Hello there,
I am modular devices fan from Pakistan.
I waiting for Project Ara for years, they kept delaying at the end “shelved” the whole project.
Meantime, I was also keeping an eye on Fairphone but it is expensive, out of reach of a student.
Project Ara promised they will launch basic phone in very affordable price. This is why it was getting more attention than others due to “affordability”.
My suggestion is Fairphone should also offer basic phone with low specs in cheaper price.
So that users can upgrade camera/screen etc later.
Basic affordable Fairphone can also reduce its price by removing camera for example. Then the customer can buy the module later.
What about motherboard/base alone? So that users can easily switch to newer Fairphone version without their older modules becoming absolute.
In my opinion, the main problem with affordability that Fairphone has, is that Fairphone is, for the time being, too small a player in the industry to have a good economy of scale (i.e. they have relatively high start-up costs relative to the number of phones they produce). Competing on price wouldn’t work out for them. If start-up costs and overhead are fixed at X, X as a percentage of €530 apparently can still be sold as ‘a small extra to pay’, but the closer you get to the truly affordable range, the more the start-up costs eat into the what’s available for actual hardware and the less ‘value for money’ a phone becomes. Whilst the argument is, of course, that having a cheaper phone could mean more customers (reducing how much of the price in each phone goes into production costs), you’d need to sell a lot more phones (more than simply twice as many for each halving of the price, as overhead doesn’t scale linearly). Hopefully, when they have the sales channels and a solid brand reputation they can start to work towards this.
