There are a few too many compromises compared to other phones in this price range.
I think you still have to consider the "Fair" in Fairphone to be a significant selling point. That's not a bad thing, but it's not going to go mainstream until it competes with other phones on everything else at their price point.
Electric cars didn't go mainstream until Tesla (roughly) because before that they weren't competitive with mainstream cars in terms of performance, comfort, or other factors.
Electric cars are mainstream in many countries, and I think a reasonable argument could be made that they are mainstream in the US now.
Fairphone is manufactured in Asia where wages are lower. Most smartphones are not made in sweatshops, so while pay may be low, it's unlikely that Fairphone are paying >2x the wages, and I'd bet it's fairly close to the wages others are paying.
I suspect most of their increased costs come from small production runs, and smaller purchase orders for components rather than paying workers more. These are issues that scale well as they become mainstream.
> They can't do magic
This is unfortunately true. I suspect getting to real scale would require investment of the level that Fairphone are unlikely to ever be able to get with their values. This is a failure of society and incentives, but complaining about it isn't going to fix it.
I feel like a better approach would be for Fairphone to tackle one issue, and make a phone that it much more competitive based on that, and scale up the issues they tackle as the business scales.
Single digit percentage sounds mainstream to me – 1 in 100 to 1 in 10 new cars being sold being electric makes them quite common. Given that there are quite a lot of manufacturers, and many models of car, no one manufacturer or model is much more than that (except perhaps the Ford F150 in the US, but that's a weird exception). This market isn't the smartphone market where 1 company controls a large chunk of the market, and the next 2-3 functionally control the rest.
>Given that there are quite a lot of manufacturers, and many models of car, no one manufacturer or model is much more than that
You're comparing manufacturers and individual models to an entire market segment. That electric vehicle prevalence is for all makes and models. The more accurate comparison in my mind would be to V8 cars from all manufacturers, or diesel vehicles from all manufacturers.
I think you still have to consider the "Fair" in Fairphone to be a significant selling point. That's not a bad thing, but it's not going to go mainstream until it competes with other phones on everything else at their price point.
Electric cars didn't go mainstream until Tesla (roughly) because before that they weren't competitive with mainstream cars in terms of performance, comfort, or other factors.