Fairphone thoughts & commentary with Louis Rossmann

hey everybody how's it going today i'd like to discuss the fair phone linus released a video on the fair phone he did what i thought was an excellent little review and overview of it and i share his enthusiasm for a device where you just flick off the back and can just replace the charge port just like that just plug a new one like a lego i really appreciate what the company is trying to do whether it is make spare parts available for you or whether it is trying to ethically create the devices that you feel less guilty when you buy it they really do care about paying the people that are producing the device more than just the basic bare minimum wage that other device manufacturers don't are paying the people at the factories making them they care about ethically sourcing the materials that go into the device as much as they possibly can in today's world and they care about making parts available which is something that companies like even apple don't do so for instance over here you know you have a lot of people that'll say louis why don't you just become apple authorized why are you complaining here for the fair phone any tom dick or harry can go to this website and buy the charge port to the phone whereas as i've mentioned here in apple's independent repair program as a useless pr stunt if you become a member of apple's irp program you could do everything jump through all the hoops you still can't even buy a charge port to an iphone you can't buy a charge port to an iphone 6 7 8 10 11 or 12 even if you're a member of apple's irp program here with the fair phone you could just go to their site and you can buy the spare part for 14 bucks or 14 european dollars i guess this is a really cool idea what they have going on here and i hope that they are successful with it not only is the device designed in a manner where they are willing to sell any tom dick or harry the earpiece the speaker the usb port they are also making it easy to open the battery is user replaceable it's not held together by a pile of glue if you want to replace the battery you just take it out of the device and you put a new one in which is really nice of them and the pad the cameras in this device are not paired to the phone if you want to replace the camera on your fair phone you do not need to have access to a special exclusive to the manufacturer tool in order to do so you can just take another camera and plug it in and it actually works now some people have asked what i think of their stance on schematics because it seems like people have tried to get schematics of the fair phone and they were told sadly legal issues are the reason why fairphone cannot provide that information i wanted to talk about this a little bit and whether or not it takes away from the rest of what they're doing so do i think it's great that there's a company out there that's actually trying to be economically viable producing a repairable phone where you can buy a replacement charge port where you can just flick the battery out with your fingernail and put a new one in where you don't need a special tool to pair the camera to the phone yes that excites me am i excited about the fact that the bootloader in the device is not locked so you're welcome to install any operating system you want yes am i still going to push ahead on that idea that i put onto a t-shirt almost seven years ago schematics or die unfortunately i must there's a reason that i drew that line in the sand i drew that line in the sand with that specific wording so that it would be more difficult to compromise on my principles or take it back later now there are many reasons why you may have companies that don't want to release schematics the first and most obvious reason is if you are using a reference design from another company even though fairphone is making the phone most cell phone manufacturers they're not doing all the work from scratch they're getting a chip from qualcomm or somebody else they're getting a reference design from qualcomm or the company that's creating the modem and everything for the device and they're using that reference design and if they're using that design they may not be allowed to make the schematic publicly available because it isn't even their choice even if fairphone wanted to make that schematic available they may be contractually obligated to not make it available and this is where the problem really starts to go up the chain because you're not only looking at having to make your own you know totally different company to make a smartphone but now you're looking at having to make a competing modem company to qualcomm you have to make a competing company for processors and everything else if you are using the reference designs from those companies and while it may be feasible for a smaller company to compete with apple or lg or google or samsung on making a phone it's gonna it's a really tough order unless you are a multi-multi-billionaire to not only create your own cell phone company and compete with apple and samsung in our competitive market and win when you're that far behind starting from scratch but to actually start from scratch on your own modem that's going to be really really difficult and that may be part of what is necessary in order to have full right to repair the second reason could be something that i discussed in a video after speaking to several different companies about releasing schematics some really cared about right to repair but couldn't some cared about right to repair and made the ballsy decision to do it which is that when you are contracting a company to say you're contracting someone to make a board for you or to design something for you they may just be copying and pasting the design that they used for somebody else so let's just take a hypothetical here let's just say and this is purely hypothetical let's say that i'm trying to let's just say that acer decides that they want to make a phone and they pay a company somewhere in china or taipei or taiwan to design them a phone they give the high level block diagram but that company then comes up with all the design and then let's say dell goes to that company and says make we want a phone now you the the the company is gonna have two choices either a huh these two companies two companies dell and acer are both asking us to make something very similar i already did the work to design it for acer i'm just going to copy and paste most of my acer design at dell or b they could actually start from scratch 99 of the time they're not going to start from scratch they're just going to control c and control v with a lot of the design because again why do all the work again to get the same outcome now if that is the case and the schematics are released then you have a position where acer may be able to sue dell and dell may be able to sue acer back and forth and say hey you stole my design hey you copied my design i had that first no i had that first and if you have a bunch of companies that are similar in size they may not want to sue each other it may not make sense for them to sue each other because they have similar market caps they have similarly sized legal teams they're just going to waste a lot of money in court and a lot of time that none of them all want to waste for results that are uncertain however if you have one company that's way smaller than all the other companies let's say you know you have your little two million dollar company versus a 50 billion dollar company it may be worth it for the 50 billion dollar company to bury the 2 million dollar company in in court battles and legal fees and expenses to bleed them out and make them go away even if you don't wind up winning and