Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets

Comments

• kadu@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There are indeed good aspects to this product.

  But I won’t join the “Fair phone” circle jerk and give them the free publicity, because just like Apple and Samsung, they removed the headphone jack from their phones soon before the launch of these headphones, in other words, artificially creating the problem and need to sell you their expensive solution.

  You don’t get to ride the “we are pro customer!” free publicity train while also wanting to be the next Apple.

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  • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I understand people’s desire for a headphone port, but I really don’t understand the hate for devices that don’t have one. It would be one thing if they vendor-locked Bluetooth headphones so you had to use theirs, but it really just seems like a common sense move in a world where Bluetooth reigns supreme.

    As long as a USB-C adapter still provides the same functionality, I really don’t see anyone’s choices being taken away. If it is one less physical port on the device that helps streamline the hardware, I’m all for it too.

    And if it is a dealbreaker, you don’t have to buy a fairphone.

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The problem is that there are fewer and fewer options with a headphone jack. My current phone has one and I use it all the time.

      Bluetooth sucks for a variety of reasons, such as:

      • not private
      • needs to charge (I’ve had BT headphones die on road trips or whatever)
      • not great sound quality

      I also like using bluetooth headphones sometimes, but having an option is good, and I don’t want to bring a dongle around everywhere.

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    • stoly@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m with you. The hate has always seemed a bit like a first world problem.

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    • blssflbreeze@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      it’s partially because we are running out of options that have the headphone jack, and the only reason to remove them is to boost sales of more expensive bluetooth sets. Bluetooth really doesn’t reign supreme yet because wired headphones are still more convenient, cheaper to produce, and last longer than their bluetooth counterparts. the only reason it’s so common is because it keeps getting removed from phones so people don’t have a choice in the matter.

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    • windpunch@feddit.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      but I really don’t understand the hate for devices that don’t have one.

      I like to have the choice. And I choose not having to buy another device.

      in a world where Bluetooth reigns supreme.

      We must think of different aspects then.

      • Reliability - battery charge, potential signal loss (note that I have no experience with wireless headphones, so the second point could be wrong.)
      • Longevity - batteries that degrade vs a cable that’s fine if you don’t abuse it
      • Ease of use - Plug it into what I want vs pairing process, possible problems with switching, devices sometimes malfunction (meaning software-wise)
      • (Audio quality - I can plug them into any DAC I want vs being limited to the built in one - I will not pretend to be able to hear the difference between 16bit/48kHz and something higher. But I still could use an audio interface that can do it.)

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    • daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Mostly just because it’s kind of seen as a higher profile example of mobile phone manufacturers colluding and creating totally unnecessary changes in the market because they’re incapable of actual innovation. The reason people are mad, basically, is because there was no reason to remove the headphone jack. I haven’t seen a reasonable argument for it’s removal, really, or the removal of most of the other used-to-be-standard features on smartphones.

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  • d4f0@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The fairphone 4 doesnt jave

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    • kadu@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      So? Their over ear Bluetooth headphones came out on Q1 2023. Two years developing a new category for your company sounds about right.

      Plus, their phones are expected to be used for long, so if they wanted to push people towards Bluetooth they’d have to start early.

      Plus, this is still irrelevant - how does the fact they screwed customers over in 2021 somehow make it better?

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    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes and they sold shitty generic bluetooth earbuds that they pulled from the market a year and a half later with 0 support when they were almost ready to launch their Bluetooth headphones.

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  • thisisbutaname@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I bought the Fairphone 5 and yeah, I miss not having the jack and I see no reason to take it out

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    • Damage@feddit.it ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Cost. The Fairphone is already too expensive for what it offers.

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  • amelia@feddit.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They explain very thoroughly on their website why they did it:

    …fairphone.com/…/9836188988049-Audio-Jack-3-5mm

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    • kadu@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yep, same excuses as Apple.

      Analogue connector too old, too big, hard to make modular. All proven false by a multitude of other devices.

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    • ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      So - takes up too much space, is the main reason :)

      I don’t care, still worth it to me. As long as I have the option, any phone I buy (including the one I bought last year) will have a 3.5mm jack.

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  • FJW@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I hated that too at the time, but I have to admit, that in practice this has not really turned into an issue basically ever: My headphones and earbuds are bluetooth anyways and I did get a usb-c to headphone adapter that I store with my earphone’s backup audio cable for the very rare case that I need it (I can count on one hand the instances for when that happened). And in those very few cases I wasn’t about to charge my phone anyways, which is the one argument for why you might want both.

    So, I don’t know, maybe it really is time to move on. I will defnitely say that I’m not a big fan of analog cables, so maybe a more general move to USB-C for audio might be the right way to go in the first place?

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    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah I feel the same way. I didn’t get in on Bluetooth until I got Bluetooth hearing aids, but it’s just really convenient.

