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i find their asking price fair tbh. yeah, it's not competitive spec-wise, but it's what they have to do to keep up their model. they're not big enough to make their own components like screens or have someone make a screen just for them, so they need to find components that will be available for seven years. fair trade materials are also more expensive because all that slave labor and shit does give the not so fair alternatives an edge in the market. the r&d cost for a small phone manufacturer is also spread across fewer units, components also cost more when you're ordering them in smaller amounts, supporting the phone for seven years has its associated costs (on top of not having your customers buy phones 2-3x more frequently), and the sustainable business model does also have overhead compared to riding the razor on the stock market or being VC-funded.
the fairphone is not cheap, but if you care about what they do, care about actually owning your phone (both in terms of rooting and os access, and in terms of hardware access and repairability), and would like to be able to use it for a long time, this is just what it takes. if apple or samsung or google made a fairphone, it would cost less due to their scale, but it would still cost more than the phone you have with the 888. but if you can feel a single-gen upgrade there, you'd likely want to upgrade at a higher frequency anyway.
from what i've seen, some people do use phones the way you do, but a lot of people only swap phones when needed. for them, a fairphone that they can keep for 5-7 years and keep alive even if something happens to it could still be cheaper than the 2-3 other phones they'd need over the same period of time.
I don't see myself doing anything with my s21 other than a new battery in another year.
My problem isn't necessarily the price being so high, it's that the performance is just trash for that price. The repairability for a phone in that performance class is OK. In my mind I compare it to an A6 in performance which comes with amoled screen and there's enough parts on the market to rebuild it forever. The only advantage fairphone has is that there's no glue on the back panel there's thousands of A9s already manufactured.
And the A6 costs < $100 on the used market with a new battery.
IMHO fairphone is making e-waste by making more already obsolete phones and taking advantage of people's desire to think they're saving the world by using a repairable phone when getting something of better quality/performance from the used market is actually better for the environment.