The Fairphone (Gen. 6)

Except I don't want to put up with the bs that Apple does to its customers, otherwise I'd buy an iPhone. It's not outrageous to expect USB 3.0, a 15 year old standard, on a 600 Euro phone with modern internals in 2025 that users are expected to keep for a long time without upgrading.

>It's just fine.

Just because it's fine for you doesn't mean it's fine for others. For other's that's the dealbreaker. Fairphone isn't a mainstream brand, it's a niche brand which tends to draw enthusiasts (often tech workers, hackers, tinkerers, etc), and enthusiasts are more picky and expect more features than your regular Apple and Samsung "muggles".

People buy niche phone brands not because they're the most performant or sexy, but because they still provide the niche features that Apple and Samsung gave up on, like SD cards, headphone jacks, removable batteries, etc.

OnePlus had USB 3.0 and DisplayPort outputs on 500 Euro phones all the way in 2019, and that feature was a lifesaver when my laptop suddenly died. There's no excuse now for this phone.

As a product manager, if I had a dime for every time someone insisted with stridency bordering on rudeness that some fringe feature was absolutely critical to my product’s success, despite data showing no market demand even from these overconfident “experts”… I would have a lot of dimes.

Like I said, I don't care what process they did to justify that decision internally, all I said is I'm not buying it since for me it's a deal breaker, but since their competitors ship this feature my money is ging to them. Simples. Free market baby.

If they think it's gonna sell well regardless, then power to them and I wish them well, but how do you know their decision is the right one and my opinion is the wrong one? I guess only time will tell.

But the majority of mainstream users who don't care about those features tend to buy Apple and Samsung anyway, not niche brands they never heard of. So then how do they expect to sway mainstream customers away as you suggest without differentiating features?

Now with the EU repairability laws and recent product developments, changing the display or battery on a Samsung or IPhone isn't the nightmare it once was, so repairability isn't such a huge differentiator feature for Fairphone as it was 5+ years ago, so they need to offer more to stand out, not less. The goalposts have moved, in favor of the consumer.

>As a product manager [...] that some fringe feature was absolutely critical to my product’s success

How niche or mass market was your product? If you have a niche product then fringe features could be important, otherwise your customers might prefer going with your tried and true IBMs since nobody ever got fired for that.

Sufficiently technical users might prefer a used flagship phone that supports custom ROMs, maybe some market segmentation like that is in play here. Case in point, the missing headphone jack, and that the tech specs have never been impressive.

It would also explain why in their forum repairability was called a non-goal from a big user group, only the fair production aspect were relevant.

I'm a fairphone user and promoter. They are a good company for what they do, but I doubt they have the finances to really do anything outside product development, software work (albeit slowly) and a bit of marketing.

If their user survey is anything to go by, they mostly ask about how the users match on their brand and mission, and less about what the users want. Their forum has a bunch of feedback on what they could do differently. Some acknowledged, like lack of communication and software updates (yet to see the results of that).

Shouldn't the user decide what to use it for, instead of others?

If people aren't gonna use USB 3.0, that's fine, but at least have it for those who do, it's not gonna bother the rest.

It's not like USB 3.0 is some expensive rocket science that takes a lot of effort to implement or takes up space in the phone like the headphone jack.