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  • iopq@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Okay, but my phone has a jack and absolutely dog water sound quality. Because it has a jack it does not support the USB DAC which I use on my desktop.

    Worst part is, the whole USB DAC is $12 including shipping and it has USB connector and 3.5mm, and an amp. They cheaped out on this part not only on the phone, but also on the motherboard. On my computer the amp is way too weak to drive my around ear headphones.

    So if it’s a crap one maybe they shouldn’t even include it, since I’ll have to use a USB DAC to get perfectly transparent sound. The only good one I own is on my budget Acer Aspire laptop.

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    • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      LG phones used to come with a DAC. I still use mine as an MP3 player even though it’s not my main phone.

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• restingboredface@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What I don’t get is how no company seems to have worked out a legitimately good service and maintenance model for tech products. Fairphone hasn’t invented the wheel here. They’re going to make money on maintenance, parts and repair.

  I would think there would be lowered costs involved in not having to push out a new product every 6 months and market it to customers who just bought something less than a year ago.

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  • Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The business models of the current tech giants are very much based on planned obsolescence. Selling you a gadget for $ 1000 every two years will always be more profitable than selling you one very five years and doing service in the meantime.

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  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The costs (overhead) are too high. They make more by simply manufacturing and selling.

    Otherwise they’d be doing it.

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    • Pistcow@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m wondering about that. I’ve worked with several manufacturers, and their most profitable segment is parts. If you ever want to get the highest annual bonus, work for the parts devision.

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The service and maintenance model is largely “replace it”.

    Everyone looks to a desktop computer where you swap out a stick of ram or whatever. But the real key is to look at laptops. Yes, a LOT of vendors solder the god damned ram in place and so forth which is bullshit. But repairs are generally less “okay, let me re-solder this one connection” since that connection is a via that is embedded in a circuitboard. So it becomes “let’s replace that board”. And yes, efforts can be made to split up the board more but you lose latency savings and increase the complexity of the boards because you now need to add connection points and so forth.

    And then you look at earbuds where… do you even have room for connectors like that? Near as I can tell, Fairbuds let you replace a few pieces of plastic, the rubber earplugs, the in-bud battery, and the charger (possibly just the battery?). That is definitely a step in the right direction but it also becomes a question of how much that even matters.

    While I think we can do better in some spaces, the reality is that a lot of modern tech is fundamentally un-repairable. Not because of evil conspiracies but just because it is a lot easier to print a PCB and slot in some components than it is to connect vacuum tube diodes. And when so many of those components are fairly complex chips and the damage is less “oh, the metal prong on this chip broke” and more “oh, the via shorted out”?

    Stuff like the fairbuds just seem… real stupid to me. Fairphone level “replace and repair” is kind of borderline but I think is generally good. And while I have series issues with how Framework does it and the resulting e-waste, I love the ethos of their laptops.

    But We need to pick and choose our battles to be ones that make sense. Will Smith’s Tested’s Adam Savage just uploaded a video where he gushed about how easy it was to repair a kitchenaid mixer and that is an AWESOME video. That is the kind of repairs that people can meaningfully make. Using an x-ray machine to detect a possible short in a chip and hoping that was the only short… is not.

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    • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I am wary of the value-add of the internal batteries since charging a lithium battery is largely “solved” and these have an external controller (the case) that can preserve the battery.

      Li-ion batteries wear out with normal use, or even sitting on a shelf fully charged. I suspect the battery is the primary reason most devices with onboard charging become unusable over time, and ensuring that it is user-replaceable will greatly increase average service life.

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    • BallsandBayonets@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s the thing about capitalism, it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy to be evil. Capitalism will optimize for the cheapest option to acquire the most profit, and generally the cheapest option is also the one that’s the worst for the workers/environment/consumers.

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    • daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      While I think we can do better in some spaces, the reality is that a lot of modern tech is fundamentally un-repairable. Not because of evil conspiracies but just because it is a lot easier to print a PCB and slot in some components than it is to connect vacuum tube diodes. And when so many of those components are fairly complex chips and the damage is less “oh, the metal prong on this chip broke” and more “oh, the via shorted out”?

      Is this a fundamental piece of tech as it exist now, or is this just kind of the way that tech has manifested after 50 years of development inside of a profit driven system which incentivizes unrepairable and disposable products over things which can be sustained for a long time?

      I’d also like to posit that we’ve experienced a relatively rapid growth in the last 50 years, and that possibly has also affected design. In a rapidly changing market, you’d be a fool not to design everything as disposable, since next year’s thing is going to be so different and so much better that it’s kind of ridiculous to expect as much backwards compatibility or to expect repairability since people won’t be sticking with stuff for as long. Now, whether or not that growth is actually slowing down intrinsically, or if that growth is just slowing down as a result of the current structure of the market, who can really say.

