Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) not have an audio jack?
After some of the criticism that we received about removing the headphone jack from Fairphone 4, we did consider bringing it back for The Fairphone (Gen. 6). However, we realized it would be at the expense of increasing the phone’s dimensions. We also looked into the consumer data and Fairphone 4’s weight and thickness were more of an issue than the lack of a minijack, so we decided to keep the same approach, although it was a difficult decision. We didn’t want to invest in OLED technology for the display and then not have improved the phone’s dimensions and weight. But just like with Fairphone 4 and Fairphone 5, we will still offer an adapter, which has had overall positive user reviews.
“We heard the criticism but decided that no, you would still need an adapter to use headphones, plus a USB-C hub to be able to charge the damn thing while listening to music or watching videos”
Funny how that’s the same excuses that we get for modern laptops terrible design. “We HAVE to make it thinner so there’s no space! You wouldn’t want a laptop that’s not complete shit if it meant it’d also be less thin and breakable, now would you?”
Let me expand, as I usually deal with surveys and population feedback. There’s loud feedback, and there’s statistically significant feedback.
People who want a headphone jack are very loud. They will interject this issue into every feedback opportunity given. They will mention it on the comment sections, forums, q&a sessions, answer their surveys accordingly, etc. That’s all fine and their prerogative.
However, when you look at the statistics. They are unfortunately a very tiny minority of the entire population. They are not statistically significant for decision making. They don’t have the volume to move sales significantly. This sucks, of course, and I personally wouldn’t mind the return of headphone jacks, smaller phones and bigger batteries as a fair trade for thicker phones.
But unfortunately, the vast majority of the market is pre-occupied with other things. The phone screen is too small, the phone weights too much, the phone is too thick, I want to bring my phone to the pool without fear of it breaking, etc. They are not as passionate about it, not like the headphone people are, but they far outnumber them in several orders of magnitude. In the end, if the product doesn’t sell, it won’t matter how much it was worth to a single passionate person. It will sink the company if it doesn’t have mass appeal. Making phones is already an extremely expensive endeavor.
You know why there aren’t more users complaining about this? Because they flat out did not buy the device for that reason (e.g. me). Removing the jack is also extremely hyprocritical coming from a “sustainable” company.
And if it did have it you wouldn’t have bought it either because the company is hypocritical. So why do you care? Why should they care?
The point is, the people who did buy it didn’t care, and the people who care don’t buy. It’s a conundrum. Pair it with performance data of other phones that do have a headphone jack, plus the engineering compromises over other very important features. Then the decision makes sense. You lot aren’t buying phones with headphone jacks either, so it isn’t economically worth it. It’s not like the motor g or the Asus rog phone are breaking sales records just on the headphone jack.
It’s the same story as with small phones. People who aren’t buying phones like to complain about phone size. But then when a small phone is made, no one buys it. Then the people who didn’t buy the phone complain again, because the phone wasn’t perfect for them.
It happens all the time, people are usually very vocal about things that actually don’t drive their decision making.
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.
Phone thickness is far from the only consideration. But Ok, you are right. There was space on the iPhone 7. That was also the first water resistant phone. Does this guy phone’s is still IP67 compliant after all the surgery he made. And that was in 2016, when IP67 headphone jacks didn’t exist. Now the phone standard is IP68. There were no IP68 compliant headphone jacks until recently, I think the ASUS Zenfone 12 is the first one.
I think companies won’t bring the headphone jack (a shame, really). But the writing is in the wall, it went away, and phones still sold like hotcakes. While those with headphone jacks aren’t being bought anywhere near the same volume. So the signal is very clear, the effort to add a headphone jack — however little it may be — is not financially worth it. It is a feature that doesn’t drive sales. Period.
My wired earbuds cost more than ten times that and will probably last me until I retire. The vast majority of those USB-c to 3.5mm adapters are cheap crap that have a worthless DAC and/or fall apart after a short time. I have purchased my wife three such adapters since she decided it was worth it to get a phone without a headphone jack and none of them have been good.
I ended up having to buy her a separate portable music player to use. So thanks for that Google, Apple, and the rest of the greedy shithead OEMs.
