Is Fairphone really fair?

this is the fair phone 5 the company's fifth attempt at making a phone that is repairable as well as fair to both the planet and the people who make it with the company's earlier devices the cost of fairness was always extra bulk worse performance and a much less attractive price than the regular competition but with the five they claim that that penalty is now smaller than ever I've been testing this phone for almost a month now to see if that is true and I've also read every 70 page in irental analysis financial statement and Mining reports that I could find to figure out what their challenges really are whether the high prices that their charging you are really fair or whether all of this is really just greenwashing or I guess it would be fair washing in this case but anyway while I was researching that this also happened we are in the process of eliminating all plastic from our packaging by the end of next year 300 suppliers have committed to using 100% clean renewable electricity everyone's talking about sustainability these days so I've also been looking into whether you even need a fair phone in the first place these days let's find [Music] out this video was sponsored by our streaming service nebula the first Fair phone ever made came out 10 years ago in 2013 and as the founders tell the story they never actually planned to make a phone instead they first ran an awareness campaign about conflict minerals trying to convince others to build Electronics more ethically then as the famous foxcom suicides brought the world's attention to the terrible conditions in factories 2 Fair phones organizers decided that they would just do it themselves they would build a phone the way they thought phones should be built well actually the fairphone 1 was a pretty humble step into that direction as they were a tiny team with zero experience they used an off-the-shelf design that they basically just slapped their own logo on and the device was both designed and made completely by their Chinese partner called gu home fa earphones achievement was basically limited to making sure that workers at kuong were treated decently and also to making sure that some fair trade materials were used in the production the company sold 60,000 units of this well very mediocre device which was not a lot but it did prove that there was some kind of a business there and then for the fair phone 2 they acquired enough capabilities to design their own phone basically from scratch they switched to better suppliers and the result was the first device with what I think is real fairphone DNA from the modu repairable design to 7even plus years of software support at the time when most Android phones were lucky to get even one but of course also to a completely lackluster price to Performance ratio this was a Fair phone through and through I mean this thing was bulky as hell the cameras and the performance were pretty painful and it cost twice as much as comparably speced phones but yes indeed it was modular so you know the formula was there and they could now iterate and improve on it with the fairphone 3 they got rid of the bulk and shrunk down the device to a much sleer size with the four they finally got a Snapdragon 750 chip making performance at least manageable and by the five I think they've actually fixed almost all the biggest pain points I used this device for almost 4 weeks and while I definitely don't think it will beat or even quite match other devices at its price point I also think it is a completely usable device now and so here's my Mini review of both how good it is and how fair it is so physically the 5 is just a millimeter or two thicker than modern iPhones and it's weight sits right between the iPhone 15 Pro and the pro Max with their fancy lightweight titanium frames the fairphone doesn't feel quite as fancy as a regular flagship phone but especially with the solid aluminum frame I have no real complaints one clear advantage of it Beyond just the ability to swap components is that the back plate likely won't crack unlike on glass models and if it does it costs less than €25 to get a new one in contrast for a quick comparison Apple got a lot of good press this year for making their rear glass class easier and cheaper to repair which is genuinely great but even on the smaller non-pro iPhone 15 that still costs $199 to be fixed here in Germany now there's a concept in electronics called The modularity Penalty which is that in order to make something easy to disassemble and reassemble again you actually have to add a whole lot of connectors and material and everything has to become more bulky and less nice this not only makes devices less nice to use but actually partially chips away at any environmental savings that you might get from modul ity this was abundantly clear with the fairphone 2 which had gigantic latches and complicated connectors but by the four and the five this penalty has gotten impressively small you can swap out 11 modules on the five now which is more than ever and yet they managed to limit the extra bulk quite well also a massive study from the German frown hofa Institute took a look at the fairphone 4 so the predecessor of the five and found that there was only a 1 to 2% penalty in extra emissions from all these extra materials neither for the modularity so we can basically claim that this issue has largely been fixed and by the way throughout this video I'm going to be referencing this study from the FR HOA Institute which is about the four because this is a really highquality third-party independently verified study that we don't have about the five yet but there's a whole lot of really good information in there that I think we can learn a lot from anyway I have noticed two areas where modularity is a clear downside first is waterproofing as without a tight integration you can't really seal everything up as much that's a real trade-off but even here fairphone has managed to achieve a fairly respectable ip55 rating that means that the phone should survive rain and even an accidental drop into I don't know a bathtub or something but not much more than that and second is the battery there is no wireless charging due to the removable back plate I guess and the cell is also slightly smaller than in most flagships at 4,200 milliamp hours I guess this is because in order to be removable the battery needs a larger and more rigid casing still this is significantly bigger than any battery in a fair phone before it and actual battery life is still pretty decent I eily got through each one of my days with it with typically 5 to 7 hours of screen on time mostly spent indoors and the 30 W charging speed meant getting from 0 to 50% in just 20 minutes that is a decent even if not amazing value in my opinion plus you can carry a spare that fairphone sells you for just under €40 for contrast Apple will swap a battery on the cheapest iPhone 15 model for €109 here in Germany now I've learned from that study from FR hoofer Institute that on the fairphone 4 at least the battery only made up a surprisingly small part of the environmental footprint of the phone which is only about 3 to 6% and I think on the fairphone 5 it should be even better and that is in part because batteries are one of the few components that are custom made for each phone model so fairphone can have a lot of control over theirs almost all of the key materials and the fairphone 5's battery are fair trade or recycled as you can see here and they're pretty easy to recycle at the end of their life as well now I've noticed that Apple actually one oped Fair phone here in at least one way by making sure that they use 100% recycled Cobalt in their iPhone 15 series batteries which is perhaps the most problematic material in there so kudos to Apple but fairphone did really well here overall okay and now moving on to the screen fairphone historically used LCD screens as those were cheaper and they didn't burn in with time but the company cleared cly thinks that OLED Tech has finally gotten durable enough for the five they thankfully also finally opted for a 90 HZ panel that has both really high resolution and gets bright enough at 800 nits of peak brightness to work well even Outdoors on a sunny day and you can also swap your display in about 5 minutes and get a replacement part for just under €100 and for contrast again Apple will fix a broken iPhone 15 screen for € 339 now moving on to cameras this is definitely itely the area where fairon struggled the most in the past but I think with the five they've actually arrived to a place that is maybe not category leading but definitely serviceable so there's a regular and an ultra wide and the overall quality is just fine daylight photos look decent even if slightly less impressive than from Modern flagships and the indoor shots are perfectly serviceable too the ultrawide performed surprisingly well as a macro camera letting me get some really nice shots of this beautiful wasp nest and while it impressed me a lot less for landscape shots actually nighttime photos easily beat my admittedly low expectations I thought these shots would be terrible and they're actually pretty good without night mode you do see more dynamic range issues than you would on other devices and once I even had this happen to me on a selfie but about 90% of the time I was definitely satisfied with the cameras which is very much not what previous fairphone cameras were like better yet you can now individually swap each of the three cameras instead of having to swap the whole module all at once and you can see the prices for each of them on screen right right now Apple only allows you to swap the whole rear module all at once for €199 on the cheapest iPhone 15 and there's no quote for the selfie camera at all so maybe that needs replacing the whole screen or something similar I have no idea now cameras are actually a type of semiconductor at least the sensors inside of them are and this is actually where we start bouncing into one of the clear limitations of fair phones sustainability approach according to our beloved frova Institute study you can see that ic's which is short for integ ated circuits also known as chips are one of the largest contributors to the fairphone 4S emissions along with related components like connectors and the printed circuit board that they sit on this is because you need a ton of energy and water to make these components and because these use a lot of precious materials the problem is that fairphone has a very little to no control over how almost any of the chips in their devices are made Sony qualcom Etc and their Fabs like tsmc and Samsung are not going to change their designs and their manufacturing processes for a company that sells phones in the hundreds of thousands that's right despite the growth none of their models have even reached the 200,000 Mark yet this is a genuine Achilles heal of the fairphone strategy I mean they can use recycled plastic for their back they can use recycled aluminum for their frame recycled the fair trade materials for the battery but they have very little control over what their chips are made off now talking of chips the phone has a very unusual one from Qualcomm called the qcm 6490 which was not originally made for phones but rather for industrial applications so the idea here is that fairphone wants to provide at least eight but hopefully 10 years of updates with at least five Android version upgrades