      But largely I would posit that, don’t mistake the fundamental nature of a thing as being the same as said thing in relation to a much larger and broader system. We could frame infotainment systems and the increasing digitization of cars as an inevitability, but in a radically different context, like southeasy asia or africa, we might see cars that are prized for their ease of maintenance and utility value, fuel efficiency being a lower concern, and luxuries like infotainment being much, much lower.

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  • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s like they completely forgot that car dealerships make most of their money on maintenance and repair of vehicles that were sold.

    Long term service is where the real money is.

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• trebuchet@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This article seems to omit the most important fact about headphones - how do they sound?

  I love repairability and all, but it hardly matters if I don’t want to use them in the first place because they traded off too much quality for repairability.

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  • twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I get what you’re saying, kind of…

    But also, most modern earbuds usually sound quite good. Quality in general has become such a bizarre moving target, but here’s my take: We’ve become so used to constant improvement at the expense of satisfaction. I can barely notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. In my mind they’re both “good quality” and therefore I’m satisfied. Same goes for audio quality. I’ve used a few pairs of earbuds and they have sounded “good.”

    As a culture, we need to stop with throwing away of perfectly good devices, because it’s extremely harmful to the planet’s occupants.

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    • TJDetweiler@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      1080p and 4k isn’t really a fair comparison for great earbuds and shit earbuds in my opinion. The comparison there is like 4k and 480p. There is a massive difference between the 2. I have had $30 earbuds that you couldn’t listen to a podcast on, and I currently have $250+ Bose earbuds that are fucking amazing for just about everything.

      Unless of course you’re saying that these earbuds are in fact “1080p” quality. In which case, fair point. I have yet to see someone who’s actually used these and commented on the sound quality though. What I’ve seen from fairphone products is they are consumer friendly at the expense of quality.

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    • Mango@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’ve got the Soundcore Liberty Pro 2 and the Soundpeats H1. Neither of them come close to my HD598. What are the modem earbuds that sound good?

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  • whereisk@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t think the writer has them on hand - this is a news article not a review.

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  • OrkneyKomodo@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Codec support is a bit of a bummer. Otherwise I would have bought them.

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    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Isn’t the codec for headphones just meant to handle the communication between the headphones and device while the device can handle transcoding from the input codec to the output codec?

      Or do you mean the quality of the codecs supported puts an upper limit on sound quality?

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  • Jax@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Biggest complaints I’ve seen aren’t with sound quality, it’s with the noise cancelling being bad and the shape of the ear cups (the latter could have just been the shape of that user’s ears were the problem).

    Mind you, these were reviews from Fairbud XLs released about a year ago. Things could have improved or gotten worse in that time, in any way. I can’t tell you for sure.

    That said, I don’t think it makes sense to correlate focusing on repairability and quality of the product going down. I actually went out and found the reviews I’m referencing simply because the concept is absurd and I needed to know for sure.

    Always keep in mind what you say online, Poe’s law is forever in effect.

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    • trebuchet@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Nah I wasn’t being sarcastic.

      As I understand it, in engineering these types of mobile space constrained devices you essentially have a “budget” of space. Every hardware feature you include generally eats into this budget and if you want things to be user accessible or repairable it eats into this budget majorly.

      That budget has to come from somewhere, so you can pay it with things like reducing the size of your battery or reducing the size of your drivers which in turn represents a reduction in sound quality.

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    • maynarkh@feddit.nl ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I am not a huge sound nerd, but I own a pair of these buds and had to take them out at a busy railway station because it was weirdly quiet and couldn’t hear the trains. I think the noise-cancelling is great.

      I also own an XL pair, and I have two complaints:

      I have a big head, and it puts some pressure on the thing as clamps on my head, I’ve broken two of the little plastic parts between the pads and the top arch so far. It was from material exhaustion, they snapped. Silver lining was it was super easy to swap out, literally 20 seconds with only a screwdriver and a single screw, and I got their customer support to send me a replacement part in a week both times.

      I hear odd noises when I try to use it when plugged in and charging. I suspect it might have to do with Windows, but still. It’s barely usable, but the charge lasts long enough to make me not care.

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  • Guajojo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Lol sound is not the selling point for any of those pods. Portability is the name of the game

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    • OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They’re not gonna sound as good as real, over ear headphones. But there’s still a pretty wide sound quality spectrum for ear buds.

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    • Xanis@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They’re almost all small. You’re a bit off center too.

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  • Sylvartas@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They’re headphones. They sound ok at best.

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    • shea@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What a lame answer. Are you this lame in real life? There’s OBVIOUSLY a HUGE spectrum of quality for iems, WHAT are you talking about? It’s a valid question on the ops part. You wanted to be snobby but it’s just a bad take that reveals how judgdy and smug and completely out of touch you are. Nobody thinks of you as cool, you don’t have friends IRL, I hope your dog dies. I hate the internet fuck you you’re the straw that broke the camels back. Would be a pretty cool place if people like you weren’t in it.

