this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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But increasingly the batteries are glued in.
Thanks to EU this will be changing in the near future. Personally I'm one of the stubborn ones who refused to buy devices with non-removable batteries and by the looks of it I will never have to either. Hopefully this applies to the headphone jack aswell.
The USB C to audio jack is ok. I'd like to have replaceable batteries, but my last few phones there wasn't one that had that and what else I wanted. I had to compromise. Glad the EU is forcing things to improve.
I strongly disagree.
I have yet to buy a phone without a headphone jack.
I've got earphones that are 17 years old and sound great. An audio jack in the car that connects way faster than Bluetooth. A hifi older than me.
The amount of electrical waste and incompatibilities caused by ditching a universal standard is not small.
The standard still usable, you just need an adaptor. I don't because Android Auto is my car navigation anyway, so it might as well do audio for podcasts. If I'm out and about, or doing house stuff, my bluetooth ear piece means I can listen to podcasts without wires in the way. At work, I've not used wired headphones since forever. I subconsciously chewed the cable and kept pushing out my chair to roll over somewhere forgetting the wire.
Adapters are more electric thrash.
Not really, as it's a standard you could keep the adaptor longer than the phone. Adaptors keep legacy stuff in use, extending their lives.
Making up theories that don't match reality.
Is talking to you worth any time at all?
All dongles break, especially the fairphone ones.
They are initially unnecessary to manufacture, then become unnecessary waste.
I don't get why this works you up so much. The majority of users have gone wire free, and the manufacturers have cost optimized accordingly. They have left backwards compatibility via a standardized adaptor.
There is no reason the adaptors have to be fragile. You can probably get cables with the adaptor built in to be honest. Like DisplayPort to HDMI between a PC and a TV used to give that old PC a second life as a media PC.
The hypocrisy of encouraging waste while pretending to be against that is what I'm calling out.
They're hypocrites and the worse they do the better a competitor for the ethical market can rise.
To be honest I'd just buy a Nokia. They're more committed to actually producing a sustainable product at volume.
My last phone I got 5 years out of and it was second hand when I got it. At work we make of point of keeping old equipment going as long as we can (adaptors is one of the ways of doing that). I'm absolutely not encouraging waste.
Competing against the main phone makers is extremely hard. The market is very competitive on hardware. FairPhone do about as well as they can do. The problem is blind trust in markets. Consumers aren't suddenly all going to wake up and make long term decisions with lower value upfront. It's like FairTrade, why is it left to a consumer choice if trade is fair or not? What is needed is regulations.
I'm afraid your audio jack is legacy so few want it's not even part of this discussion to me.
They've probably lost to the competition already.
Nokia are more sustainable and offer more options for a lower price.
Fairphone are a virtue signalling brand at best now and a hypocritical one at that.
Anyone with a fairphone 4 might have made an honest mistake, a 5 or later and they're just gullible.
Even they aren't the most sustainable directly anymore, it shows there is an appetite for sustainability. But as I said before, I don't want this just left to the market. I want ratcheting minimum legal sustainability standard, right to repair in law and repairability index on products. Plus a lot of other stuff to help alternative operating systems compete.
The EU and Nokia are at the forefront of what you're asking for.
Ultimately the more appetite for sustainability the better and the less custom sent to companies which are not actually sustainable the better.
Fairphone isn't a sustainable company it's pretending to be one and taking market share from more reputable companies.
So how do you charge your phone while listening to music? Plug a splitter dongle into your headphone dongle? When this could be built into your phone? Yes a compromise.
Yer a cable that has both a male USBC and a female USB C and audio Jack. Easy. It's not worth limiting phone options for. Plus mainly I use bluetooth anyway.
Increasingly I buy fairphones
I nearly did, but I wanted to try GrapheneOS. Until now I've been LinageOS without Google (over a decade), but I've had to compromise and wanted to reduce how much that compromised me.
I know sooner or later I'll have to degoogle. Maybe once I know the first thing about how to run my home server I'll get to it.
Nextcloud fills a lot of the hole. I still use Google as little as I can, but I was bumping into apps that were are hard requirement to do things. Banking apps (no seperate security device anymore), EV charger apps (old chargers don't all have simple card payment) is just two classes.
We have a real issue here. The duopoly of Google and Apple is being reenforced by infrastructure requiring apps. Regulators need to wake up.
It's a whole system of bad incentives, yeah. I'll make a note to look into nextcloud, thanks!
I use Nextcloud for my auto-photo uploads, calendars, contacts, notes and passwords. I've been using it at least 8 years. It's great. 😃
I've never seen an unreplaceable battery. Most phones use a glue that is easily removed with pull-tabs.
That being said it's still a far cry from the devices of yore where you just popped off the back cover and slapped a new one in.
I watched videos on it for my previous phone. You had to use a heat gun to warm the glue but not heat it too much or you damage the screen. It was a bit of a knife edge temperature wise. Plus you then had to take most of the phone apart to get at the battery. It just wasn't practical. Replacing the screen looked better, but was as easy as it was on an old phone I did. This stuff just isn't designed with repair in mind.
I replaced the battery in a 2016 iPhone SE and it was hell. Microsurgery to get the phone apart, multiple attempts at undoing the glue, and at the end the home key didn't work. Result: upgraded phone.
I miss the form factor off my HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 for Americans). It had a neat, flip-out keyboard, swappable batteries, and a compact, 3.7 inch display.