I find it interesting how every post I see on Lemmy about Fairphone always has half of the comments complaining about the lack of a head home jack, but in real life I don’t know a single person that really laments it’s removal. All the people I personally know are fine with Bluetooth headphones. This is just such a loud minority, it’s impressive. I know that there is overlap between people that want a headphone jack and people that want a repairable phone, but still, I feel it’s way over-represented in the comments.
Since you asked, the lack of the headphone jack is the exact reason I have not upgraded my phone. I use my phone for music in my two cars and my home gym. None of those currently have Bluetooth.
Upgrading all 3 is just a matter of money of course - throw everything I have away & buy new. I see no reason to do that.
You have been visited by the USB-C port. This post is now protected against headphone jack jihadists
Give me a phone with two USB-C ports so I don’t need a dongle when I wire up to my USB-C headphones and battery bank
I would actually spend money in this. :)
That wouldn’t be bad, for extra couple of bucks headphone manufacturers could give us C jacks and a pass-through as well.
Wonder if this problem will be “solved” with Qi2 (magnetic charging) in the future. Pixel 10 is supposed to have it if we’re talking Android. Otherwise with 2 USB-C ports you have Lenovo Legion 2 Pro and Lenovo Legion Y90 but that’s not mainstream
I had high hopes for wireless charging. But in the end it’s just heat and battery stress for no good reason. Just bring back some Pogo pens or maybe a couple of pads on the back of the phone or something.
USB-C FTW!
They largely brought that on themselves. I mean obviously they did by removing the jack, but I think moreso by claiming to be better than the rest of the industry - and charging a premium for that difference.
When Samsung removed the jack it was annoying, and also very hypocritical as they had made fun of Apple for that just a year before, but it was to be expected from a corporation like that. These guys promised they weren’t like that, and then did the same thing.
You can imagine it like this: if you see an ad by a pop star trying to sell you some bullshit product that doesn’t work you’d think “that’s shitty” and move on. But if you saw the same ad, but instead of the plain old pop star it was the members of Rage Against the Machine, you’d notice that a lot more. Everything they had done before would ring hollow, and every time someone would bring them up you’d remember that they’re just posers looking to make a buck off of a demographic.
And that’s how I feel about this phone. Just posing as something better.
I can see that, that’s a fair point, but I don’t think it’s malicious from their standpoint. I just think that when you look at their sales, they really are trying to cut down costs as much as possible while retaining their main goals of being a repairable phone with ethical materials, because in the end, if they’re not profitable, they won’t be making phones anymore, and then you won’t have a company making repairable or ethical phones at all. Headphone jacks are a relatively easy thing to remove because realistically, very few people use them nowadays. There is a vocal minority that wants them but they really are just a minority, and catering to every single niche for a company as small as them isn’t realistic.
cause you live in a part of the world, that has already gave up. including yourself.
I mean, I didn’t give up anything? What do I have to give up? The user experience is objectively way better with wireless earbuds. You don’t have to care about a cable being tugged around, battery life is a non-issue for me. I’ve never ran out of battery on my headphones and modern connectivity is pretty good, I’ve never had them fail to connect or anything like that. The only people that have any sort of benefit from wired headphones are audiophiles, that I can assure you 95% of people are not. They will not notice a difference between the headphone jack and wireless earbuds. Even if you gave me a headphone jack, I wouldn’t use it. I just do not have a reason to use one. I’ve been using wireless Wi-Fi headsets for my PC for a long while now, I don’t even use a headphone jack on my PC. It’s just way more convenient having wireless headsets.
You don’t really know the meaning of objective do you?
Look at the thread for “objective” reasons people want the jack.
I’m still on my Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. People getting new phones every year or two do it because they want to, they don’t keep their phone in a case, or it got ran over or lost at sea or stolen.
My phone is five years old. Five years from now there will be very few Faiphone six’s left in use. Why do you think they’re already on their sixth iteration of phone? Can you upgrade the Fairphone two and make it just as good as the six?
