Fairphone 6 is switching to a new design that's even more sustainable

All phones eventually become obsolete, but their guts could be used in so many ways. I'd love for example if someone made an enclosure acting also as multi port docking station so that old phones with unlocked bootloader (Fairphone being one of them) could be reflashed with a different operating system then used as mini PCs, media players, IoT wall terminals with bigger screens or other uses. Seeing all that perfectly good electronics going into landfills because planned obsolescence says so just irritates me. Can we do that at least for unlocked ones? Framework did something similar for their laptop mainboards, minus the docking station.function as they already have more ports than a phone. Any chances that this could be doable with Fairphone hardware?

> then used as mini PCs, media players, IoT wall terminals with bigger screens or other uses

If they can be used like that, why couldn't they be used... as phones?

Changing phone every two years is not sustainable, even if the old phone is used as an IoT wall terminal: it's still "consuming" one phone every two years. In a sense, an old phone in a drawer uses less energy than an old phone staying powered to control a lightbulb.

> planned obsolescence

Nitpick: I like to call it "premature obsolescence". Planned obsolescence is the idea of engineering the product to not last more than some time. I think nowadays it's often not the case; rather we engineer the product to last for the time of the warranty (1-2 years) and not more. And a product dying after 1 year is "premature", even though it was not actively engineered for that.

Under the new EU Ecodesign regulation, smartphone manufacturers must provide software updates for at least 5 years after the date of last sale, not 1-2 years.

(Applies to newly released devices, not to devices which were already on the market as of June 20).

https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules...