I closed this temporarily to give everyone time to cool down. This discussion is not going anywhere at the moment.
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I totally agree with this post. I don’t think anyone really listed the reasons the fairphone needs a SoC upgrade.
The Snapdragon 801 is laughably old at this point in time - there should be a refresh bringing in either the 450 or the 636.
Both of these are high grade commodity processors that wipe the floor with the 801 in several ways.
Manufacturing process means it’s up to 80% more power efficient than the 801.
The 801 uses A7 cores, we’re 3 generation past that technology alone in the 636, using A73 cores.
These cores are up to 8x faster per mHZ, you don’t need a 2.2 GHz processor eating your battery life, you can have a 1.8Ghz sipper.
LTE Radio - reduce power consumption, get better throughput in locations, support for more bands, better connectivity to carriers with aggregation technology. Safer better phone for calls where you are.
WiFi radio - latest mimo technology and range aggregation, now comes on commodity budget processors. This is less of an issue, but much bigger convenience factor. Multiple uses for wifi. Better to have the latest stable radio you can have.
Charging technology. If you haven’t tried quick charge 4 you are missing out. A full days battery in about 15 minutes. - that convenience alone makes for a phone that’s safe and accessible.
Camera - You know what’s better than a camera module upgrade? How about some Image Signal Processors that are modern.
NFC - not a fad, in a world where all of our information is consistently stolen and sold, protect your self when using credit cards through tolken based technology that doesn’t share your cards. This should be default now, it’s made its way into $200 budget phones.
I could go on and on and on about everything that the fp2 isn’t going to do as well as a $300 phone being sold today.
Lots of us want to join this community ride of fairness, and long use - but at this point in time there’s so many missing features for the cost, it’d be hard to sell.
And no, I’m not a phone every year guy. I use a phone until it breaks, and I can justify the cost too repair ratio.
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I’m afraid that’s false. The Snapdragon 801 has Qualcomm’s own Krait (400) CPUs. They do 3.39DMIPS/MHz, putting them in terms of performance in line with Cortex A15, not A7. Perhaps you meant to talk about ARMs (32-bit) v7 architecture, under which both the Cortex A7 and A15 fall?
Other than that, I sympathise completely with the “SoC is outdated” story, but not necessarily for the individual features that you point out. I’d only have one simple reason:
I’d go one step further and say that the Fairphone in terms of specs is about on par with the Wileyfox Swift 2x, which you can pick up for €170. When I bought the FP2, a phone with similar specs would have cost me about €350-400. This means that when I made a decision to purchase a new phone, I paid a +40% mark-up for fairness. Due to market changes, FP today is asking for a +200% mark-up to stand for these values. That’s quite a different thing to ask from customers…
Don’t get me wrong, I am quite satisfied with my purchase 2,5 years ago, and I hope it’ll last me another 2,5. But if today my FP2 fell off a cliff I would find it incredibly hard to justify getting a new FP2.
And here’s the troublesome situation Fairphone is currently in. I’d say if the FP2 today was on sale for €350, it would be a reasonable deal. However, there’s no opportunity for them to make up for the difference in price at such a level because they rely on now unsupported/discontinued components. Qualcomm doesn’t produce these 801’s at bulk anymore, so there’s just nothing to win from supply chain efficiency gains. And you don’t want to deteriorate workers’ conditions either.
The other option is to add value to justify a retail price of €529 again. Newer better SoCs can probably be purchased for the same price as the 801 so that sounds like an easy plan, but the challenges involved there both on the hardware as on the software side essentially mean releasing a new phone. As long as Fairphone considers releasing a new phone a breach of their “5 year lifespan” value (why? I for one won’t upgrade straight away, this phone can still fulfils my needs for the next year or so when Android 7 makes it), they’ll have a hard time selling.
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My bad, you’re right, they are A15 CPUs, still 3 generations behind current SoCs, but yes thanks for pointing out that I referenced the wrong base core! I should have expanded but really mean we’re at a point where quad A73 cores are the base standard in 2018.
Maybe you should follow and support this community project:
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As it is typical in fad industries, you give lots of examples of solutions in search of problems.
Let me give you another perspective: my family’s two Fairphone 2 still work great after one year and a half. They function as expected and fulfill all our needs while protecting our privacy and allowing me to fix them easily when necessary, both hardware and software. And, above all, they offer solutions to real problems in an industry filled up with utterly unsustainable business models and consumer attitudes.
Or as the saying goes, “the fool looks at the finger that points at the sky” 
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Be careful with this argument 
. I tend to agree mostly that a lot of the stuff offered by newer SoCs are “nice to have” rather than “must have” features, of the whole list posted by @Dmikey I really only care about battery life (which is why I feel impatient about the Android 7 upgrade, but that’s for a different forum thread 
). However, I’m not entitled to judge about other people’s requirements.
Which is why I prefer to look at the “value for money” offered by FP2. Value might be something personal, but we can express it in money by analysing the rest of the market. As I said in a previous post, an “unfair” FP2-equivalent would today cost less than €200, where at time of release this was around €350. That changes the decision made by consumers who have to find a balance in their life between product satisfaction, fairness and their own bank account.