Please release an FP6 mini. Model its size on iphone 13 mini or better yet, the 2018 SE. It would be worth more to me than the current gigantic model so I would pay more for it.
The problem is a lot of people see they want small phones, but in practice almost nobody actually buys small phones. The reason companies don’t make them, and many have tried, is they just don’t sell. Fairphone is a pretty small company. They do not sell that many phones, so having multiple SKUs of the same phone would just tank their profitability.
I agree. FP needs to walk a fine line between ethics and being profitable. In FP threads people keep making demands instead of being able to compromise
You worked to create a phone made with ethical factory conditions which no one else does? How nice! Wait, what do you mean it doesn’t have a headphone jack/ is too big?! I don’t care about the people anymore
Same with people saying “the price is not worth it for a mid tier phone” yes of course it’s not, you’re partly paying for how it’s manufactured, which has no direct benefit to you as a user. This is an ethical purchase. Recycled cotton t-shirts made in Germany cost 40 euro, I wonder why?
I’ve been using my FP6 with e/os for a week now and I’m very happy with it.
My phone before it was a S10.
I love that they finally listened and added back the jack!
The value of the fp is the refurbished market. All the component can be replaced, and the system will be maintained for years by the os.
I’m happy to see a new one in the market, because it means I will be able to upgrade my fp4 for cheaper now! 😁
Not looking for a new phone for a few more years from now. But when I do I really hope that this phone will be available with a better camera and that Linux mobile options will be mature as well.
The fairphone 5 actually did extremely well if you look at MKBHD’s camera competition in 2024. If you don’t care about having very over-saturated, over-sharpened, images that pop on social media, then it is actually very competitive (except for with the pixel beating everyone). Miles better than a HMD global or Samsung A-series camera. It looks better than the Samsung S series and daylight iPhone in many shots.
I think the 6 has a similar camera. It’s never going to beat a DSLR, but it isn’t meant to.
As a Fairphone 5 owner, 6 seams like a downgrade to me, with it’s USB 2. I don’t care about whatever refresh rate they have, USB alt mode is way more important to me, also dropping audio jack was bad enough already.
Well, the audio problem is not going to be worse with 2.0. USB 2.0 can deliver 480Mbps. Audio data rates are in Kbps. Even at 192kHz, 24 bui studio recordings it is only 4.6Mbps. Stereo audio is easy from a digital perspective. Also, USB 2.0 is MUCH less susceptible to bad hardware design, bad cables and dongles, and bad shielding. A single twisted pair at low speeds and minimal negotiation is much simpler and almost never drops. In a joystick design I did, I had a 20cm long untwisted pair in testing and it never dropped at all.
USB 3.0+ (and especially external display capabilities) is an order of magnitude more noise sensitive, impedance variation limited, and susceptible to bad design. If you use a non-twisted cable, it won’t even negotiate USB 3.0 and will only work with 2.0.
That being said, USB 3.0+ for large file transfers and an external monitor desktop mode would be so much better, but I guess not many people use those.
Usb needs power. That means electricity that means more ftighin climate change.
Headphone jacks are smarter, clearer, and better for the environment
Usb head phones are trick. But hey. Who cates. Its the apocalypse
Do you think headphone jacks don’t use electricity?
I have accubattery on my phone. During the past 3.5 years with it, I have charged 2 143 031 mAh. That is at 3.7V average, 7.93kWh over 3 years.
An dongle jack usually had a chip that uses ~1mW. A headphone alone still has to power the headphones, which is between 0.25mW and 1mW.
That would take 1 000 000 hours in order to have a difference between 1kWh and 0.25kWh ( approximately 0.23€ difference), that is over 114 years of straight listening. That is the same difference of running your oven for about 5 minutes, once.
That is a very weird hill to die on for the environment. That is about 0.001s of energy consumption of a billionaire.
