Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts
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I use them and that's more than reason enough to want a reliable, small, cheap, jack that literally has no downsides and lets me use my devices how I want to use them.
Unless you want to use them with a device that doesn’t have a headphone jack.
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For $700 I'm not interested in compromising my own convenience for theirs.
Then you’re going to have to go and start your own phone company. Good luck to you, let us know when your phone comes out.
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These points were all disproved long ago. The jack is a the same thickness as the display.
The reason is because BT headphones have a much higher margin, and need to be replaced every few years because of the battery (if not already replaced because they were lost or damaged).
It's just a dumb cash grab.
This would make sense if the only Bluetooth headphones that worked with the phone were made by the same company, but alas, that’s not how it works.
The reason they don’t have a headphone jack anymore is because it’s easier to make without it, saves money, has a built in replacement in BT, and people overwhelmingly love BT headphones due to being wireless.
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You can - Samsung phones are really well supported for that.
**Snapdragon 8 gen 2 enters the chat..
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Headphone jack is e-waste
you can use the usb C headphones
What the absolute fuck are you talking about? What am I supposed to do with the dozen wired headphones I already have? Some of them decades old? Throw them in the garbage? Sounds real eco-friendly.
bluetooth audio is great
It is. We had it on phones since before the original iPhone. No one wants to take that away.
Problem is BT headphones last 2 years then they go in the garbage because the batteries are dead. How eco-friendly is that!?
Problem is BT headphones last 2 years then they go in the garbage because the batteries are dead. How eco-friendly is that!?
My 7 years old bluetooth headphone would disagree.
It is. We had it on phones since before the original iPhone. No one wants to take that away.
And no one except a vocal minority want to keep it. There are a lot on data on that, and manufacturer make their decision on that data.
But lets ignore that, and let's take my viewpoint as a customer. I don't want a port I have no use for. I don't want a DAC I have no use for. I don't want the extra weight that comes with them.
My needs conflict with yours, so what's the only way to make both of us somewhat happy? That's by making the 3.5mm jack an addon, which is what any manufacturer that does not focus on music listening would do.
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Why should they care?
Because they should want to capture more customers? Is that really your question?
The point is, the people who did buy it didn’t care
Yeah and how many were those?
Exactly, they want the most amount of customers. But they won't sacrifice AxB customers to satisfy B customers. They'd be effectively losing customers or breaking even at a higher cost to them.
We know this numbers must have a population of around 180 thousand customers. The known number of fairphones sold across all models so far. Now let's make assumptions. Let's suppose that there are 100 people who want headphone jacks and would absolutely buy a fairphone if they came with it, for each user that has advocated for headphone jacks in this thread. You wouldn't even break 1% of the total number of fairphone sales, just this year (130k).
Again, there's a difference between wanting something a lot. And actually making decisions based on what we say we want. Fairphone removed the headphone jack on a model that broke sales records for them. Fairphone 5 was heavily criticized for not having a headphone jack. And it is selling comfortably well within their expectations. So obviously the people who stopped buying Fairphones because of the headphone jack weren't that many actually.
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I wish I could ditch stock android but my business bank app refuses to run on e/os and I assume I'd have the same problem with graphene.
e/os was otherwise soo much better, and the increase in performance and battery life was huge.
I assume I'd have the same problem with graphene.
There's a list of bank apps that work in Grapheme. You can check for yours here
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/
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how many people care about the source of the materials?
Far too few I'm afraid
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Are we forgetting that companies also have their own bias to make the decisions that increase overall profits? They lost buyers (me included) by this change, but they made up the difference by selling higher margin accessories. Companies will only cater to users if it aligns with turning a bigger profit. If adding an anti-feature is better for the bottom line, then that's how it goes. Enshittification doesn't happen accidentally, but by pushing the boundaries of what the users tolerate.
wrote last edited by [email protected]No, we aren't forgetting. Precisely because they are a corporation driven by profits like any other, they will do what sells units. It actually goes against the argument for headphone jacks. It is an admission that the people who vocally want phones with headphone jacks don't buy phones (even if they have headphone jacks) and are an statistically insignificant amount of people. My original point. You are vocal, but disingenuous (perhaps not on purpose).
Fairphone catered to the mass market with the Fairphone 4 (and removed the headphone jack) and broke their own sales records. Sorry, that's just the truth. What you want is against the grain of the rest of the market. Yes, even the market who want repairable modular phones.
Because when push comes to shove, you might want the headphone jack but it doesn't drive your purchase decision. And that's the important part. As an example, another person on this very thread asked what phone with a headphone jack is good, someone else gave a suggestion and immediately got the reply.
I considered that phone, but it didn't have an OLED screen, so I didn't buy it.
Admitting that — despite being very vocal about wanting the headphone jack — that feature is actually low in their own list of decision making priorities. At the very least it is below screen quality. Raising the question, where should a profit driven company choose to invest money in when presented with that customer?
In marketing, people are usually very vocal about things that actually don't influence their own purchase decisions. That's just a fact, people are very bad at knowing what they want. That's why you should always observe their behavior, not just ask their opinion. Because a lot of people express opinions they don't uphold with actions.
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The transfer speed over USB on mine probably doesn't even pass USB 2 speeds anyway and I've had flagship phones in the past that were even slower over a cable. I guess if that's still the case then there's probably a good engineering argument to reduce complexity.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I just checked my phone and the up/down speed for files is roughly 40MB/s despite having a USB 3 connection.
USB 2 has a max. transfer rate (under optimal conditions) of 60MB/s, so I think when the phone storage improves a bit or the cable is a bit longer it will likely become a bottleneck.
Also note that there are other applications than transfering files which might need more bandwidth.
To be fair it really doesn't make much of a difference but USB 3 is now the standard for a century and has been around since 2008 so I somewhere expect a 600€ phone to also have it.
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USB 2? What a stupid choice that appears to be. Did they have any reasoning behind that?
Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) use USB-2?
In order to make the device more affordable, we explored how we could best balance our spec choices with the least possible impact on user experience. Going from USB-3 to USB-2 was one of them.
https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/24463093338898-The-Fairphone-Gen-6-FAQ
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Audio jack isn't an audiophile thing, it's a "I don't want to pay 100$ for headphones thing"
As for thickness, it doesn't increase thickness. It is simply false, someone even retrofitted a whole audio jack into an iphone.
Nobody makes q difference between a 4mm and a 4.5mm phone, even if tgey were feature and price parity.
The reason you are giving here is made up marketing by the phone industry so they can sell earbuds.
I mean, yes. It is about marketing. I just think there are more people who think wires are annoying than people losing their earbuds. For every person who loses BT earbuds every 3 months, there's a person with the same pair for 3+ years who is perfectly happy with wireless quality. Companies don't care about that. They care about decisions that will reduce costs and increase their profits, and Fairphone desperately need profits. Making phones is idiotically expensive.
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how many times does the average person use wireless charging? Seriously, I haven't seen anyone do that yet, or know of someone who uses that.
and yet that's still a major feature in lots of phones
“It's not in front of my face, so it doesn't exists!”
That's literally the thinking abilities of a toddler. Wireless chargers sell like hotcakes. MagSafe charger is Apple's most popular accessory in their entire history.
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Exactly, they want the most amount of customers. But they won't sacrifice AxB customers to satisfy B customers. They'd be effectively losing customers or breaking even at a higher cost to them.
We know this numbers must have a population of around 180 thousand customers. The known number of fairphones sold across all models so far. Now let's make assumptions. Let's suppose that there are 100 people who want headphone jacks and would absolutely buy a fairphone if they came with it, for each user that has advocated for headphone jacks in this thread. You wouldn't even break 1% of the total number of fairphone sales, just this year (130k).
Again, there's a difference between wanting something a lot. And actually making decisions based on what we say we want. Fairphone removed the headphone jack on a model that broke sales records for them. Fairphone 5 was heavily criticized for not having a headphone jack. And it is selling comfortably well within their expectations. So obviously the people who stopped buying Fairphones because of the headphone jack weren't that many actually.
But they won’t sacrifice AxB customers to satisfy B customers.
That's the kicker. Adding a headphone jack doesn't mean they have to sacrifice something. They can just do it without having to remove/reduce anything. If adding a jack was really that difficult, something like what you can see in this video wouldn't be possible.
You have to preeeety gullible to believe their reasons for not adding it. The only reason was that they wanted to sell their bluetooth earbuds, that's it.
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The transfer speed over USB on mine probably doesn't even pass USB 2 speeds anyway and I've had flagship phones in the past that were even slower over a cable. I guess if that's still the case then there's probably a good engineering argument to reduce complexity.
Or there wasn't good enough engineering to begin with to achieve usb 3 speeds. Seems like they should have got it right before using it as a reason to cripple the thing further.
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Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) use USB-2?
In order to make the device more affordable, we explored how we could best balance our spec choices with the least possible impact on user experience. Going from USB-3 to USB-2 was one of them.
https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/24463093338898-The-Fairphone-Gen-6-FAQ
Thanks for the link. I can't necessarily agree that it's low impact, transferring files at 2.0 speeds is brutal.
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You know you've got not argument when you have to compare a $700 dollar phone to a $5 dongle for your argument to even make sense.
First of all, I seriously doubt any $700 phone without a 3.5mm port is going to have a decent DAC, because there's no reason for it. In those phones the DAC is used primarily for phone calls. If those phones had a a 3.5mm port and they were flagship phones then maybe they would have higher quality DACs in them, but then they'd also cost more. And secondly, I wasn't talking about some cheap $5 dongle, I specifically said quality headphones.
You know you’ve got not argument when you have to compare a $700 dollar phone to a $5 dongle for your argument to even make sense.
Oh, so I should buy $100 dongles then? lol Everyone's argument about the dongles is that they're super cheap, that's why I made the comparison.
In those phones the DAC is used primarily for phone calls.
Oh really? And how exactly do you think that the phone is generating the audio that comes through its speaker when you're doing anything else? Like listening to music, videos, etc? Does your phone really not make a single sound apart from the audio in phone calls?
I wasn’t talking about some cheap $5 dongle, I specifically said quality headphones
headphone =/= dongle
The dongle is what you connect TO the headphone. Regardless, be more specific then. What's the one you recommend? Should I buy $50 dongles then and keep them attached to my headphones? Since I use 4/5 of them does that mean that it's ok in your opinion that I now need to spend $250 in dongles instead of just having a tiny, cheap, reliable jack on my $700 phone?
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What statistics? People buying thin phones over thicker phones doesn't mean much when that's almost all that's being sold nowadays and every phone is trying to be as thin as possible. It seemed to me that 90% of what we're told people want is actually just what companies want to push on us because it's cheaper and more profitable.
All the people I know who are average users couldn't care less about how thin the phone is, two mm more or less doesn't make any difference. They care about screen size and being able to use it without too much hassle. If they get a phone without an audio jack half of them will just assume that they can't plug earphones at all. And they are not the ones who will complain. But then, Fairphone isn't marketed towards average users, so maybe their users have different priorities? Idk
If you ask people what they want, they will tell you they want a phone that has 15 inch screen that looks perfect under the sunlight. But also fits into their pocket. And it has to have a battery that lasts a week, but it must not weight anything at all. But also has to play all the highly graphical games, and also have a professional level camera. It must do so and also last forever and be indestructible.
That phone obviously can't exist, and a lot of what people want are things that oppose each other from the engineering pov. That's the point of surveys and market analysis. You don't just look at what people say, you look at what they do, what they actually buy.
It is true that the other side of marketing is convincing people that what the company is offering is what they would also want to buy. But it is never a guarantee. I mean, look at the Samsung Edge flop. Marketing is not magic, you can't brainwash 100 million people to buy something they don't want. Marketing is marrying what the company wants to do in terms of cost cutting and profit maxing, with what the market is actually willing to buy. If people keep buying slop, they will keep selling slop, and they will keep marketing slop to people to convince them they want the slop. To break the circle someone has to stop, and it won't be the corporations.
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Not in the US apparently
Well, technically no phones are made in the US. I think you're talking about selling phones there. Regardless, you might have poor short term memory because they only pulled out of the US phone market (which is pretty crappy) a little over a year ago I believe.
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You can - Samsung phones are really well supported for that.
I would never go with Samsung as a conscious choice for custom ROMs, mostly because all well-supported devices are pretty old, which means lower chance of getting something in a decent state for a reasonable price used, that wouldn't require immediately swapping the battery already. Not to mention the Knox eFuse which means losing functionality when flashing a custom ROM. I'd argue a used Pixel is a better option, the 7 Pro can be had for relatively little money and is still a good phone.
