Tech enthusiast Marques Brownlee has just featured the Fairphone 4 in his latest video!
For those of you who haven’t heard of him, he’s a tech YouTuber who started out with simple product reviews and has grown enormously over the years to now have an audience of 15 million subscribers (although given the nature of YouTube’s algorithm, his actual audience is probably double that), becoming influential enough of a figure to interview the CEOs of Microsoft, Tesla and Google (to name a few).
I’ve been following him for quite a few years and really enjoy his style: honest, unbiased, and giving valuable insights into why companies make certain decisions rather than just looking at the surface level. One example from this very review was that he didn’t fall into the trap of simply saying that the Fairphone is more expensive than phones of similar specs and stating this as a disadvantage - instead, he put the price into context by explaining the main sustainable benefits and concluding:
“as a customer, choosing to buy one, you have to really value the repairability and the sustainability offered by the Fairphone to pick it over… any other phones in this range.”
At the end of the video, he also said something I never would have expected from a ‘cool’ mainstream figure in popular culture:
“I want to make a pledge to include some section in all of my future smartphone reviews on repairability and sustainability, just to shine a light on that, and give those companies a reason - a reward - to make those compromises.”
It was such a great honour to see him sharing one of Fairphone’s products with his huge audience, and so wonderful to see Fairphone and Marques each influencing the fate of the other so positively. To me, it’s a sign that sustainability is finally garnering importance in the eyes of the general public. Here’s to the future! 