Dude, comparing USB headphone consumption to 3.5mm jack headphone power consumption is laughable. The power consumption is so negligible it’s insane. It’s on the order of magnitude if you were to forget to turn off the light in a room for 1 minute each year. Phones themselves consume extremely little power, I forget the exact number but I think it’s in the realm of a few kW/h per year, and USB headphones are going to be a fraction of a percent of that
That’s a miniscule amount of energy and when compared to the internal DAC and loss in analog cable with 32 Ω impedance, it might be the same, give or take a few microwatts – negligible compared to other appliances and HVAC. The durability and frequency of buying a new pair is more important if you’re into the environment.
The audio quality for either is more correlated with physical build quality than whether the length of wire is susceptible to noise and own losses (where the USB has an edge). Some headphones have terrible impedance matching and awful drivers no matter the interface they use.
And the “smarter” point: Depends. Support for multiple buttons is hit-and-miss either way. As for audio from non-phones, you might have driver issues for digital or need a line level amplifier for analog.
I prefer the jack because of compatibility with all other hardware and more physical resilience: I don’t want to wear out or dislodge my phone’s charging and data port whille running with headphones.
$600 I’d go for it… $900 in the US… :-( can’t justify it. I’ll keep watching closely though. I so want one of these. As well as a Framework laptop, in the future.
900 as a flagship price, for mid tier phone, not worth it.
Article is paywalled for me
They decided to paywall the verge for me too
But it’s perfectly visible with noscript
The fun part is that I used to whitelist the verge on my ad blocker because I liked it. Ok, you get nothing, then
Also works to just stop loading the page when the text and images appear, lol.
Best I could come across. Can’t access the other archive sites atm for some reason.
Lol tariffs singing their magic tune for Trumpistan?,
We are required to sing doot doot doot here, by law.
I’m very tempted to get one, at least once there’s a lineage build for it, since it will let me finally degoogle completely. Currently on an S24 and even with ADB it’s still a nightmare with the phone constantly telling me there’s an “issue” with my google account (which doesn’t exist anymore) and google services like gemini reinstalling after updates.
/e/OS is a pretty good de-Googled alternative, fully supported. :)
I might try it out then. I’ve heard mixed things on e, something about security patches coming months later than other ROMs, but I see murena claim that they are in line with most android manufacturers, just not as quick as hardened ROMs like graphene. Maybe I’ll see this week about swapping over.
A little rant about that, sorry in advance:
The Graphene team seems very busy trash talking /e/OS and Fairphone on social media (at least Mastodon) for not being secure enough.
Their criticism boils down to how nothing except GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone can ever be “secure enough”, but they are weirdly aggressive and insistant about it targetting /e/ specifically.
I used to care when I saw their posts as of course I want my phone to be reasonably safe, but the more I looked at it the more it boled down to bullshit.
Furthermore:
- They insist one should buy a Pixel phone produced by Google - avoiding Google is my #1 priority from the start. Clearly my values don’t overlap with theirs
- They pretend like /e/ is super dangerous because non-0-day exploits can get patched later. Yet /e/ provides software updates for much longer, while in the past all my phones that didn’t break right away have immediately stopped receiving updates. Longer software support = more security.
- Contained apps is not so important if you don’t install random bullshit on your phone. I get as much as possible from f-droid, which is very well screened.
- The communication of the GrapheneOS team around this has been pathetic to the point where I have frankly lost trust in the project. I struggle to trust a team I don’t respect. /e/OS was started by the founder of Mandrake Linux, and as far as I’ve seen he seems to have values that align with mine.
- I like /e/OS. It lets me avoid companies like Google, block trackers, and just use my phone free of things I hate and cannot control or understand. For me, that is security.
Thanks, a good rant is nice to read sometimes. Completely agree on Pixels – even if I got second hand, they seem so unreliable based on having one in the past and knowing a few that have had one. There seems to be so much toxicity coming from that project.
Exactly.
Since /e/OS is not a security-hardened mobile OS, it is targeting standard industry practices. Therefore, for a given release on month N, our current work-flow is to integrate Android security patches from month N-1. As a result, in the worst case, it will take up to 9 weeks to roll out the latest available security updates.In most cases, it will be much sooner.
