this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Fairphone is a for-profit business, correct?
If so, what's there to prevent the company from eventually (or even now) prioritizing profits over the longevity of its products? For example, let's say that their board wants to make higher margins. One way they can accomplish this is to use poor-quality parts in the initial product so that they need to be repaired more often, thus, they sell more replacement parts.
This doesn't matter. E-waste is a crock of shit. All of the phones you will ever use over your lifetime will fit in your coffin with you, there's nothing seriously poisonous in there else it wouldn't be safe to carry phone around in sweaty pockets, and the recoverable raw material value is approxmiately 0% of the manufacturing cost of a phone.
Apple's "recycling" program is half virtue signal, half sneaky way of keeping devices off the used market. Which, by the way, is the only way real value is ever recovered from old phones. Recycle is the last R for a reason.
This, on the other hand, is very important. The real reason disposable and unreliable phones are bad is that getting a new phone sucks. Search costs suck, transaction costs suck, the "features" that the new phone comes with inevitably suck, and migrating data to a new device sucks. Which is at least partly intentional. Observe one scumbag Android developer cheering about the prospect of users no longer being in control of their own data.