I’ve used three: one was generic (it was at the time the only way to get one that could charge and have a headphone out in the same dongle), one was from Fiio (surprisingly bad sounding, maybe worse than the generic in some ways, but better build), and one was the official Google dongle (sounded clean, but was super weak. Couldn’t power even my lightest headphones that weren’t IEMs). The only one I still have is the Google dongle because the others broke, but I don’t use it because it still kinda sucks. I ended up being forced to buy a phone without a headphone jack fairly recently because Google more or less killed my Pixel 4a and there were no replacement phones with headphones jacks that I could put GrapheneOS on. I ended up buying myself a portable music player to list to music on. My phone is now only for listening to music in the car and it sucks :(
From what I understand there are better dongles now than that they can perform better than the Apple dongle, but the one everyone raves about that was $20 - $30 or so is now hard to come brand is going for closer to $80 (I think it is the Jcally JM20 Max). I don’t see a reason to bother spending more money chasing this crap now that I’ve had to buy both my wife and I standalone music players. What I do know is that the first company that releases a decent phone that has a headphone jack that fits my other needs is getting my Money. If Fairphone has brought it back, it would have been them since they have decent ROM alternatives (though not GrapheneOS).
Maybe I chose the wrong $10 adapter but I notice a big drop in sound quality using that vs Bluetooth, to the point that it’s not worth using unless there isn’t another option. I’m not really an audiophile, though I can notice the general quality of sound.
If we revisit the “loud” vs “statistically significant” paradigm, while it is a shame you will not be able to charge the phone with a dac in without buying a specific cable, how often does the average person do so?
so you need a dongle for the DAC, and an additional dongle for charging that is also, if I recall it correctly, violates the USB-C standard. did I understand it correctly?
“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.
I use wireless charging every single day and majority of my non techie friends do as well. Its so convenient to have a wireless charger on the desk and put your phone there. They are dirt cheap as well.
Or you switch to your bluetooth buds during a wired charge.
I’m all for audio jacks, but have been using a phone without one for 4 years now, and there are so many options to not be incovenienced.
Also I don’t use my audiophile headphones with the phone at all - DAC on it just isn’t good enough to get most out of then, prefer to use them with my desktop PC amp only.
It’s kinda tough sell without wireless for such price, for me. Though I guess it’s maybe a tough fit with their modular design ambitions, and corners have to be cut somewhere to keep their higher costs down.
good luck charging my phone wirelessly! wireless charging is also very wasteful, and it does not support idle charging (powering the phone without wearing the battery), even if the phone otherwise does. doesn’t it also take up a significant amount of that precious space inside the phone?
People who want a headphone jack […] are unfortunately a very tiny minority of the entire population.
People interested in paying more for fair trade materials and repairable phones are also a very tiny minority of the entire population.
Of course I don’t have any statistic, but I would guess that the proportion of people wanting a Jack is significantly higher in the group of people interested in buying Fairphone that on the general population.
In my particular case, I’m still using my Fairphone 3, and I’m not buying a Fairphone again unless it has a Jack.
I don’t have any statistic, but I would guess that the proportion of people wanting a Jack is significantly higher in the group of people interested in buying Fairphone that on the general population.
Fairphone literally does have that statistic. They spent effort to gather that info in order to inform their business decisions. And they report:
We also looked into the consumer data and Fairphone 4’s weight and thickness were more of an issue than the lack of a minijack
I have a Sony Xperia that has both a jack and a SD slot. I shelled out for the top of the line one, but since it has good specs I plan on keeping it for many years.
I have no idea, I’m hoping for my F3 to still last a couple of years.
I’m honestly pretty tired of Android, and that’s another can of worms.
Maybe I’ll try with a linux phone, but I’m still undecided.
Have a look at their impact report. They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff.
You are only paying more for that phone because they are a tiny boutique manufacturer who has to outsource everything. The fair/eco stuff is just fair- and greenwashing.
If you buy a phone because you want to look fair/eco, buy a Fairphone. If you actually really care for fair/eco, get an used phone and donate some money to the correct NGOs or charities.
Have a look at their impact report. They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff.
I’ve looked through their report and I can’t find this info. The only thing I’ve found is a ~€2 bonus per phone to their factory workers, which is only a small fraction of a phones supply chain. Can you provide a more detailed reference supporting your claim?
Read through the whole report, sum up all the money they mention. It comes out to $16 000. Double that for the stuff where they don’t mention money (because they surely would mention anything that costs more than the things they do mention). Double it again, for a safety margin. Double it again, because we are really generous. Now we are at €128 000. Divide that by the number of devices sold in 2024 and you get $1.24. Now add the $1.20 (Page 29) they pay as a living wage bonus and you arrive at $2.44 per device.
And now let’s be super generous and double that guess again, and you end up with the <€5 per device that I quoted above.
The picture becomes clearer when you look at what they say about their fair material usage.
Take for example the FP5 (page 42 & 67). Their top claim here is “Fair materials: 76%”, which they then put a disclaimer next to it, that they only mean that 76% of 14 specific focus materials is actually fair. On the detail page (page 67) they specify that actually only 44% of the total weight of the phone is fairly mined, because they just excluded a ton of material from the list of “focus materials” to push up the number.
