Fairphone 4—the repairable, sustainable smartphone—is coming to the US
Fairphone 4—the repairable, sustainable smartphone—is coming to the US
Fairphone teams up with the developer of the /e/ Android fork to enable US sales.
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That's a step in the right direction, hopefully in the future phones will be more like computers, where you can buy parts and build your own. At least that'd be my dream.
Well not all computers can be upgraded unfortunately. Looking at you MacBooks with SSDs welded to the motherboard…
Well, that's not a PC, it's a Mac :P
There aren't lots of compact devices that are upgradable, even on windows. Most use soldered ram and flash storage.
Which sucks because there was a time when some laptops let you change all the parts, including the CPU.
Then maybe it's time we changed that!
It's already happening:
Framework devices are cool as heck, but damn are they expensive...
Maybe if you spec them out.
But it's like $1000 for the midrange model with the latest hardware, which is in line with the competition.
And the first upgrade you do will end up saving money, since you won't have to replace the whole laptop.
When last I looked into them, if you compared a barebones Framework laptop (i.e. without storage/RAM/OS/charger) to a big brand name laptop with the same/similar processor but also a SSD/RAM/OS/charger & various IO ports (e.g. usb-c/HDMI/ethernet/etc.), the Framework laptop was still more expensive...
Agree with the upgrade path, but I can't justify paying 1k for a midrange model (of any brand). I personally go to the used market, and spend up to 500€ for a ~2 year old machine (which was >1k new).
That's definitely the smart way to buy laptops.
I just wanted to remind people that Framework's pricing is competitive in the segment they are targeting.
Personally I'm with you, buying a 1-2 year old premium machine can save up to 75% off the new retail price, while still getting most of the latest features.
But it is a computer.
I was referencing those old
cringyMac ads.Yeah I love Justin Long but man those were fucking lame ads.
Years ago google was looking at doing a modular phone. It was basically a frame with modules on the back that contained the battery, storage, cameras, and even the processor. The screen was even replaceable in a similar way. I really want someone to do another project ara.
I remember that, I liked the idea except for Google being involved. The dream would be a fully modular phone running Linux. I don't ever see that becoming a reality, but hey.
Right, getting a Linux phone to work well still hasn't been achieved, let alone on modular hardware!
What do you mean by "running Linux"? Android is Linux.
By that logic MacOS is FreeBSD. Android has a modified Linux kernel, doesn't run GNU software or basically any Linux applications natively and it has a bunch of Google proprietary crap on top of it, when I mean "running Linux" I mean running a FOSS GNU/Linux distro.
There's Android forks out there that avoid Google's crap. LineageOS and GrapheneOS come to mind. Though I'm less familiar with all that.
I know, but you're still at the mercy of Google's upstream codebase. Don't get me wrong, degooglefying Android is better than nothing but it's not the ideal we should be striving for.
I think that was called project aria or ara... something like that. A fully modular phone seems so great! I hope that concept is used someday like the Framework uses on their laptops for ports.