In a bid to reduce global electronic waste, Fairphone has created a smartphone that owners can repair themselves. What makes its technology so sustainable?
I feel people nowadays upgrade out of battery degradation rather than new features/specs.
phones became so damn frustrating to service that people just swap them when their batteries start to degrade, instead of swapping batteries and continue using it.
I’m still using Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 from 2015. Replaced battery 3 times. Each time for <10$ from aliexpress. The last swap was few months ago and surprisingly this one was the best out of all swapped batteries so far.
I don’t plan to replace the phone any time soon. I just wish phones were made more like PCs - you buy a hardware and then you put any software you want on it. Now you buy a hardware and a year of software support then good luck.
Batteries got harder to access, making battery swaps a lot harder and error prone for regular users. The battery used to be easily accessible via the back cover, which was made to be easily removable. Now you have to unglue your screen with a heat gun, get to the battery through the phone guts, remove the original battery which is likely glued in, put the new one, put the phone back together and somehow glue the screen back and hope you didn’t damage anything. Also, from my experience, 3rd party replacement batteries typically don’t last as long as the original ones do. An original battery lasted me 3 years, after which I had to keep replacing 3rd party batteries every 4 months because they kept dying.
I feel people nowadays upgrade out of battery degradation rather than new features/specs.
phones became so damn frustrating to service that people just swap them when their batteries start to degrade, instead of swapping batteries and continue using it.
I’m still using Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 from 2015. Replaced battery 3 times. Each time for <10$ from aliexpress. The last swap was few months ago and surprisingly this one was the best out of all swapped batteries so far.
I don’t plan to replace the phone any time soon. I just wish phones were made more like PCs - you buy a hardware and then you put any software you want on it. Now you buy a hardware and a year of software support then good luck.
Batteries got harder to access, making battery swaps a lot harder and error prone for regular users. The battery used to be easily accessible via the back cover, which was made to be easily removable. Now you have to unglue your screen with a heat gun, get to the battery through the phone guts, remove the original battery which is likely glued in, put the new one, put the phone back together and somehow glue the screen back and hope you didn’t damage anything. Also, from my experience, 3rd party replacement batteries typically don’t last as long as the original ones do. An original battery lasted me 3 years, after which I had to keep replacing 3rd party batteries every 4 months because they kept dying.