Thanks to call me a “more experienced people of this community” but mine is quite low if you ask me to write about SoCs
However I’ll try my best to answer: if I agree with the fact a good SoC will allow the phone to last longer, the best SoCs are very expensive considering what they give on top of what mid-range SoCs do. The extra value-for-money simply is not worth it for most people. If you’re always willing to have the latest tech gadgets and best graphically challenging games, you will want to change your phone often anyway, which is contradictory with Fairphone’s goal.
Fairphone is aiming to take a mid-range SoC out of a compromise: because it’ll be good enough to last years for the tasks of most users and be cheap enough not to rise the price by an extra 200€, which not a lot of potential customers could afford. A lot of people tell me they love the project but already can’t afford a 450€ naked phone (without the expensive accessories), knowing they are technically better ones for half the price, even if they’re ready to pay more for the sustainability part…
Like with organic products, if it’s 10-30% more, they’re ready to make an effort, but if it’s 2-3 times the price, especially when it’s about hundreds of €uros, it’s too much for them… Of course, I tell them it’s the price for fairness, durability and sustainability, but…
We also know the higher price is because Fairphone is such a tiny company they don’t have the scale savings bigger brands have.
So if the SoC was more expensive it would mean less customers, so even less scale savings. Do you see the vicious circle?
A solution to this would be to develop different ranges of Fairphones, which is what they initiate with FP3 and FP3+. At this moment I don’t think Fairphone would be able to fully do this, and releasing a completely new and better phone juste a year after a brand new modular one would’ve been misunderstood by a lot of FP3 owners, not to mention sending a completely contradictory signal regarding its mission.
But when FP4 comes out in the next years (maybe even next year), they will probably offer a slightly higher range (now the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 700’s are in the place) and definitely more recent and powerful processor to make the FP4 more future-proof than the FP3 (or at least as future-proof, but 2 years or more after its big brother release), while still selling FP3 as lower-range phone like what the brand does, which is not such a bad idea, as it maintains the same product assembly lines so doesn’t require extra R&D costs.
They couldn’t do it with FP2 because it was badly designed on several aspects, which is why they had to fully change FP3’s design compared to its older brother they had to stop selling, so if such a strategy already existed in their mind before, it was probably delayed.
They’re still providing spare parts for FP2 for a very affordable price (they’ve lowered the prices of the battery, screen and camera modules) of course, which is proof for you @existentionaut that they’re trustworthy. They even dug up the old cameras spare parts to keep the FP2 repairable after the production stop of its “new” modules!
Is it and will it be their strategy? I’d love to see this, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to do it.