People who want a headphone jack […] are unfortunately a very tiny minority of the entire population.
People interested in paying more for fair trade materials and repairable phones are also a very tiny minority of the entire population.
Of course I don’t have any statistic, but I would guess that the proportion of people wanting a Jack is significantly higher in the group of people interested in buying Fairphone tht on the general population.
In my particular case, I’m still using my Fairphone 3, and I’m not buying a Fairphone again unless it has a Jack.
Have a look at their impact report. They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff.
You are only paying more for that phone because they are a tiny boutique manufacturer who has to outsource everything. The fair/eco stuff is just fair- and greenwashing.
If you buy a phone because you want to look fair/eco, buy a Fairphone. If you actually really care for fair/eco, get an used phone and donate some money to the correct NGOs or charities.
Have a look at their impact report. They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff.
I’ve looked through their report and I can’t find this info. The only thing I’ve found is a ~€2 bonus per phone to their factory workers, which is only a small fraction of a phones supply chain. Can you provide a more detailed reference supporting your claim?
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.
Yeah, I see, thanks a lot for taking the time to read through the report and write this.
It’s fucking sad but honestly thanks for pointing it out, I hadn’t even read the report.
Like I’ve said before- their market is small enough they should be trying to get everyone they can to buy it.
That’s what they’re doing. That’s why they remove the headphone jack in favour for a slimmer, lighter phone. Their market research showed that’s more important to a bigger portion of their customers.
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?
I have no idea, I’m hoping for my F3 to still last a couple of years.
I’m honestly pretty tired of Android, and that’s another can of worms.
Maybe I’ll try with a linux phone, but I’m still undecided.
Motorola or whatever, depends what’s available within budget at the time I need the phone.
falcunculus@jlai.lu 15 hours ago
Fairphone literally does have that statistic. They spent effort to gather that info in order to inform their business decisions. And they report: