Some people consider more things than just being a fastest bang for the buck.

The difference is striking, though. It’s half as fast at the starting line. I can only imagine what’ll happen to it once it runs Android 23 in eight years.

Unethical mining, forced labour, e-waste, data mining, and lots of other things. If you care at all, that is.

That’s fair, but then buying a second hand iPhone should solve all of those issues for you. No additional materials beind mined, no days collection, and the only forced labour you’ll be adding to the market is you forcing open the back to replace the battery.

It speaks more about principles than anything else.

It does, but principles don’t translate to tangible benefits for the products.

How exactly is that environmentally friendly than starting to use a phone made by a company with higher ethics?

It is, unless Fairphone manages to make an impact. To make an impact, they’ll need to convince “normal” people to buy the phone. And to do that, they need to put a phone out in the market place at a competitive price.

It’s good that there’s an ethical new phone out there, but the simple truth is that the general consumer will ignore this thing if it costs twice as much as a phone with similar specs.

Rich people buy new phones, less rich buy phones from the rich, and so on. No one needs to look past the marketing into ethics in how they were made and companies keep profiting in billions by exploitation of the poor. So so environmentally friendly. ^ You need to be pretty rich to be able to afford a Fairphone. I guess the cycle continues?

I’m not sure how companies benefit from a second hand market, though. Second hand flagship phones compete directly with their budget and mid-range models. If they legally could, they’d block you from being able to sell your phone.

And yes, reusing an old phone is more environmentally friendly than buying a new one even if the new one is sustainably built. If you care about the environment, you should be happy with the second hand market, and encourage others to buy second hand phones. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” is said in that particular order for a very good reason.

Perhaps the truth is that the review was unfair, because there is no competition to put the Fairphone against. It’s a product built for a specific niche that has no other devices to choose from. But then again, if it only competes in that particular niche, why send one for review to a general tech reviewer at all? There are other reviewers that focus on sustainable technology that would be a lot more positive about this thing, nicely targeting the people who would consider buying such a device.