The largest part of these materials are actually recycled materials (37% of the 44% “fair” materials). The materials they are recycling are plastics, metals and rare earth elements. That’s all materials that are cheaper to recycle than to mine. You’ll likely find almost identical amounts of recycled materials in any other phone, because it makes economical sense. It’s just cheaper. Since these materials cost nothing extra to Fairphone, we can exclude them from the list, which leaves 1% of actually fair mined material (specifically gold), and 6% of materials that they bought fairwashing credits for.
Also, the raw materials of phones are dirt cheap compared to the end price. The costly part is not mining the materials, but manufacturing all the components.
With only 1% of the materials being fairly mined and only 6% being compensated with credits, you can start to see why in total they spend next to nothing on fair mining/fair credits.
Thanks for the detailed reply. You saying that “They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff” is a complete lie. It’s not a number they’re claiming, it’s a number you’ve estimated. And lets be clear: what you’ve done is take $3k in gold credits plus $13k cobalt credits and multiplied that by an arbitrary 8x.
I think you’ve gone into your analysis with a foregone conclusion. There simply isn’t enough information to say anything about the cost overheat of being “fair”.
You’ll likely find almost identical amounts of recycled materials in any other phone, because it makes economical sense. It’s just cheaper.
And yet the FP4 was significantly less recycled. Plastic is certainly not cheaper to recycle; that’s a lie the plastic industry’s been pushing for a while.
Yeah, I see, thanks a lot for taking the time to read through the report and write this.
It’s fucking sad but honestly thanks for pointing it out, I hadn’t even read the report.
Yeah, it is sad. Turns out, Fairphone is just yet another fairwashing company. People spend lots of money and suffer through using this phone with its trash quality software because they think that they are saving the planet by doing so, and in the end they actually just indirectly donated maybe a few Euros to some random fair credit mill.
Keep your eyes peeled and read what’s beind the marketing, because even companies that look good rarely are.
Especially for stuff like fair/eco/green, where it’s really hard to objectively measure how good something is and where legal standards are ridiculously low.
That’s what they’re doing. That’s why they remove the headphone jack in favour for a slimmer, lighter phone. Their market research showed that’s more important to a bigger portion of their customers.
This is thing with not understanding how statistics work. The point is that your personal experience is biased.
These people are not passionate about phone thickness. They won’t start or even have conversations about it. Specially since, for the most part, the companies are already catering to their tastes. But, if placed in front of a survey and asked to rank phone features by their importance for their purchase decisions, the overwhelming majority will rank other phones features way above a headphone jack. Most people on the planet are not audiophiles, and the majority of people perceive wires as an annoyance and an inconvenience.
That is the point of surveying and market research. To check with the actual potential buyers what is worth making. Of course it isn’t a guarantee, looking here at the recent flop of the Samsung Edge. But otherwise, a single person’s perception of the market will never be complete or accurate.
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.
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.
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.
Do you interact with people outside of audiophile circles? I’m not in any, and I haven’t heard anyone in person complain about a missing headphone jack in many years, not after a few years of airpods being available. Hell, I don’t know anyone who uses wired headphones anymore. I have heard people mention that my phone is too heavy, and I’m using a pixel 9 pro. Before this phone I was using a pixel 5, and I had people telling me my phone was too small/plastic-y. I don’t think you have an understanding of “normal people” They aren’t tech enthusiasts, they aren’t audiophiles, and they are genuinely shocked when I tell them about how egregiously most tech companies are violating their privacy, but are quick to say that they don’t care/don’t want to give up creature comforts to prevent it.
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.
Okay, I’m going to ask… why don’t you use wireless?
Edit: some results are in, and the only reasonable answer is better audio quality, although that’s probably no longer true. The rest are fairly weak reasons.
Lol’d at the 10m extension cord though, thanks for that one.
Let me give you simple example. When I take a flight, I like to watch my own media. Those flights sometimes are upwards of 10 hours. If I use wireless earbuds, both the earbuds and my phone will run out of battery and I have to charge them separately. However, since I have a phone with a headphone jack, my earbuds never run out of battery, I can charge my phone while I’m using them and I don’t need to use a single adapter.
That’s not simple. That’s very specific, and you really listen for 10 solid hours? Also if you’re dropping 10 hour flight money… I feel like there’s a wireless solution in your price range
You clearly didn’t get the point. The cost isn’t the only issue. There are downsides to wireless earbuds and I honestly do not prefer them most of the time. In my example, I’m using them the entire time because I don’t want to hear airplane noises and yeah, I am playing something on them most of the time if I’m flying alone.
Also if you’re dropping 10 hour flight money…
Sorry but this is a very very dumb take. “if you spent a lot of money, you could spend MORE money”. Really dude? The solution is just having a damn headphone jack, not spending money because corporations want you to.
It’s about options. You can still use Bluetooth even with a phone that has a 3.5mm jack. I also run live sound and have used the ability to plug my phone directly into the board for background music multiple times.
Latency issue, in some use cases it’s not acceptable to have 0.1~0.3 sec lag, like racing games or rhythm games.
(Yeah, I know there are some wireless protocols to make latency shorter, but it might cost a lot to buy a supported headphone, and it’s still useless if the phone doesn’t have proper protocol supports.)
Battery degradation. Wired earphones/headphones can be BIFL if treated properly. A typical wireless device will see battery degradation within a handful of years, and I have yet to see a decent TWS solution with replaceable batteries.
The Fairbuds does have a replaceable battery if that’s what you are searching for. Sure, the sound won’t be as good as a Sony, Bose, or the like, but it would be good enough if your focus is durability instead of perfect sound quality.
1.Wired headphones deliver better audio quality
2.Wired headphones are harder to lose
3.Wired headphones don’t need batteries, so:
a)less e-waste
b)no need to check if they are charged
4.Wired headphones are more secure, connection cannot be intercepted and phishing attacks with BT are not possible
5.While wired headphones are plugged, no one can take your phone without you noticing
Wired headphones can be intercepted, as the wires unfortunately also act as an antenna (I’m a computer security technician, we semi-routinely do such interception).
As for sound quality, it will always be limited by the DAC quality, and there is little way to add a good quality DAC without adding significant weight to the phone. Did you ever wonder why audiophiles audio players looks like bricks? That why.
But I agree with point 2, 3 and 5, they are valid, but I don’t agree with some aspects:
You can make some TW headphones bips to find them, which you cannot with wired ones for obvious reasons.
The cable is unfortunately often their weakpoints, and I had to throw away multiple of my headphones (which were fairly good quality ones) because of that. That’s actually the main reason I went wireless. I was tired of the cable breaking, and it getting in my way.
Now all my audio equipments are wireless, and I change their batteries every 5 years or so. Unfortunately I bought mines before Fairphone launched theirs, so it wasn’t an option, but once any of my headphones eat the dust for good, I’ll probably buy an easily repairable one if audio quality and codecs are acceptable (I’m an Audiophile, so that’s important to me).
Yep. There was a type of attack that utilized wireless headphone merging as an attack vector. With wired headphones, you can simply turn Bluetooth off.
I know of DACs (been through audiophile phase myself), and sure, a typical integrated mobile one doesn’t deliver THAT big of a quality. Still, wired headphones are not bottlenecking much just by the means of connection. And they are generally cheaper for the same audio quality, because you don’t need to put batteries etc.
Agree with your counterpoints. On the cable - I much prefer detachable options, so you can replace the cable easily. but the connector has to be strong enough - I’m a bit tired to see my Moondrop Chu disconnecting and shaking somewhere in my pocket.
They are expensive. You can get wired earphones for 2 euros that actually work and are reasonably durable. It’s not a great loss if they fall in a puddle or if I step on them.
They are a lot more failure prone. Half of those I tried didn’t work or only half worked, and those that did work didn’t last very long.
They have shitty range. I can use a 10 meters extension cord with wired earphones if I want to.
They require charging. And it’s a law of physics that everything that requires charging always run out at the most inconvenient time.
Also THEY ALWAYS GET LOST. Wireless earphones, mouse, controllers… it doesn’t matter, if it’s not attached with a cable they’ll just disappear.
LOL, 10m extension cord. I mean you’ve already established that you don’t give a crap about sound quality with your first point but that’s just ridiculous. Not to mention the 10m cord that your dragging around the house.
I don’t really care about sound quality when using earphones at home because I only use them when there’s a lot of ambient noise so the sound will be bad either way. When doing vacuum cleaning, or the dishes, stuff like that. When I still had a smartphone I used a 1,5m extension cord so it wouldn’t pull on the jack each time I move, but since it died I’m using a much longer one plugged to my PC (not actually 10m, that was hyperbole, more like 5m). It’s not very convenient I’ll admit, but it does the job.
“We heard the criticism but decided that no, you would still need an adapter to use headphones, plus a USB-C hub to be able to charge the damn thing while listening to music or watching videos”
Funny how that’s the same excuses that we get for modern laptops terrible design. “We HAVE to make it thinner so there’s no space! You wouldn’t want a laptop that’s not complete shit if it meant it’d also be less thin and breakable, now would you?”
