I mean, I get that. It’s just that I’m triggered by the amount of people that constantly comment on every thread raging about how dare they not include a headphone jack. It’s insane how loud this minority is when in real life very few people actually care about it.

I was more so focusing on the overall user experience, so including the ease of use and the convenience of not having to fight with a cable. I definitely agree that Bluetooth earbuds aren’t perfect. They have their issues. But I feel like for the general user, they objectively offer an improved experience. 90 or 95% of people can’t hear the difference between wired and wireless earbuds. If you don’t care about audio quality then I feel like it has objectively more upsides than it has downsides. As people mentioned about cars and the like, there are instances where having a headphone jack is necessary, but I feel like the number of cases where this issue is unavoidable and is a real problem for people is so minuscule that it’s not worth it for the companies to bother.

I mean, in the end, I personally don’t care if a phone has a headphone jack. It’s not like I wouldn’t buy it because it has one. I was more so triggered by the people constantly screaming at every phone for not having a headphone jack, when in reality it’s not important for most people.

It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to

That doesn’t really make that much sense. A toaster can run most apps people use nowadays. Apple would sell you a brick if it had their App Store on it. There is an argument that they want to upsell you to bigger phones so that you pay more for the device itself, but if it was really worth it for them to offer smaller versions, I’m sure they would. Their biggest profits by far are from the App Store. And if they really were ignoring that market in the hopes of upselling people, then other companies would offer mini phones and people that want them would switch. But they’re basically nonexistent.

Case and point, mini version accounted for barely 5% of sales in 2021: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-iphone-13-mini-is-over-ending-this-small-screen-fan-favorite/

Do you really think that Fairphone, a company with sales in the thousands, should cater to five percent of the market? And comparing this to the SteamDeck is also not really fair, because Valve owns Steam and they subsidize SteamDecks via purchases from Steam. Fairphone doesn’t earn anything from purchases made on the Play Store. And in addition the SteamDeck is considered a success because it captured like 50% of the market when it released. The market is in general really small for these devices, but the SteamDeck was a notable success because it managed to become the go-to device. Were the market for handheld consoles as big as the phone market, the SteamDeck very much would not be considered a success.

Damn, this is totally gonna be a thing, and I’m all for it. We shall all become cute cat girls.

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

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.

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.

The problem is a lot of people say 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 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.

That’s a bit of a flawed approach, at least if we’re talking about the average user. The average user doesn’t want nor shouldn’t need to have a deep understanding of the OS. If you’re a dev or interested in it, sure, it’s good to know, but asking the average person to have to constantly tinker with their OS is like asking people to diagnose their own illnesses. Sure, it would be nice if you knew medicine and why you were sick and how to cure it, but it doesn’t make sense to expect everyone to do it. Most people don’t care, and have better things to do in their life.

For now it seems to work, but I now have a different issue, the fingerprint scanner doesn’t work when I unlock my phone sometimes, which never happened before. Weird

Yeah but LLMs don’t train off of data automatically, you need a separate dedicated process for that, it won’t happen from just using them. In that sense, companies can still use your data to train them in the background, even if you aren’t directly using an LLM, or they can not train them even when you are using them. I guess in the latter case there is a bigger incentive for them to train them than otherwise, but to me it seems basically the same thing privacy wise.

One thing I don’t get with people fearing AI is when something adds AI and suddenly it’s a privacy nightmare. Yeah, in some cases it does make it worse, but in most cases, what was stopping the company from taking your data anyways? LLMs are just algorithms that process data and output something, they don’t inherently give firms any additional data. Now, in some cases that means data that previously wasn’t or that shouldn’t be sent to a server is now being sent, but I’ve seen people complain about privacy so often in cases where I don’t understand why AI is your tipping point, if you don’t trust the company to not store your data when using AI, why trust it in the first place?

They aren’t saying every person of those generations is the same. Your family is very techy and it makes sense that they’d be knowledgeable, but the point of the meme is that there was a generation that grew up with tech that kinda worked most of the time, forcing them to learn how to use it to be effective, leading to a higher proportion of people knowing how computers work. Nowadays, except if your job is fixing computers, the chance you know them in-depth and how to tinker with them is much lower, because there is no need, they just work most of the time.

I’ll try it out, thanks!

Hosting costs heavily depend on the type of service, YouTube’s costs are very much not negligible, but it is true that for most sites it is very cheap. But hosting costs aren’t the only cost, many sites provide useful reviews, news, or testing that costs them money to produce, which they pay for with ads. Yes, some sites survive using alternative payment methods, but I’m skeptical that this can scale to the rest of the internet. My fear is that we’ll end up in a situation where 90% of the internet is just YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and other giants and people get all of their news, reviews and other information from those sites, which I think is worse than having ads.

Lol, lmao even

I mean, this one is 600€ because it’s from a small, low volume company, is highly repairable and invests in a bit more ethical materials. You can still find decent midrange phones for e.g. 300€. My friend got a Xiaomi, idk which one exactly, for 300€, and its performance is about on par with my Fairphone.

I’m not advocating for you being forced physically to watch ads, I’m saying that as it stands, ads are the payment method and you actively blocking them means you’re not paying for what you’re using. I’m not criticising people for that, I’m simply stating a fact. If everyone on the internet was to use adblockers, most of the web would die out, and first to die would be actually useful sites that provide helpful information that they invested time and money into making, such as news, review sites, etc. Perhaps the threat of adblockers itself is benefitial for the internet as it might force websites to find alternate, better payment methods, but I don’t see what you could replace ads with since people won’t be willing to pay a monthly subscription for every site they visit, and most people won’t pay for donations if you try a donations based model.

I’ll give a short overview of my experience with the phone thus far. In general, I’m pretty happy with it. For now it’s adequately snappy. It does lag in some apps and has some odd behavior (YouTube seems to lock the refresh rate to 60 as soon as any preview starts playing, even if it’s off screen, making scrolling not as smooth), but in general the responsiveness of the phone itself is very good. They have some annoying bugs. For example, they still haven’t fixed the screen being locked to like 10Hz when unlocking the phone sometimes. But, in general, it hasn’t really been a problem, have been using it without much issue. The most annoying part has to be the positioning of the volume buttons, for me at least. They’re positioned on the left side of the phone, directly opposite to the power button, so I’m constantly taking accidental screenshots. It’s extremely annoying, and I don’t understand why they decided to put it there. As someone else mentioned, there are tiny gaps between the screen and the frame, as well as some other seams, so some dead skin gets in there making the phone look a bit dirty, but it isn’t too bad. Double tap to wake is pretty bad, it often doesn’t register double taps properly, and it often gets accidentally activated in my pocket, making the phone try to dial emergency services, forcing me to disable it.

While I have been quite critical when listing the faults, in general I’m still happy with the phone. I was actually surprised by the camera. It’s nothing special, but I expected it to be worse. However, it has much beter performance than I expected, especially in low light, just that the zoom is very bad since it doesn’t have an optical zoom lense. It does what I need it to while being more repairable and from a more ethical company, so if you need a mid range phone, and don’t mind minor inconveniences, I’d recommend it.