Fairphone is a Dutch electronics manufacturer that designs and produces smartphones. It aims to lower environmental footprint through minimizing the use of conflict minerals in its devices, maintaining fair labor conditions for its workforce and suppliers, and allowing users to maintain their own devices.
Dunno, their financials seem shakey if you look at them multi-year. It seems to always jump in the first year they release a new model and then dips into the negative again.
This might be ok for a normal botique mobile phone producer, but it really disincentives them from their core mission of sustainable and long lasting phones that don't need replacement every 2 years.
it really disincentives them from their core mission of sustainable and long lasting phones that don't need replacement every 2 years.
Huh? Why would it? You know that people can plan ahead, including their company's budget?
If they can only make money by releasing new phones, there is no business incentive for them to keep selling and supporting the older models beyond the bare minimum. In fact this is already happening with the FP5 being discontinued a mere 2-3 years after release despite being better than the FP6 in many ways.
In fact this is already happening with the FP5 being discontinued a mere 2-3 years
What do you mean? It's about 2 1/2 years old and receives updates regularly:
https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/18682800465169-Fairphone-5-Release-Notes
They also announced support until 2031. They stopped sales, which is fair enough, but supposedly will push it up to android 18. I never heard anything about them no longer providing support. Where did you get that idea?
It would be much more credible if they continued selling it. Stopping to sell it basically means they have a small stock of spare parts left and the commonly replaced parts like batteries and usb ports will probably going to be difficult to get soon.
We're talking about a small company. Keeping your lineup manageable keeps your processes in check. Offering fewer things means less stuff to take care of.
You can still easily get one through retailers if you want to, but they argued that sales were down, so they phased out selling the device. Just like they did with older models, which they then continued to support for years. So I call bullshit: as long as they don't officially stop supporting the fp5 I have no reason to believe they would as they kept their promises before.
I would agree with you if they were just a regular small phone design company, but the way things are going they are one bad device away from going out of business and even without that their support for older phones has been spotty at best, and I say that as a Fairphone owner.
What makes it better than the new phone?
It was a side grade performance wise, but they removed useful features like display out and usb3. Only the battery in the FP6 is slightly larger, but at the disadvantage of coming in a custom housing with makes it harder to replace.