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A person who thinks about product “value” only in terms of conspicuous features against dollars spent evidently doesn’t share Fairphone values, consequently there’s no reason for she or he to try to give an answer to the question at the top of this thread. To convince someone to use a Fairphone is simple: you just need to show that this is the only phone based on business, technological and utilization models that respect consumer privacy and sustainability principles.
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On the topic of battery conservation, no tech trickery will ever fix smartphones’ high battery use as long as the GAFAs business model is based on private data harvesting.
My phones’ batteries have good longevity simply because I don’t allow them to be nodes in bloodsucking GAFAs’ networks.
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I disagree with this rather black-and-white argument. Here’s some entirely fictional scenario’s that show some of the conflicts.
Person #1 cares about fairness. But also desires a good camera. Unfortunately, to person #1 the camera of FP2 doesn’t quite cut it. He/she now has two options: spend €530 on a Fairphone and another €300 on a non-fair compact camera, or just spend €550 on an unfair phone with a better camera. Which one is better? Option one uses up more natural resources and still requires child labour and unfair minerals, but involves the Fairphone brand. Option two uses fewer resources and allows to pocket €250 to be spent freely (on Tony Chocolonely’s and Fairtrade cotton t-shirts perhaps?)
Person #2 also cares about fairness. But is also concerned about his/her security. Unfortunately, banks have stopped giving out cards without contactless transactions, which are susceptible to fraud even when unused as they can be interacted with while they sit on your pocket. Rather than carrying these bank cards around, person #2 would rather have the cards embedded in the phone, so that the NFC signal is only enabled when person #2 wants it to. Fairphone doesn’t permit this…
I’m sure we can have a lengthy discussion about whether these examples are contrived or not, but the point I’m trying to make is that you and I don’t get to decide what other people find important, and thus which features are “conspicuous”. I can think along, I can provide suggestions (why not just invest in an aluminium wallet, person #2?), but I can’t and shouldn’t want to decide.
This statement is either assuming that the person you’re trying to convince only cares about consumer privacy and sustainability, or assuming that you can project your values wholesale onto others. I’m afraid that in my experience both are usually false. For a lot of people, fairness is one of the many factors that plays a role when making a purchase. Unless you’re ultra-wealthy, price definitely plays a factor. Satisfaction (simply “does the phone do what I want it to do”) matters, which is defined differently for each individual. And although Fairphone is still (sadly! ) unmet in terms of fairness, the price/satisfaction ratio logically must have decreased since release as feature-wise comparative phones have gone down in price.
Actually, this is not 100% true. When compared to two years ago, they upgraded the camera and ship with a more reliable case, plus they improved on fairness. Does that compensate for the €150-180 value drop when compared to unfair-but-featurewise-comparative phones? I can’t say of course, but I suspect only the best in the world would answer “yes, more fairness is invaluable” while the majority are more likely to answer “no”.
If a company only cares about the part of the population who perceive fairness (or “consumer privacy and sustainability” for that matter) as the sole important factor for buying a phone, they’ll not only fail in their mission to sell fair phones - because that market is tiny -, but also fail in their mission to spread awareness among bigger masses. So the way I see it, it’s all about being an ethical business but a business nonetheless. Which means finding the right balance between price, consumer satisfaction and fairness. For Fairphone to be able to continue being a force for the good in the market in the upcoming few years, I think it would be completely justified to re-assess where their product stands on this scale and whether there are options to improve upon this without compromising on their fair values.
And at the same time you couldn’t be more right. These are the Fairphone 2 unique selling points that must make a difference when you try to convince someone to make the leap and pay the premium. But as the price/satisfaction gap with non-fair competitors widens, I sincerely fear this will impress fewer and fewer people enough to vote with their wallet and purchase a Fairphone 2.
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There is no reason for the gap to widen, production costs for Fairphone can equally fall, like in the rest of the industry, or new modules can have improved features, like it happened in the past. A whole new Fairphone will eventually see daylight, but only when a new platform becomes really necessary. Your mistake is that you’re trying to apply an outdated business analytical framework to a radically new business model, with entirely different values and consumer base.
Let me reword a point I made a few posts back. According to the cost breakdown, the materials of the FP2 amount to about €230 of the price. From what I can tell, that would be the only place where Fairphone would be able to bring the cost down provided that market forces work. Sadly, they don’t work in Fairphones favour, and there’s no way they can chop €170 off of that. Firstly because Fairphone does not nearly make the kind of bulk orders that other major players make, giving them little leverage against the major suppliers. Secondly, because the most promising cost factor to reduce is the SoC (DRAM and storage aren’t getting cheaper these days, and peripherals already are relatively low-price). Judging by the lack of support from Qualcomm even for Android 7 (Fairphone is pushing the wagon itself on this one), this SoC is discontinued. That’s not going to get cheaper with time… if anything it would get more expensive as this is now a hardly-produced legacy product. To bring the price of the core module down (and I suspect that wouldn’t save more than €10-20), they’d instead have to start purchasing newer, lower end SoCs (like perhaps a Snapdragon 632, or maybe even a lower-end Snapdragon 429) that come with a lower price tag. Sadly, the engineering effort to integrate this with the rest of the system would be large enough to justify talking about a new phone (that can hopefully re-use components from the current model). At this point “new phone” is a matter of semantics…
I wish this was only my mistake, but this is deeply rooted in the various capitalist markets that we work with in the Western world. I’m not convinced that the majority of the consumer base targeted by Fairphone is “entirely different”. The whole point of the Fairphone operation is to try and challenge this mentality, to make them aware of the injustice happening in this world such that hopefully they can develop these values. But that would be a slow transformation, certainly not one that they have completed today. If they want to reach a large audience today, they also have to play the game of the market as it stands today - minus the exploitation - and convince their audience that there is a satisfaction or value to be gained from choosing sustainable and fair that justifies or even outweighs the price premium.
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Your analytical mistakes can be exemplified by this statement:
this is deeply rooted in the various capitalist markets that we work with in the Western world. I’m not convinced that the majority of the consumer base targeted by Fairphone is “entirely different”.
The consumer base targeted by firms like Fairphone is entirely different by definition. You won’t ever be able to understand business models of sustainability-driven firms if you can’t grasp this fact.
I think I said enough, so this is my last reply to your replies. Bye! 
I am not sure releasing a new phone is a break of the policy per se. I believe they are, at the moment, unable to support the FP2 for five years and release a new model yet. I am 100% sure there has to me a new model next year and I can imagine Fairphone will be able to shorten the release cycle and keep on supporting the phones for 5 years. With market share, two or three models at the same time are realistic.
I don’t agree. Consumers choices are not binay, but most times, we balance thinks like value for money, ethical / environmental and feature »needs«. I know there is a core fan base that , thankfully, still buys the FP2 for 500€+ today. I think that is great, but to be fair, while I bought the FP2 a few years back, I wouldn’t buy it at that price today. The reasons are all here in this thread. I try to buy fairtrade and organic food, for example. But I would not buy the organic apples if they were four times the price. I am sure the same applies to Fairphone.
What does this even matter? Fairphone is a for-profit company. A social company, see bcorp, but still. They also stated market share issues several times (for example to ensure spare part availability, to reduce costs, to make more impact with better contracts at the factories, etc. Furthermore, they operate in a business that greatly profits from scale. For example, see the effort to develop Android 7 for the FP2: It’s expansive, requires specialists and essentially the same amount of work, no matter if done for 100.000 or 1.000.000 phones.
I have (crowd) invested in Fairphone because I believe in the ideals and unique approach, but I also believe that if we want Fairphone to still strive and make an impact in a few years, we need to take the voices of critics serious. Fairphone must be more then the only morally acceptable phone, it must also be a very good phone.
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If that were so, I would wholeheartedly agree with you.
But I don’t think that your assumption is right. The targe of Fairphone - as I understand it - is to change the market, to make other companies change their production, following the example of Fairphone, simply because the consumers show that this is what they want.
Why else would Fairphone use the slogan “Together we can change the way products are made”
I really hope, that they don’t see themselves as a small company, building a special (niche)product for a small group of customers. Companies of that kind have vanished by the dozen when their customer-group lost interest or just “grew out” of it
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I think that we can nevertheless tell our friends that they are doing wrong in our eyes if they don’t buy a Fairphone or a second-hand phone.
Nobody wants to be bad. Many people though are still not fully aware of the grave problems in electronics supply chains. When a friend of mine got a new phone, I asked her, " Why didn’t you get a Fairphone? Your new phone supports child labour and social and environmental exploitation." She answered that she hadn’t known about these things and was a bit sad about it.
In response to the topic title I think we should tell people about the huge problems in smartphone production and make them aware about them. This was happening from the very beginning (pre-FP1), but I have the feeling that lately we tend to talk more about modularity than about exploitation (certainly because it is much easier to explain the former).
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I agree with you there, although I have the impression, that many - if not most - users of Fairphone are a bit tech-minded, loving all those technical possibilities.
While there’s nothing really new on the social aspects of the Fairphone, there are so many technical possibilities, OS-developments and even someone designing a new motherboard, that the discussion is focusing on the “by nature”.
Btw., in my opinion technical developments are making new smartphones so fascinating in general, that they are therefore primarily adressed by marketing experts to sell the latest model.
So it comes quite natural to counter that marketing by explaining the technical features of the phone, while the social engangement (at least to most) is so evident, it seems to need no emphasizing. But you are right of course, that all aspects of fairness should be explained in depths, when “selling” Fairphone to others.
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The problem IMO is that Fairphone can only lose on this front. Truth is that the FP2 is not competitive anymore if you only take the technical specifications into account.
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If you look at the investment sheet for the recent crowdfunding campaign, there is on page 22:
And then they also write in that document that they’ll focus on the regions in Western Europe where they are already operating plus expanding to Scandinavia and Southern Europe. And if I got it correctly, this is on a time scale till 2021.
To me, targeted 285,000 phones per year (less than one day of iPhones around xmas) still looks pretty small.
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