Let me expand, as I usually deal with surveys and population feedback. There’s loud feedback, and there’s statistically significant feedback.
People who want a headphone jack are very loud. They will interject this issue into every feedback opportunity given. They will mention it on the comment sections, forums, q&a sessions, answer their surveys accordingly, etc. That’s all fine and their prerogative.
However, when you look at the statistics. They are unfortunately a very tiny minority of the entire population. They are not statistically significant for decision making. They don’t have the volume to move sales significantly. This sucks, of course, and I personally wouldn’t mind the return of headphone jacks, smaller phones and bigger batteries as a fair trade for thicker phones.
But unfortunately, the vast majority of the market is pre-occupied with other things. The phone screen is too small, the phone weights too much, the phone is too thick, I want to bring my phone to the pool without fear of it breaking, etc. They are not as passionate about it, not like the headphone people are, but they far outnumber them in several orders of magnitude. In the end, if the product doesn’t sell, it won’t matter how much it was worth to a single passionate person. It will sink the company if it doesn’t have mass appeal. Making phones is already an extremely expensive endeavor.
You know why there aren’t more users complaining about this? Because they flat out did not buy the device for that reason (e.g. me). Removing the jack is also extremely hyprocritical coming from a “sustainable” company.
And if it did have it you wouldn’t have bought it either because the company is hypocritical. So why do you care? Why should they care?
The point is, the people who did buy it didn’t care, and the people who care don’t buy. It’s a conundrum. Pair it with performance data of other phones that do have a headphone jack, plus the engineering compromises over other very important features. Then the decision makes sense. You lot aren’t buying phones with headphone jacks either, so it isn’t economically worth it. It’s not like the motor g or the Asus rog phone are breaking sales records just on the headphone jack.
It’s the same story as with small phones. People who aren’t buying phones like to complain about phone size. But then when a small phone is made, no one buys it. Then the people who didn’t buy the phone complain again, because the phone wasn’t perfect for them.
It happens all the time, people are usually very vocal about things that actually don’t drive their decision making.
Because they should want to capture more customers? Is that really your question?
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.
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.
Phone thickness is far from the only consideration. But Ok, you are right. There was space on the iPhone 7. That was also the first water resistant phone. Does this guy phone’s is still IP67 compliant after all the surgery he made. And that was in 2016, when IP67 headphone jacks didn’t exist. Now the phone standard is IP68. There were no IP68 compliant headphone jacks until recently, I think the ASUS Zenfone 12 is the first one.
I think companies won’t bring the headphone jack (a shame, really). But the writing is in the wall, it went away, and phones still sold like hotcakes. While those with headphone jacks aren’t being bought anywhere near the same volume. So the signal is very clear, the effort to add a headphone jack — however little it may be — is not financially worth it. It is a feature that doesn’t drive sales. Period.
You can get good Bluetooth earbuds for under $50 and a USB-C to AUX dongle for under $15.
The average person is fine with Bluetooth earbuds or an adapter, and audiophiles would not find the inbuilt DAC/amp on a phone to be adequate.
My wired earbuds cost more than ten times that and will probably last me until I retire. The vast majority of those USB-c to 3.5mm adapters are cheap crap that have a worthless DAC and/or fall apart after a short time. I have purchased my wife three such adapters since she decided it was worth it to get a phone without a headphone jack and none of them have been good.
I ended up having to buy her a separate portable music player to use. So thanks for that Google, Apple, and the rest of the greedy shithead OEMs.
Which brand of adpater did you get? If you got a generic one then a bad DAC and durability aren’t surprises.
I’ve used three: one was generic (it was at the time the only way to get one that could charge and have a headphone out in the same dongle), one was from Fiio (surprisingly bad sounding, maybe worse than the generic in some ways, but better build), and one was the official Google dongle (sounded clean, but was super weak. Couldn’t power even my lightest headphones that weren’t IEMs). The only one I still have is the Google dongle because the others broke, but I don’t use it because it still kinda sucks. I ended up being forced to buy a phone without a headphone jack fairly recently because Google more or less killed my Pixel 4a and there were no replacement phones with headphones jacks that I could put GrapheneOS on. I ended up buying myself a portable music player to list to music on. My phone is now only for listening to music in the car and it sucks :(
Maybe try the Apple one when Android 16 comes out (in GrapheneOS form) which fixes the volume issues.
