Fairphone 4 is a repairable, modular phone that’s made to last at least 5 years

1. Too bad about the missing headset jack. I only use wireless earbuds at home/office and use wired ones when out due to battery life issues and these battery cases are too big. The optics does seem like it’s a money grab given they’re introducing wireless earbuds at the same time.

   Anyway, I hope they do well enough so that they’ll eventually support carriers in the USA (Verizon for me). I like the long term support and repairability.

2. I feel like there’s an issue with their processor selection: Android CPU performance lags pretty badly, especially in single-threaded (which is extremely bad compared to Apple and to desktop CPUs). This reduces the practical longevity of the phone, due to having a too-slow CPU for much of the phone’s life.

   If you’re designing for a 5 year or longer lifespan, you really need a bleeding-edge CPU so it’s not fallen off of the plateau of CPU performance before its lifespan has ended. Additionally, although less of a problem in Europe, it helps to have bleeding-edge connectivity so that, as older protocols are deprecated and decommissioned, the phone keeps working. (There’s a problem in the US with carriers shutting down 3G to free up spectrum for 5G, which means you need a VoLTE-capable device to continue using it at all. This is worsened by some carriers having an allowlist for unlocked devices to use VoLTE (and sometimes even only allowing the carrier-branded version of a device offered as unlocked, or not approving successors to previously-approved devices)…)

   1. Have you tried carrying around your desktop PC with a battery to power it, so you can make phone calls?

      How is the part repair and total part or battery repair on your 4 year old iPhone, can you open the iPhone change the battery, without tools, yourself?

      1. I’m not saying to literally use a desktop processor, and I’m not saying that the iPhone is overall better than this (in some ways an iPhone has major longevity advantages (hardware performance), in some ways it doesn’t (serviceability, as you point out)).

         (And, I detest iOS, so, I don’t actually buy iPhones.)

         I’m saying that the 750G is not the right processor for a phone meant to last 5 years, and if you can’t get something better than Qualcomm, at least get a better Qualcomm processor. The 750G performs like a 855 in single-threaded (so, 2.5 years old), and like an 845 in multi-threaded (so, 3.5 years old – although I usually look more at single-threaded for these comparisons). You’re starting out 2.5 years behind an 888+, and that’s half of your design lifespan.

         (And then, it gets uglier compared to iPhones – on single-threaded, it’s between the A9 and the A10 Fusion, so let’s say 5.5 years behind – greater than its entire design lifespan – and on multi-threaded, it’s at about the A11 Bionic’s performance, so about 4 years behind. But, then, even the SD888 is 4 years behind on single-threaded (and the 888+’s overclocking of one core won’t help much), and 2 years behind on multi-threaded.)

         1. At once I’d like to assert that a CPU doesn’t become useless after two years anymore because if nothing else transistor density doesn’t follow Moore’s law anymore, but at the same time I could see bloated phone software using up every bit of available CPU overhead it gets every year.
            I’m sure it’d be fine for how I use phones using an Android fork without the Google bloat though.

            1. Yeah, that’s what I was getting at with the “years behind” – continual bloat as apps are rewritten in increasingly bloated frameworks despite not offering significant new functionality, and websites loaded down with more JavaScript for ads and tracking, because the devs find that they can get away with it on an iPhone and maybe some Android flagship, and don’t adequately test performance on mid-range phones or on bottom-end e-waste-when-new phones (like the “LG Xpression Plus” with a Snapdragon 425 that AT&T sent me, due to my BlackBerry Key2 not being approved to use VoLTE on their network (it supports VoLTE, they just didn’t approve it)).

               The web is already to the point that, on Android, Firefox – despite being slower when all else is equal – is vastly faster than Chrome, purely because it supports extensions including uBlock Origin that can block a lot of the garbage, and Chrome doesn’t.

               And, honestly, I don’t even think the Google bloat is the actual problem…

3. No headphone jack? Throw away our wired headphones? They want even more e-waste?

   I agree with the other commenters. If we want throw-away culture then we can as well go somewhere else. There’s a mismatch in what they claim and what they actually do. With the introduction of earbuds at the time of killing the headphone jack, they’re just on the money-is-all-that-matters path like the others. I thought Fairphone was different. Guess I was wrong. I’m so disappointed. I expected better from Fairphone.

   1. Plug the earphones into your Bluetooth audio headphones. Problem solved and no wasted earphone socket on the phone.

4. Unfortunately the thing that prevented me from buying the Fairphone 3 is even more of an issue with the Fairphone 4.

   $700 USD is just too expensive for a phone without a decent IP rating. I totally understand that offering the ability to open the phone easily prevents them from offering a better IP rating.

   However, this isn’t the price bracket for that kind of thing. I do want a phone that can be repaired easily, even at the expense of an IP rating. But I’d be interested in something like that closer to $300.

5. Might be my next phone. Will wait to see what the Pixel 6 is about first though.

   Agreed on the wireless buds though. Not really in keeping with Fairphone’s social goals. Seems more of a money thing: that product category has crazy margins. Luckily, a usb-c to audio jack converter is at most 10 coins.

6. I still think that wired headphones are not as bad for the environment and consider the exclusion of the jack to be just an excuse to sell the wireless headphones.
   But because wired headphones are now socially unacceptable, as long as you can still root the phone or get it with ungoogled AOSP forks and other operating systems, I’ll still consider the phone. Not the headphones though. As far as I know reasonably priced clothing hasn’t adapted to have pockets for those yet.

   1. Wired headphones are socially unacceptable? I plan on using wired headphones forever.

      1. Let me rephrase that: I feel like I’d fit in better among my co-workers using wireless headphones than with wired ones.

         1. Wired headphone are resource wasteful as they need more copper for wire, and break so easy.

            1. Having to buy wireless headphones (or some kind of adapter) is resource wasteful compared to just using the wired headphones I already own.

            2. But you can plug the earphones you already own, into your present phone, obviously ! Not like you are phone upgrading for fashion 😂

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