🪫 A Battery I Still Can't Buy Where I Live August 18, 2026 · https://tavi-blog.github.io/a-battery-i-still-cant-buy-where-i-live/

Fairphone put a new phone on sale in the United States this week, the first time the company has sold anything there directly, and the detail that stopped me mid-scroll wasn't the price. It was the screwdriver. The Gen 6+ ships with one in the box, because the battery, the screen, the USB-C port, and nine other parts are designed to come out with it: no glue, no proprietary tool, no trip to a shop that may or may not still stock the part. A replacement screen runs ninety dollars, a battery forty, a port twenty, all sold through the company's own store instead of gatekept behind an authorized repair network. I've run every phone I've seriously considered past some version of this same test for years, and Fairphone has always been the answer that wins on the ethics half and loses everywhere else. This is the first time that felt less true.

The honest reason to skip a Fairphone, for most of the time I've been aware of the company, was never the sourcing. It was the phone itself. Underpowered chips, cameras that lagged two generations behind, missing bands that made it a gamble outside a handful of European carriers. Buying one meant accepting a worse phone as the cost of a cleaner conscience, and I think it's fair to admit that most people, myself included, weren't willing to pay that particular tax indefinitely. A phone is a tool you reach for fifty times a day. Pretending performance shouldn't factor into that decision at all is its own kind of dishonesty, dressed up as principle. The Gen 6+ closes most of that gap on paper: a current mid-range chipset, a 120Hz OLED screen, a camera setup that reads as competitive rather than apologetic, and a stated commitment to software updates running out to the early 2030s, which is longer than most flagships bother promising.

So the practical excuse, the one I've leaned on for years without examining it too closely, is mostly gone. And I still can't buy one. The US launch runs through two carriers there, and nothing about it extends north. I could import a unit, but that means paying duty on top of an already unsubsidized price, gambling on whether the radio bands line up cleanly with a Canadian network, and giving up whatever thin warranty protection exists for a device the company never intended to sell into this market. None of that is a sourcing objection or a performance objection. It's a distribution objection, and it's the one axis I never built into my own evaluation because it never used to be the binding constraint.

That's the part of this I keep turning over. I've spent a long time treating the choice between an ethical phone and a practical one as a decision I make, weighing labor record against camera quality against how much of my data ends up somewhere I didn't agree to. It turns out there's a third variable sitting underneath both of the ones I actually argue with myself about, and it has nothing to do with values or specs. A company Fairphone's size doesn't get to choose to be everywhere at once. Carrier certification, regulatory approval, and after-sales support cost real money per market, and a small manufacturer with a mission has to pick where that money goes before it can pick anywhere else. The country I happen to live in just wasn't first on that list, and no amount of resolving my own ethics-versus-performance argument changes that.

I don't think the answer is pretending an import workaround is the same as the thing actually being available, the way people sometimes talk themselves into a grey-market purchase and call it a principled stand. It's a worse phone experience wrapped around a better supply chain story, and I'd be lying to myself about which one I actually care more about day to day. What I've settled on instead is less satisfying and more accurate: the phone in my pocket right now will probably still be there next year, not because the ethical case lost the argument, but because winning an argument with yourself was never the part that determines whether a product reaches your shelf.