From what I understand there are better dongles now than that they can perform better than the Apple dongle, but the one everyone raves about that was $20 - $30 or so is now hard to come brand is going for closer to $80 (I think it is the Jcally JM20 Max). I don’t see a reason to bother spending more money chasing this crap now that I’ve had to buy both my wife and I standalone music players. What I do know is that the first company that releases a decent phone that has a headphone jack that fits my other needs is getting my Money. If Fairphone has brought it back, it would have been them since they have decent ROM alternatives (though not GrapheneOS).
Maybe I chose the wrong $10 adapter but I notice a big drop in sound quality using that vs Bluetooth, to the point that it’s not worth using unless there isn’t another option. I’m not really an audiophile, though I can notice the general quality of sound.
That’s why you don’t just buy the cheapest one you see on Amazon. Google/DDG around to know which ones are good.
how do you charge the phone with a DAC plugged in?
If we revisit the “loud” vs “statistically significant” paradigm, while it is a shame you will not be able to charge the phone with a dac in without buying a specific cable, how often does the average person do so?
so you need a dongle for the DAC, and an additional dongle for charging that is also, if I recall it correctly, violates the USB-C standard. did I understand it correctly?
Sure, for simplicities sake let’s just say it’s impossible.
How many times has the average person needed to do so in a year?
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
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.
If I’ve asked a question twice and you’ve danced around it both times, that tells everyone what your answer is.
I use wireless charging every single day and majority of my non techie friends do as well. Its so convenient to have a wireless charger on the desk and put your phone there. They are dirt cheap as well.
You can get a USB-C splitter adapter.
isn’t that against the USB-C standard?
sure, a USB-C Hub With Two USB-C Ports then
Wirelessly.
Or you switch to your bluetooth buds during a wired charge.
I’m all for audio jacks, but have been using a phone without one for 4 years now, and there are so many options to not be incovenienced.
Also I don’t use my audiophile headphones with the phone at all - DAC on it just isn’t good enough to get most out of then, prefer to use them with my desktop PC amp only.
FairPhone doesn’t do wireless charging.
Didn’t know that, thanks.
It’s kinda tough sell without wireless for such price, for me. Though I guess it’s maybe a tough fit with their modular design ambitions, and corners have to be cut somewhere to keep their higher costs down.
good luck charging my phone wirelessly! wireless charging is also very wasteful, and it does not support idle charging (powering the phone without wearing the battery), even if the phone otherwise does. doesn’t it also take up a significant amount of that precious space inside the phone?
People interested in paying more for fair trade materials and repairable phones are also a very tiny minority of the entire population.
Of course I don’t have any statistic, but I would guess that the proportion of people wanting a Jack is significantly higher in the group of people interested in buying Fairphone that on the general population.
In my particular case, I’m still using my Fairphone 3, and I’m not buying a Fairphone again unless it has a Jack.
Fairphone literally does have that statistic. They spent effort to gather that info in order to inform their business decisions. And they report:
Just out of interest, because I too love the jack, then what are you buying in the future?
I have a Sony Xperia that has both a jack and a SD slot. I shelled out for the top of the line one, but since it has good specs I plan on keeping it for many years.
Same, but it’s insanely expensive for a good phone with a horrible camera.
I have no idea, I’m hoping for my F3 to still last a couple of years.
I’m honestly pretty tired of Android, and that’s another can of worms. Maybe I’ll try with a linux phone, but I’m still undecided.
Motorola or whatever, depends what’s available within budget at the time I need the phone.
Have a look at their impact report. They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff.
You are only paying more for that phone because they are a tiny boutique manufacturer who has to outsource everything. The fair/eco stuff is just fair- and greenwashing.
If you buy a phone because you want to look fair/eco, buy a Fairphone. If you actually really care for fair/eco, get an used phone and donate some money to the correct NGOs or charities.
I’ve looked through their report and I can’t find this info. The only thing I’ve found is a ~€2 bonus per phone to their factory workers, which is only a small fraction of a phones supply chain. Can you provide a more detailed reference supporting your claim?
Read through the whole report, sum up all the money they mention. It comes out to $16 000. Double that for the stuff where they don’t mention money (because they surely would mention anything that costs more than the things they do mention). Double it again, for a safety margin. Double it again, because we are really generous. Now we are at €128 000. Divide that by the number of devices sold in 2024 and you get $1.24. Now add the $1.20 (Page 29) they pay as a living wage bonus and you arrive at $2.44 per device.
And now let’s be super generous and double that guess again, and you end up with the <€5 per device that I quoted above.
The picture becomes clearer when you look at what they say about their fair material usage.
