For a customer who wants the best phone for their money, the Fairphone is objectively worse

Objectivity worse in performance, sure. Some people consider more things than just being a fastest bang for the buck. Unethical mining, forced labour, e-waste, data mining, and lots of other things. If you care at all, that is.

If you want to compare that to a product made by a billion dollar company, no one is stopping anyone. There is cost associated with doing things ethically. Small companies aren’t financed to eat those costs to gain the market. It speaks more about principles than anything else.

I don’t disagree with Linus’ suggestion at the end: even the fairest phone is environmentally costlier than rescuing an old second hand phone

is it? The person who sold the phone is most definitely going to buy a new phone and if they sold the phone released last year they will most likely do so every year. The reason there’s a second hand market with a year old phones is because people obsessively buy new phones. How exactly is that environmentally friendly than starting to use a phone made by a company with higher ethics? Surely the later stacks higher in being environmentally and morally friendly?

Duchebag is spouting capitalists “trickle down” economics. Rather than fix the cause, find the flex tape to hide it. Rich people buy new phones, less rich buy phones from the rich, and so on. No one needs to look past the marketing into ethics in how they were made and companies keep profiting in billions by exploitation of the poor. So so environmentally friendly.