As I understand it: Framework is for people who don't want to sacrifice a great PC for repairability, which comes at a price. Fairphone is for people who want outdated hardware and stock Android in exchange for repairability, at pretty much the same price as a competitive product.

But: Compared to Framework, Fairphone is a pretty small company which tries to create as much of its products as possible in a sustainable manner. And for smartphones, that's just not super easy or sustainable as a business.

Fairphone doesn't really targer enthusiasts or the mass market, they are targeting a (sadly) small group of people who care enough about the environment to sacrifice convenience for it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wasn't fairphone originally about being sweatshop-free with the sustainability or repairability claims being afterthoughts? Am I thinking about something else?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Could be. Can't find anything specific about that atm, but the Fairphone 1 was already highly repairable, even though it wasn't necessarily modular. So yeah, the repairability thing was probably something they went with as a secondary goal.

I found this iFixit teardown of the Fairphone 1. Doesn't seem to be too complicated to take appart, but then again, neither were a lot of other phones at the time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Framework uses high end SOCs. And doesn’t have to write as much code to make it all work ootb. Fairphone has to choose an SOC that will be supported by manufacturer for as long as possible since they’re on the hook for supporting the fairphone for so long. Only SOCs that are supported long term are designed for industrial/enterprise type use

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Fairphone should try to get their hands on Google's SoC and board support package. Perhaps a special deal. That'll get them long software support without any special SoC engineering. Just improve the high level Android apps and sell parts. This would let them be closer to what Framework is. Framework writes almost no software for their hardware.