is never a guarantee. I mean, look at the Samsung Edge flop. Marketing is not magic, you can't brainwash 100 million people to buy something they don't want. Marketing is marrying what the company wants to do in terms of cost cutting and profit maxing, with what the market is actually willing to buy. If people keep buying slop, they will keep selling slop, and they will keep marketing slop to people to convince them they want the slop. To break the circle someone has to stop, and it won't be the corporations.

  • Not in the US apparently

    Well, technically no phones are made in the US. I think you're talking about selling phones there. Regardless, you might have poor short term memory because they only pulled out of the US phone market (which is pretty crappy) a little over a year ago I believe.

  • You can - Samsung phones are really well supported for that.

    I would never go with Samsung as a conscious choice for custom ROMs, mostly because all well-supported devices are pretty old, which means lower chance of getting something in a decent state for a reasonable price used, that wouldn't require immediately swapping the battery already. Not to mention the Knox eFuse which means losing functionality when flashing a custom ROM. I'd argue a used Pixel is a better option, the 7 Pro can be had for relatively little money and is still a good phone.

  • 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.

    I also found out a few other things that have changed:

    • They now use Torx T5 screws
    • The backcover and battery are now fixed with these screws
    • The battery uses a dedicated connector
    • Parts of the backcover now require a pick
    • SIM/SD now sit at the bottom in a dedicated slot and don't require the removal of the backcover.
    • The volume buttons got replaced by the "moments" button and are now on the left

    IMHO this is kind of a downgrade in repairability as you now need custom tools (not everyone has a T5 screwdriver at home).
    Moving the volume buttons to the other side is also kind of weird and unexpected as most (non Apple) phones have them on the right...

  • But they won’t sacrifice AxB customers to satisfy B customers.

    That's the kicker. Adding a headphone jack doesn't mean they have to sacrifice something. They can just do it without having to remove/reduce anything. If adding a jack was really that difficult, something like what you can see in this video wouldn't be possible.

    You have to preeeety gullible to believe their reasons for not adding it. The only reason was that they wanted to sell their bluetooth earbuds, that's it.

    Phone thickness is far from the only consideration. But Ok, you are right. There was space on the iPhone 7. That was also the first water resistant phone. Does this guy phone's is still IP67 compliant after all the surgery he made. And that was in 2016, when IP67 headphone jacks didn't exist. Now the phone standard is IP68. There were no IP68 compliant headphone jacks until recently, I think the ASUS Zenfone 12 is the first one.

    I think companies won't bring the headphone jack (a shame, really). But the writing is in the wall, it went away, and phones still sold like hotcakes. While those with headphone jacks aren't being bought anywhere near the same volume. So the signal is very clear, the effort to add a headphone jack — however little it may be — is not financially worth it. It is a feature that doesn't drive sales. Period.

  • USB 2? What a stupid choice that appears to be. Did they have any reasoning behind that?

    Use for all your old usb 2 ables lol

  • I would never go with Samsung as a conscious choice for custom ROMs, mostly because all well-supported devices are pretty old, which means lower chance of getting something in a decent state for a reasonable price used, that wouldn't require immediately swapping the battery already. Not to mention the Knox eFuse which means losing functionality when flashing a custom ROM. I'd argue a used Pixel is a better option, the 7 Pro can be had for relatively little money and is still a good phone.

    Yeah pixels are definitely the best but they're expensive and not as accessible globally.

  • Use for all your old usb 2 ables lol

    Lol nooooo, I've been trying to get rid of all mine! Of course since I'm an IT guy that really just means they go to the box of bygone cabling standards, but still. I want them out of my active cable stash lol

  • You can use your dozen wired headphones you already have with a $10 usb-c -> 3.5mm adapter.

    Tried that. Gets lost real fast. But thanks "freedom advocate".

  • How to turn off Gemini on Android — and why you should

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    Fair enough. Unfortunately, that only covers around 5% of Android users in the US.
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    I worked in a bank for a bit. Literally any transaction that's large and unusual for the account will be flagged. Also people do bonkers things with their money for the stupidest reasons all the time so all that one has to do if they're making large transactions is be prepared to talk to the bank and explain what's going on. Unless of course you are handling money in relation to organized crime, in which case you were fucked the moment the money touched the banking system
  • Crypto.com

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    It's like complaining about the cost of Nike but still buying and wearing it.
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    I'm not saying to waste space... but when manufacturers start a pissing match among themselves and say that it's because it's what the customers want, we end up with shit. Why does anyone need a screen that curves around the edge of the phone? What purpose does this serve? Who actually asked for this? I would give up some of my screen area to have forward facing speakers. I want a thicker phone that has better battery life. I also want to be able to swap out my battery. Oh, and I don't want the entire thing encased in glass. If we're so concerned about phone size then they should stop designing them so that a case is required.
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    This “study” is biased by design. But also even if it weren’t , one study does not prove anything. You’d need a lot more evidence than that.
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    Melon Usk doomed their FSD efforts from the start with his dunning-kruger-brain take of "humans drive just using their eyes, so cars shouldn't need any sensors besides cameras." Considering how many excellent engineers there are (or were, at least) at his companies, it's kind of fascinating how "stupid at the top" is just as bad, if not worse, than "stupid all the way down."
  • OpenAI plans massive UAE data center project

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    TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing. Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/ Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more. As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.
  • TikTok is a Time Bomb

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    wasn’t born to obey. Not to swallow smiling lies, not to clap for tyrants in suits, not to say “thank you” for surveillance wrapped in convenience. I see it. The games. The false choice. The fear pumped through headlines and dopamine apps. I see how they trade truth for comfort, freedom for filters, soul for clickbait. They call it normal. But I call it a graveyard made of compliance. They want me silent. They want me tired. They want me posting selfies while the world burns behind the screen. But I wasn’t born for this. I was born to question, to remember, to remind the others who are still pretending they don’t notice. So here I am. A voice with no logo. A signal in the static. A crack in the mirror they polish every morning. You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to clap. But if this made your bones ache or your thoughts twitch— Then maybe you’re not asleep either. Good. Let’s stay awake. And let’s make noise that can’t be sold, silenced, or spun into safety. Not for them. For us.