Fairphone is unique in the world of smartphones. It’s pretty much the only company trying to build a sustainable device that isn’t glued together and hostile to the repair community. Today, Fairphone is announcing a brand-new flagship: the Fairphone 4, which brings an updated design and better specs while still shipping with all the modularity you would expect.
I find it interesting that the modularity probably makes it much easier and cheaper for them to provide 5 year warranty. Personally I would even prefer them sending me the replacement part alone instead of sending the entire device back for warranty.
Imagine if any Apple store could easily repair any device that is brought in within 15 minutes… IMHO the entire debate around “right to repair” reminds me of the copyright and DRM debate, i.e. trying to fix an “issue” (piracy) with increasingly draconian methods, which they wouldn’t have if they would pull their head out of their asses and just provided decent customer service…
That’s an excellent point. Being able to swap components out easily makes it much easier to keep it running. Apple is by far the worst offender where everything is just glued together. It’s an ultimate case of form over function.
And I think we’re at the point now where things don’t need to be getting any thinner. It’s fine to have a slightly bulkier device if it means it can be repaired easily. And yeah, if it can be user serviceable that’s even better.
Maybe I am wrong (never owned a Apple device) but from following a bit the right to repair debate it looks to me like they are actively trying to prevent 3rd party repairs. And they seem to have (had) at least plausible reasons for this.
Due to the mono-culture and relatively long service life of their devices it is easy to make nock-off replacement parts and accessories of substantially lower quality. And given that Apple is selling the original accessories and spare-parts for ridiculously high prices this “fake” product market seems to have been booming for a while. So Apple had to deal with a lot of support issues coming from 3rd party spare-parts and accessories.
A reasonable company would have decided that their customers would probably chose 1st party spare-parts and accessories if they were available and affordable, but Apple doubled down and started a war against repairability and all sorts of scare campaigns about using 3rd party chargers etc.
Apple deny this, but I definitely think that’s part of it. They take the idea of a walled garden to an extreme and try to remove third parties from the equation wherever they can.