it's interesting to me because the more companies and the more people i talk to this is what i really find interesting is you'll hear people say we cannot release schematics because it will result in other people stealing our intellectual property whereas what i'm finding is the true intellectual property red pill is that the people who are doing the actual work that are you know actually sitting there doing the designs they've they're already copying and pasting a lot of design from one to the other the reason that many companies may not want schematics out there is it not because they're afraid of other people stealing their design it's because the people they outsource the manufacturing and the engineering of the device to are are just copying and pasting design from somebody else already so they are contracting a company to make a board for them but the company they're contracting to make a motherboard for them is just control seeing control v and what they put into somebody else's stuff so it's very interesting to me because you'll always hear them say we don't want people stealing our designs yet the actual fear that i've heard people have is that they're afraid that other people will figure out that the company we contracted to make the device was stealing the design to begin with our intellectual property system in america is such a complete and utter and this is what i think is really important is that you have companies that actually do want to make schematics available you have people that do want to make them available that do want to allow us to fix our stuff but they are afraid of being embroiled in endless court battles if they do so and it's very interesting when you get to a point in society where intellectual property rights are held above actual property rights you and i are not able to service the devices that we own to the extent that we want to be able to service them our rights to our actual property are getting preempted by you know fear that people will sue each other over squiggly drawings and i just find that to be incredibly incredibly interesting now i don't know the exact reason for fairphone not being open to schematics i'm gonna guess it has something to do with the fact that they are using some sort of qualcomm reference design or something like that again smaller companies like this there's no way in hell they're designing their own process or they're designing their own modem but at the end of the day if we want schematics or die if we want what we were actually whatever you know what many of us need to be able to do the repairs in these devices at that type of level to really be able to do data recovery to get the boards working again on a regular basis and schematics or die is important and the only way i think we're actually going to achieve that at some point is not just by having me too companies that wind up you know making again i don't want to insult fair phone when i say this but you know just using a similar reference design to samsung or apple or anybody or or lg or google and you know just making the battery and the charge port removable but actually having choices with regards to modems having more choices with regards to processors and all of that high level stuff that we really can't expect companies that are just playing around with a million or 5 million or 10 million to be able to do on their own it's going to require somebody that's worth you know tens of billions of dollars to actually get in the ring and decide i am going to compete so i'm going to create something competing from the ground up and it's going to require some people i think in the billion dollar net worth category to be able to truly free us from where we are right now i don't want to say that i throw away everything that this company is trying to do simply because they're not releasing schematics i think that would be unfair i remember reading online a while ago that richard stallman was using i think a leno laptop he wanted to have only open source stuff on his computer and this company had i believe it was an open source but to find a to find a laptop that had an open source bios i think he was using a lino don't quote me on that that's what i read a le note computer that didn't even have suspend so you didn't even have like s5 s4 s3 and so states in your computer you didn't even have that because he was that much of an ideologue that much sticking to his principles that he would not use a computer with a bios that wasn't open source the reality here is if you want to have a smartphone that is even remotely modern you are like you are going to be buying something that does not fully respect right to repair and as much as i like what fair phone is doing as much as i respect the hell out of the fact that they make it easy to replace the charge port that they will sell you a battery that they are not serializing cameras as long as this is the case this is not full right to repair and this doesn't mean that we at fairphone this means that we need someone to step up to the plate figure out what is keeping companies like this for making schematics available and actually creating something that can compete with the processor manufacturers with the modem and radio manufacturers that exist today and that that's gonna take a lot of money that's gonna like honestly that's gonna take a lot more money than framework probably has a lot more money than fairphone has no offense to linus but a lot more than what linus probably has i appreciate people like him investing in framework but that's that's uh that's going to be difficult but i think that's going to be what's necessary to get like 100 right to repair as opposed to 90 or 95 right to repair as long as you have those incumbents that have enough money that have enough of a head start that they're going to crush any competitor that are not going to allow schematics to be released for people to do what they to do repairs in their devices it's going to be difficult let me know what you think in the comments down below that's it for today and as always i hope you learned something and i'd honestly be re i would be open to a conversation with the people over at fort fair phone to really kind of understand what it is that's keeping them from releasing them because i genuinely believe these people have their heart in the right place even if they're not able to live up to the ideals that i push here which you know again the schematics are dye ordeal i have a feeling their heart's in the right place and i'd really be interested in a conversation to figure out exactly what it is because i don't think that these are bad people i don't think these are people that are say you're just trying to use right to repair branding to sell a product or to get esg money from people that don't actually care about repairability if that were the case they wouldn't have designed this product from the ground up with a removable battery a room you know a camera that anybody can change a charge port that a 10 year old could replace without needing a soldering iron this type of stuff shows me that they really give a and they're they care and they're trying but something's holding them back and i'd be curious to figure out what it is let me know what you think in the comments down below that's it for today and as always i hope you learned something i can't say this device is 100 right to repair uh but you know they're putting a lot more effort in than everybody else and that means something to me and hopefully it means something to you see you in the next video bye now

Channel: Louis Rossmann

Views: 147,765

Keywords: Fairphone, Louis Rossmann, Right to Repair

Id: fhLtyrRwGcg

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021