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.

Sure, but it’s not more valuable than $30 + regular price increases for 60+ years. That’s what a lifetime membership is.

Lets flip that around: For my own finances $300 is a lot more valuable than $30 for 10 years. So if I’m to expect that the company will go out of business in 10 years or so, I would have been better off paying for the subscription.

Lets also not forget that companies don’t take that $300 and responsibly invest it. It gets reinvested in a risky bid to grow the company and get enough people to subscribe in order to pay for your service going forward.

Lifetime services/updates are always a scam. The economics of this are really simple: Nebula is $30 per year or $300 lifetime. That lifetime membership covers only 10 years of subscription. So what’s the plan after that? There’s only really three outcomes:

• They stop providing you service
• They go bankrupt trying to provide you service
• They grow and stay big enough to be able to subsidize your service for your lifetime. I can’t overstate how unlikely this is.

Buying a lifetime membership you’re gambling that Nebula will grow big enough that other people’s subscription will pay for your service. Your membership is a liability for them.

It’s also bad from the other end. Lots of small software devs will sell lifetime updates but eventually need to abandon their products because they simply run out of money.

A service continually costs money to provide. You can’t pay for that with a single payment. Lifetime services are simply incompatible with running a business long term. It’s a bad idea and someone is always getting screwed.

Support for 2015 macs ended 7 months ago. Forget 10 years ago, my 2015 mac doesn’t run like it used to in Big Sur.