Take for example the FP5 (page 42 & 67). Their top claim here is “Fair materials: 76%”, which they then put a disclaimer next to it, that they only mean that 76% of 14 specific focus materials is actually fair. On the detail page (page 67) they specify that actually only 44% of the total weight of the phone is fairly mined, because they just excluded a ton of material from the list of “focus materials” to push up the number.
The largest part of these materials are actually recycled materials (37% of the 44% “fair” materials). The materials they are recycling are plastics, metals and rare earth elements. That’s all materials that are cheaper to recycle than to mine. You’ll likely find almost identical amounts of recycled materials in any other phone, because it makes economical sense. It’s just cheaper. Since these materials cost nothing extra to Fairphone, we can exclude them from the list, which leaves 1% of actually fair mined material (specifically gold), and 6% of materials that they bought fairwashing credits for.
Also, the raw materials of phones are dirt cheap compared to the end price. The costly part is not mining the materials, but manufacturing all the components.
With only 1% of the materials being fairly mined and only 6% being compensated with credits, you can start to see why in total they spend next to nothing on fair mining/fair credits.
Thanks for the detailed reply. You saying that “They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff” is a complete lie. It’s not a number they’re claiming, it’s a number you’ve estimated. And lets be clear: what you’ve done is take $3k in gold credits plus $13k cobalt credits and multiplied that by an arbitrary 8x.
I think you’ve gone into your analysis with a foregone conclusion. There simply isn’t enough information to say anything about the cost overheat of being “fair”.
And yet the FP4 was significantly less recycled. Plastic is certainly not cheaper to recycle; that’s a lie the plastic industry’s been pushing for a while.
Yeah, I see, thanks a lot for taking the time to read through the report and write this.
It’s fucking sad but honestly thanks for pointing it out, I hadn’t even read the report.
Yeah, it is sad. Turns out, Fairphone is just yet another fairwashing company. People spend lots of money and suffer through using this phone with its trash quality software because they think that they are saving the planet by doing so, and in the end they actually just indirectly donated maybe a few Euros to some random fair credit mill.
Keep your eyes peeled and read what’s beind the marketing, because even companies that look good rarely are.
Especially for stuff like fair/eco/green, where it’s really hard to objectively measure how good something is and where legal standards are ridiculously low.
Like I’ve said before- their market is small enough they should be trying to get everyone they can to buy it.
That’s what they’re doing. That’s why they remove the headphone jack in favour for a slimmer, lighter phone. Their market research showed that’s more important to a bigger portion of their customers.
I’ve never met someone that cared about a thinner phone, they’ve been too thin since 2015…
People that want their ducking hradphine jacks? They are everywhere.
This is thing with not understanding how statistics work. The point is that your personal experience is biased.
These people are not passionate about phone thickness. They won’t start or even have conversations about it. Specially since, for the most part, the companies are already catering to their tastes. But, if placed in front of a survey and asked to rank phone features by their importance for their purchase decisions, the overwhelming majority will rank other phones features way above a headphone jack. Most people on the planet are not audiophiles, and the majority of people perceive wires as an annoyance and an inconvenience.
That is the point of surveying and market research. To check with the actual potential buyers what is worth making. Of course it isn’t a guarantee, looking here at the recent flop of the Samsung Edge. But otherwise, a single person’s perception of the market will never be complete or accurate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you interact with people outside of audiophile circles? I’m not in any, and I haven’t heard anyone in person complain about a missing headphone jack in many years, not after a few years of airpods being available. Hell, I don’t know anyone who uses wired headphones anymore. I have heard people mention that my phone is too heavy, and I’m using a pixel 9 pro. Before this phone I was using a pixel 5, and I had people telling me my phone was too small/plastic-y. I don’t think you have an understanding of “normal people” They aren’t tech enthusiasts, they aren’t audiophiles, and they are genuinely shocked when I tell them about how egregiously most tech companies are violating their privacy, but are quick to say that they don’t care/don’t want to give up creature comforts to prevent it.
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.
Very strange how mine can somehow fit a 7000mAh battery, dual SIM + SD card slot and a regular jack. Hmm…
Is it repairable only with a screwdriver and parts you can buy from the manufacturer?
That’s a definite advantage of the Fairphone.
I guess, I will find out how mine fares when the need arises. Hasn’t happened in 4.5 years yet.
Are you a Republican? Because that really sounds like “mine works, so fuck everyone else”
Are you a murican? Cuz you really sound like USA is your whole world.
Okay, I’m going to ask… why don’t you use wireless?
Edit: some results are in, and the only reasonable answer is better audio quality, although that’s probably no longer true. The rest are fairly weak reasons.
Lol’d at the 10m extension cord though, thanks for that one.
