Don’t always give in to the two-year itch

E ver since the arrival of the iPhone 13 and Pixel 6, my two-year-old Huawei P30 Pro has been looking increasingly tired. An ill-advised dip in the bath turned its USB-C charging port into a USB-C non-charging port, and if it weren’t for wireless chargers it would have been sent to the great recycling bin in the sky long ago.

This aside, the phone works perfectly. It’s still receiving security updates and the camera setup is so good I rarely take my “proper” camera with me to product launches. Still, I had the two-year itch. After all, I told myself, I could always pass on my phone to one of my ragged-trousered children and buy something new and shiny instead. So, I started looking.

Anyone who’s read this magazine for a while will know that Lee Grant bangs the right-to-repair drum with a great deal of vigour. That banging has broken through to the point where I seriously considered the Fairphone 4, and the company was kind enough to send one in for me to look at.

The Fairphone earned a largely positive review in last month’s mag, but surely the high point for the firm came when it romped its way to a Hot Hardware of the Week victory in our mid-December podcast. During the show, I was roundly mocked for getting excited about the excellent screwdriver that comes in the box, but to me that is the real point of this product: no glue, just screws. If you can break a part, chances are that you can replace it too. That includes the camera, the screen and the USB-C port.

To my surprise, what my time with the Fairphone 4 ended up proving was that I was happy with the P30

Pro. Its cameras are better than the Fairphone’s, its screen just as luscious, and aside from that pesky port, it works perfectly. If I can squeeze another couple of years’ use out of my phone then why buy something new, with all the accompanying waste of resources that brings?

That’s one itch safely scratched. Sadly, I have another, and that’s my main work computer. I bought my Surface Book 3 in mid-2020, so there’s no sane reason why I should be looking to replace it – except I keep on reviewing newer, sexier laptops.

It also bugs me that Microsoft is only now starting to acknowledge that perhaps glue shouldn’t be the main ingredient in a laptop. Compare that to the Framework Laptop DIY ( see

p50) which, as its name suggests, is so fixable that you can literally put it together yourself. Even the big companies are joining in, with Acer’s Aspire Vero ( see p48) designed with ease of repair as a key selling point.

Now, you may say Acer is jumping on the eco bandwagon. I prefer to be more positive: Acer has spotted a big enough audience to make creating such a laptop viable. It’s a sign that we’re moving away from an era of useless glue to crosshead screw.

I won’t be buying either product because, despite my moans, I really don’t need a new laptop. But even 18 months ago, as my purchase of the Surface Book 3 indicates, I wouldn’t have put repairability anywhere near the top of my demands. That’s changed, and I salute Fairphone and Framework for leading the way. Tim Danton

Editor-in-chief