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.

they stop selling parts quickly

That’s weird. If they stopped making parts how did I get a replacement battery for my fairphone 3?

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?

Wirelessly.

FairPhone doesn’t do wireless charging.

A big problem they have is that they have to rely on Qualcomm for security updates, and the flagship chips simply don’t get 8+ years of support. Fairphone uses Qualcomms IOT chips, which come with much longer support.