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• blssflbreeze@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’d rather they just give me a headphone jack tbh

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  • kinther@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m right there with ya. I know many people prefer wireless earbuds, but I like ripping cables out of my ears at random. Makes me feel alive.

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    • Serpent@feddit.uk ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes! I had totally forgotten about the instant pang of shock and anger I would feel when that happened.

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  • yrmyli@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This. I hate to charge my headphones everyday

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    • Persen@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My sony ones survive more than a week.

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    • cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Love my pixel buds. I take them on airplanes, I clean the house with them, I take phone calls with them, and not once have I swung my hand and yanked my phone out of my hand causing it to crash to the ground. Not once have I had a damaged cable that forces one bud to cut in and out. They work great.

      I think it should always be an option to have the jack but I personally prefer wireless.

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    • zaphod@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My Momentum 4s have 60 hours of battery life…

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    • BURN@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I use my AirPods daily for 5-6 hours and still only have to charge for 20 minutes once a week. It’s really not that big of an issue

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  • Azzu@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Am I the only one that can’t stand the few hundred millisecond delay of Bluetooth audio?

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    • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not at all! It drives me nuts. I’ve tried watching movies with Bluetooth headphones on, so as not to bug my wife at night, and it just feels off. Almost like watching old subtitled movies. I checked it out and my headphones have a ~250ms response time. My car’s system literally has a nearly two second delay and I can’t take it.

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  • Smokeless7048@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I have come to love my bluetooth earbuds… but darn when im in the car i just wanna plug my phone in some times.

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  • iAvicenna@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    fuck wireless headphones! I don’t want to remember charging another god damn thing to start with.

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• moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This the type of business the EU has to develop. An entire ecosystem from phones, earbuds to computers and software. It’s how you create a conscious and a model.

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  • jol@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Unfortunately most people don’t care. And since they don’t care, they don’t buy. These earbuds cost 150€ because they can’t afford to buy huge amounts like Apple. I wish they could lobby the EU to subsidise these kinds of devices.

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  • kureta@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And standards. EU please enforce standards and interoperability.

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• Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I love what fairphone and other her companies are doing.

  Still some of their earphones got a 1/10 reparability on ifixit, so I’d really check how reparaible these ones are.

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  • FJW@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Those were the first earbuds they offered, which were just OEM-ones where they main point of attention was on getting the workers a living wage (which is fair enough, they are called “fairphone”, not “repairablephone”), just like the Fairphone 1 where they apparently wanted to collect some experience in the space first.

    I have them because I bought my fairphone 4 like one week before they had a free pair with every purchase on offer and wrote to their support, who graciously gave me a voucher as well. I don’t use them a lot, because I do have pretty good over-ear headphones, but they do come in handy on occasion, as they fit into my handbag, which means I am more likely to actually have them with me.

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• Gigan@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I wish all their stuff wasn’t EU only.

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  • Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s hard for a small manufacturer to start selling in overseas markets. It would take a certain volume for them to have the capital to set up shop in the US.

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  • xnx@slrpnk.net ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They’re not, they sell the phones in the US through here murena.com/america/shop/…/murena-fairphone-4/

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  • shortwavesurfer@monero.town ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I completely agree. This is annoying.

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  • moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You should ask your carrier why. Why they don’t offer it. EU and US are two different market where people don’t buy phones in the same way.

    They cut the cost by not selling it to the carriers which will sell it to the customer.

    In my European country, the market is dynamic. The fairphone 5 is available in multiple store. People have cheap mobile plan without contract. Another type of market.

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  • wabafee@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Search for KZ IEM it’s a chifi has this kind of feature also probably cheaper than fairphone version.

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• AzureRT@reddthat.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Nothing’s fair with FP when they can’t give the option of a jack. So much for caring about the environment

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• BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Meh.

  Overpriced.

  I can buy 3 or 4 pairs of BT5 earphones for the price of these.

  My most expensive pair currently was $75.

  I’ve never had batteries go bad in them - they get broken well before that happens. Though I have a noise canceling headset from 2006 that still works. Battery lasts long enough.

  I’d rather break a pair of $30 earphones, and have multiple spares than a single pair of $150.

  And they all sound about the same given the source and environment.

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  • noodlejetski@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Overpriced.

    their entire premise is making sure that people on the supply chain of their device are compensated adequately (hence the “Fair” in the name), which is why their products are more expensive than you’re used to.

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  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    While I’m not blaming you, what you’re saying is really the problem in our society.

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• blackfire@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think you can get them imported but the costs go up significantly. Also they wouldnt be certified by your electronic bodies

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• Albatross2724@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I still use the free wired earbuds I get on flights. You can also go to walmart and get unpackaged bags of them for like $1. I just lose wireless ones too easily

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