An exception is made for 0-day exploits: in this case our policy is to build and roll out a patched version of /e/OS as soon as possible.
And based on lineage!
these phones seem pretty intriguing to me with their focus on repairability but i genuinely don’t see the point of they don’t come with an audio jack
Agreed. Freedom from pricy expendable headphones is a thing. And converter-dongles are a ghetto stop-gap created to check boxes on a brochure.
Still no 3.5 mm jack.
Is this a real complain or I’m too obtuse to understand this as a running joke?
I mean there have been usb c to 3.5 for quite a while now.
This is a real complaint, and for me personally, it’s a complete dealbreaker.
There have been converters, but I don’t want to choose whether I want to charge my phone or listen to music (¿por qué no los dos?, i.e. “why not both?”). I also don’t want to add up lines of dongles for something as primitive and actively used as a headphone jack.
3,5mm jack doesn’t take much space and is used by many people, so why remove it?
For regular companies, the answer is clear: to sell you wireless devices often produced by the same companies, costing more.
But for Fairphone, a “fair” company that always shipped their phones with it, this seems like a betrayal. Failing to mention this giant point of concern is not great for a review article, either.
Real complaint.
yeah so? If you need to regularly use one of those then that is a good argument for having it in the device itself
I really do want it because I hate being forced to buy superfluous shit that didn’t need to exist to get the same functionality I had previously. I’m also not getting a new car every friggin’ year so I still drive something without bluetooth (I also can’t just get a new radio for it) and would rather listen to my own playlists than ads on the radio.
The acceptable compromise would be packaging a 3.5mm to USBC jack with the goddamn phone. If the real reason it’s not there was because of space in the device, this practice would be standard.
Packaging the USB-C-to-3.5 doesn’t solve the problem for me. I could plug in a headphone or line out AND a charger at the same time. And yes I frequently used that. There’s are adapters that do both, but they are fiddly.
Also I will need to have that stupid adapter with me. I have many many headphones. There’s a headphone in every jacket I own (you never know when your need one). Every backpack. I then forget to bring the fucking adapter, and what use is all the depositing of headphones so I’ll always have one? I’m not adding adapters to my headphone stashes, that’s for sure.
I really do want it because I hate being forced to buy superfluous shit that didn’t need to exist to get the same functionality I had previously
This is the same enegry as complaining about a new car not being able to play your old tapes.
That’s a bad comparison tbh. Bluetooth audio isn’t a superior technology over wired audio (in many ways it’s inferior). The two have always been included together with no issue until one company decided to drop one of them in order to more easily sell more expensive and less durable stuff. Other companies followed like sheep.
With aptx codec, its nearly the same as cd quality without the hassle of cds.
A data rate of 352kbps for aptX and 576kbps for aptX HD is hardly cd quality. It’s plenty for Spotify of course.
I’m not against BT headphones, but you don’t need to remove the headphone jack for it.
A data rate of 352kbps for aptX and 576kbps for aptX HD is hardly cd quality.
Those are compressed bitrates of the full 1.4mbps of a cd. Aptx hd is near lossless. You’d have to be a serious audiophile to notice the difference. Which case, are you going to be listening from your phone with its shitty DAC?
Hardly. The quality is worse than the mp3s I downloaded from the pirate bay back in the day. Aptx hd is better but fairly uncommon. Sbc in high bitrate wounds fairly good but I’ve only come across it on linux with pipewire.
When CDs started taking place of cassettes, most vehicles had BOTH tapedecks and CD players. They didn’t immediately ditch the old shit. They actually compromised.
And how long have phones and cars had bluetooth and aux?
IDK; I havent had a car with bluetooth yet.
So get a 20 year old phone to match your car?
It’s a real complaint to an extent; The real issue is that the jack itself isn’t enough, to be worth anything it needs a good DAC behind it and there have only been a handful of phones ever that have had that. So the jack complaint itself is mostly a meme as yeah, the USBC splitter option would sound just as good as most jacks built in.
