The market wanted thinner phones and most people want wireless earbuds anyway.

Luckly for us there are laws and other security measures in place to help prevent it. At least Proton is under a loop now, other options are probably just as bad but we don’t know about it

It’s not that it isn’t the biggest market it’s just that it’s not big enough to be worth while. An 8 year old Android is not going to be supporting all apps, which often makes it unsuitable for people as well. That doesn’t help the whole ordeal either.

Probably because people (like audiophiles) buy things like the Fiio M15S or cheaper alternatives if they really want good sound quality. Idk any who wants to spend 1100 euro on a MP4 player that is bigger than most phone’s, but hey.

Edit: I mean so the market does exist yes, but it seems to be filled by things like MP4 players (running Android) and old iPods with flash mods.

Them being an absolute moron hasn’t affected the product for me or my experience with the rest of the company.

If I would stop using any and old company that had some bullshit owner, some bullshit thing done in the past or done currently I would basically have nothing I can use. The moment the opionins of him will start to impact the product I am out, but considering there is a foundation above the company which means he has a limited amount of impact I will wait and see before I act.

What phone do you have then?

Apparently the market is not big enough for phone’s to really exist with all the features everybody want for an acceptable price. Otherwise more options with good sound quality and SD card slots exist. But the nature of how DAC’s works is that it is hard to fit that in a slim phone and especially if you want long battery life etc.

Maybe taking two devices is a bit stupid, but on the other hand you can also ask yourself how often you can leave your phone at home or wherever when you want to listen to music.

I would also prefer a phone that has a good DAC, has a SD card and has good working apps. So unless Apple is going to start making that again (they never will), I’ll probably stick with an iPhone and a separate audio device or wireless buds/headphone. Android is not for me and finding the correct Android is a bullshit mess. But I know of others who are interested in an Android device with a good DAC.

You can check the privacy statement.

But considering it’s an American company I can tell you that it will abuse your data

I have seen Proton as a sponsor once or twice and I don’t have any complains about the products they are selling.

A MP4 player can play games or display books/comics. The once from FiO basically are Android devices from which you cannot call (or maybe with an internet connection you can).

Being on the go without an internet connection is getting rarer and rarer anyway so that is less of an issue for most.

Truth of it all is that most people want tinner phones and/or wireless earbuds/headsets and the people who do not are for a big part audiophiles who want better audio quality than a phone is going to offer. So there is only a relatively small section of users who prefer the audio jack.

I used to want one and a SD card and a good 3mm jack as well, but it just doesn’t exist. So I switched to using a NAS (a raspberry Pi can get your pretty far), plus an iPod or Spotify with dongles or just wireless.

Yeah man cause a SD card that sits in your phone also works as a backup solution.

Yeah that is fair, but I preferred that a lot more than just using the 3mm jack on my Redmi Note 13 Pro. Man the DAC in that thing sucks.

Because most people don’t need a 3mm jack anymore, I prefer to use a USB-c dac anyway the sound is better.

And I offload the data to a NAS anyway so the storage is irrelevant anyway.

An external DAC is better anyway, just put that on your headphones.

Just get a USB-c dongle and let that sit on your headphones. These days nearly everything has USB-c anyway and the sound is way better. The last phones I had with the USB-c jack (RedMi Note 13 Pro and iPhone 4 before that) all sounded worse than me using a cheap DAC. Getting an expensive DAC will improve the sound even more.

Personally I say that most would need to get a NAS before they need a SD card or you need to get a dedicated Camera or MP4 player if your pictures or music exceed the 500GB max and streaming isn;t an option using a NAS.

The rest of your points are valid.

I am happy with the size of my iPhone 16 and pretty sure there are other brands that don’t have these massive phones as tablets.

But you should first try to reuse something bedore you start to repurpose (or reuse it). If it can’t be repaired or it isn’t viable enough (because nobody want’s it or nobbody wants to pay for the repair) then reuse it

No it’s not, the full ladder is basically (and even legally here in NL rvo.nl )

1. Refuse and rethink
2. Reduce
3. Re-use
4. Refair/refurbish
5. Recycle
6. Recover

But the saying is often used as “Repair, Reuse, Recycle” in the right to repair programs.

Reparing is the first one, idk where reduce comes into the saying.

Maybe we need to include a 4th R?

Ideally people wouldn’t use abbreviations in general context. Searching for it on Ecosia doesn’t help that much either.

But coalitions are a mess on their own, just check politics in Europe. At least Geert Wilders is only an example for Trump and nowhere near as bas

Ideally you wouldn’t have two parties, but have an odd number of parties to figure it out. So three at minimum

Describing the good of the opinions that are more on the right side of the spectrum isn’t going to come across as good if you use conservatives to describe it.