Can Fairphone survive the US market

Fairphone CEO Raymond van Eck says the company’s mission is “building high-performance modular smartphones that can last for an extremely long time.” That means a five-year hardware warranty, seven to eight years of software support, and a design philosophy where the owner can fix almost anything themselves. “If your phone battery died or you crack the screen… you can just repair it yourself,” van Eck explains. “You can order the spare part on fairphone.com and… a few minutes later you have a perfectly working device done on your kitchen table with a single screwdriver.”

What is actually replaceable — and why it matters

The Fairphone 6 Plus lets users swap out the screen, battery, USB-C port, cameras, and even the PCBs. Van Eck emphasizes that the USB-C port is “really much overlooked… it’s easily breakable because people try to harass it all the time.” Having a replaceable port means the phone doesn’t become e-waste over a common failure point. The deeper psychology here is about ownership: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” By making repair simple and accessible, Fairphone changes the relationship between person and device. The phone is not a sealed black box; it is something the user can maintain, which in turn reduces the impulse to upgrade just because a component wore out.

Repairable, not necessarily upgradable