for this device Qualcomm doesn't support its phone chips for that long and after that support ends a manufacturer kind of has to hack together updates by itself in the past fairphone fought qualcom very publicly over this but with the five fairphone finally got big enough to where they established a good direct relationship with qualcom who helped them get one of these special chips industrial machines don't get swapped out every 3 years or so unlike the average smartphone so Qualcomm actually supports these chips for way longer that in turn should make it much easier for Fair phone to support their phones I guess it doesn't hurt to have Qualcomm as an ally rather than as an enemy Fair phones CEO even told us that they're now pitching Qualcomm to have modular chips kind of like how desktop PCS have socketed CPUs that you can swap which I honestly don't think is very feasible but anyway it's clear that even just having this much scale is slowly allowing fairphone to have much more control over its key suppliers like Qualcomm now as for the performance of the device this is somewhere in the mid-range category here are some Benchmark numbers for you Benchmark lovers definitely not a Prime Choice for gamers and I suspect that stuttering will become noticeable even after just a few years of use but it handled all the messaging and scrolling that I threw at it during my few weeks with it just fine as for the rest of the device everything else felt similarly okay except for three minor annoyances that I had first Bluetooth connectivity is somehow a little weaker than on my other phones so I occasionally get a little bit of stuttering over my earphones now this might just be a problem of my review unit being an early production sample but the problem is occasionally noticeable and next the vibration motor and the loudspeakers are both noticeably less premium than on other phones now fairon specifically calls out these two components as having recycled rare Earths and magnets as well as highlighting the factory at which these components are made as being one of their key concerns so I guess these are components where they chose fairness over just quality these are a little bit annoying from a user experience perspective but I guess for the eco-conscious consumer these are not going to be real deal breakers I think the fairphone 5 is over all a pretty well-rounded device so if you want something that is repairable and modular and fair then I think you got to be pretty happy with the five of course as fairphone themselves will point out the most eco-conscious thing that you can do is to not buy a new phone in the first place and to keep whatever you buy for as long as possible so the next question is how well Fair phone is doing in terms of longevity well the fairphone 1 only got support for 3 and 1/2 years due to fairphone having little control over the actual device the two got more than 7 years of software support including five actual Android version upgrades which is way longer than they promised at launch and for the majority of that time components were on sale too that is pretty good and meanwhile the three and the four are still fully supported right now both are promised 5 years of software support with faon hoping to overd deliver on that promise like they did with the two and both still have all the components in stock at the time of writing as for the five faam promises eight years of updates and hopes 4 10 with at least five Android version upgrades as well since they no longer have to circumvent qualum 4 updates anymore that is a pretty respectable track record and there's also support for all the custom roms you could imagine as well as even a pretty insane 5 years of warranty that's kind of unprecedented so that's good but does all of this actually lead to increased longevity well in their 2022 financial report fairphone claims that their users keep devices on average for 5 and a half years versus the industry standard of 2 to 3 years that's great and I guess that for the fairphone 5 those figures should get even longer as the device got better which means that yes there is some kind of a longevity benefit now would the type of consumer who wants to get a fair phone also have kept their iPhone or Samsung or similar device for a really long time as well beyond the average consumer I guess so unless they somehow managed to break it in a way that was impossible to repair or at least impossibly expensive to repair after all regular phones last pretty long these days as well if you take good care of them and finally everyone from Apple to Samsung and Google are offering five or more years of updates on their devices too also we're finally seeing real right to repair legislation in multiple countries including mandates to stock spare parts for longer we're seeing that the EU in particular is soon mandating that batteries be more easily repairable by users and we're seeing everyone from Samsung to Google and apple offering spare parts and manuals for self-repair as well Etc so clearly repair is slowly becoming less and less of an issue industrywide in a way it's easier than ever to keep using any device for longer not just a fair phone if people actually want to keep using them that is still fairon did this better and earlier than any other brand and their support of spare parts is still second to n so for those who want to truly stick around it might still be the ultimate philm and if anything they deserve credit for showing the industry just how much is possible now beside that I was also always wondering why Fair phones are so expensive like is the cost of fairness really that high or are they just ripping us off thankfully fairphone actually releases their financial statements just to be extra trans arent and in these we can see that the company made a final profit of just € 44,000 last year that is basically nothing it's a profit margin of way less than 1% and while their three-year average is slightly better at 5% that is still way below the margins of apple and most other really successful Electronics Giants this is a vastly oversimplified way of looking at a business but I've actually read the financial statements and the short of it is that yeah running a business like this with these crazy warranties and complex Supply chains and everything it is just this expensive they're not really ripping you off but this also tells me two different things first in a way it's not that fairphone is too expensive but rather that everyone else is too cheap exploiting fewer people in mines and in factories and using more recycled materials Etc has a e price and the majority of the industry just chooses not to pay it but second also Fair phones biggest problem in my opinion is scale 10 years in fairphone is still selling phones in the hundreds of thousands while the the Samsung and the apples of the world are in the hundreds of millions the company hasn't even officially expanded past Europe except for a recent partnership to sell through a small partner called Moren in the US making such a complicated design with such a unique supply chain and supporting it for 10 years or whatever is super expensive especially when you can't spread those costs out over millions of units and especially if you don't have the proper economies of scale for production without scale they can't push qualum and so and all of their other suppliers to do better either so it even hinders their sustainability goals and the lack of scale hurts their recycling efforts as well in my opinion so fairphone claims to be an e-w neutral company meaning that for each phone or device that they sell they will actually recycle an equivalent amount of electronics products be it an older fairphone or whatever Electronics device that they can plug out of a landfill in Ghana or something similar this is great and I command them for it but they can't actually do something that ironically Apple does pretty well there's plenty to complain about with apple including how they basically started the trend of glute together unrepairable Electronics or how they still do Parts pairing which is where they will artificially basically break your phone if you repair it through anything other than the company's own official repair channels but one place where their enormous scale has given them a remarkable Advantage is recycling Apple has literally custommade and designed robots that will individually disassemble an iPhone into its components or lets them recycle their raw materials much more cleanly now I don't know if overall Apple does as well in terms of recycling as fairphone does because they don't actually promise to match their sales volumes with the Recycled volumes on like fairphone but the point that I'm trying to make here is that scale is a superpower and fair foone doesn't have it now for this video as I said I have to read through literally hundreds of pages of environmental reports and fair trade certification documents and whatnot to give you some properly researched and properly drawn conclusions but I think it was worth worth it I'm an absolute sucker for well- researched video essays that are made with genuine care and if you are too then I think you'll find so many of your soon to be favorite shows over on nebula hundreds of the best educational creators including climate Town not just bikes Wendover yours truly and more got together to build a video streaming service of our own that is filled with not just our regular content but also nebula Originals so many great Originals you're not looking at episodes by the way these are individual shows many with dozens of episodes and I've discovered many of my favorite video essays of the year right here I absolutely love a good Lindsay Alice analysis like this newest one that is breaking down the bizarre ways that Las Vegas tried to appeal to families with kids while also trying to be a gambling town that is great I keep raving about red atoms covering the Soviet nuclear program which has just launched new episodes not long ago and there is so much good stuff for the Curious mind here these originals are only possible because of the the generous funding by nebula subscribers and I myself have made over a dozen nebula exclusive bonus videos plus a whole eight-part nebula original series called techorama as well originals are on top of all of our usual videos which come out and free and often Early Access on nebula and in addition we also have the nebula classes platform where creators including me teach a bunch of things that we think we are really good at I think this is the cleanest tradeit of the industry you give us money and we give you more and better content there no ads no Shady tracking nothing else just good content made with genuine care if you use my link which you can find down in the description you'll even get an annual subscription for just $30 a year that is $20 off versus just signing up using a generic link so be sure to use my link when you sign up and that way nebula will also know that I sent [Music] you

Channel: TechAltar

Views: 435,127

Keywords: Fairphone, Fairphone 5, fair phone, sustainability, green, eco, recycling, recycled, materials, fair trade, fair-trade, climate change, climate, e-waste, electronic waste, cobalt, copper, gold, minerals, mining, manufacturing, fair, sustainable, iPhone, apple, Samsung, Android, updates, warranty, support, longevity

Id: lU4vv7qCQvg

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023