Let me give you simple example. When I take a flight, I like to watch my own media. Those flights sometimes are upwards of 10 hours. If I use wireless earbuds, both the earbuds and my phone will run out of battery and I have to charge them separately. However, since I have a phone with a headphone jack, my earbuds never run out of battery, I can charge my phone while I’m using them and I don’t need to use a single adapter.
Oh yeah, and the audio quality is also better.
That’s not simple. That’s very specific, and you really listen for 10 solid hours? Also if you’re dropping 10 hour flight money… I feel like there’s a wireless solution in your price range
You clearly didn’t get the point. The cost isn’t the only issue. There are downsides to wireless earbuds and I honestly do not prefer them most of the time. In my example, I’m using them the entire time because I don’t want to hear airplane noises and yeah, I am playing something on them most of the time if I’m flying alone.
Sorry but this is a very very dumb take. “if you spent a lot of money, you could spend MORE money”. Really dude? The solution is just having a damn headphone jack, not spending money because corporations want you to.
Alright what phone are you using with a jack?
Sony Xperia 5V
I didn’t know sony made phones
They’ve always made phones…
It’s about options. You can still use Bluetooth even with a phone that has a 3.5mm jack. I also run live sound and have used the ability to plug my phone directly into the board for background music multiple times.
Latency issue, in some use cases it’s not acceptable to have 0.1~0.3 sec lag, like racing games or rhythm games.
(Yeah, I know there are some wireless protocols to make latency shorter, but it might cost a lot to buy a supported headphone, and it’s still useless if the phone doesn’t have proper protocol supports.)
wireless headphones run out of battery, and most seem to have atrocious build quality and battery life.
The battery? Mine last at least 8 hours and charge in two.
Battery degradation. Wired earphones/headphones can be BIFL if treated properly. A typical wireless device will see battery degradation within a handful of years, and I have yet to see a decent TWS solution with replaceable batteries.
The Fairbuds does have a replaceable battery if that’s what you are searching for. Sure, the sound won’t be as good as a Sony, Bose, or the like, but it would be good enough if your focus is durability instead of perfect sound quality.
1.Wired headphones deliver better audio quality 2.Wired headphones are harder to lose 3.Wired headphones don’t need batteries, so: a)less e-waste b)no need to check if they are charged 4.Wired headphones are more secure, connection cannot be intercepted and phishing attacks with BT are not possible 5.While wired headphones are plugged, no one can take your phone without you noticing
Phishing attacks? On a headphone? 🤣
Wired headphones can be intercepted, as the wires unfortunately also act as an antenna (I’m a computer security technician, we semi-routinely do such interception).
As for sound quality, it will always be limited by the DAC quality, and there is little way to add a good quality DAC without adding significant weight to the phone. Did you ever wonder why audiophiles audio players looks like bricks? That why.
But I agree with point 2, 3 and 5, they are valid, but I don’t agree with some aspects:
Now all my audio equipments are wireless, and I change their batteries every 5 years or so. Unfortunately I bought mines before Fairphone launched theirs, so it wasn’t an option, but once any of my headphones eat the dust for good, I’ll probably buy an easily repairable one if audio quality and codecs are acceptable (I’m an Audiophile, so that’s important to me).
Yep. There was a type of attack that utilized wireless headphone merging as an attack vector. With wired headphones, you can simply turn Bluetooth off.
I know of DACs (been through audiophile phase myself), and sure, a typical integrated mobile one doesn’t deliver THAT big of a quality. Still, wired headphones are not bottlenecking much just by the means of connection. And they are generally cheaper for the same audio quality, because you don’t need to put batteries etc.
Agree with your counterpoints. On the cable - I much prefer detachable options, so you can replace the cable easily. but the connector has to be strong enough - I’m a bit tired to see my Moondrop Chu disconnecting and shaking somewhere in my pocket.
LOL, 10m extension cord. I mean you’ve already established that you don’t give a crap about sound quality with your first point but that’s just ridiculous. Not to mention the 10m cord that your dragging around the house.
I don’t really care about sound quality when using earphones at home because I only use them when there’s a lot of ambient noise so the sound will be bad either way. When doing vacuum cleaning, or the dishes, stuff like that. When I still had a smartphone I used a 1,5m extension cord so it wouldn’t pull on the jack each time I move, but since it died I’m using a much longer one plugged to my PC (not actually 10m, that was hyperbole, more like 5m). It’s not very convenient I’ll admit, but it does the job.
Wait… have you actually lost your mouse? Hilarious if true 😂
Well not actually lost… I just haven’t found under which furniture it rolled yet 😅