Alt text: Spongebob screaming "I fucking love right to repair. I want to fucking excercise my legal right to maintain my property to reduce electronic waste and save money instead of supporting planned obsolescence in the technology space" with an iFixit knife and smartphone in his hands.
Repairing your old phone won't make it any less insecure. The baseband firmware is a gaping security hole in basically all smartphones, and the only phone I know of that mitigates it is the eye-wateringly expensive Librem 5. It's a very sad state of affairs.
The baseband firmware isn't very secure I agree, but there's a lot you can do to the application processor OS to make it more secure and more private without tinkering with the modem side. Stock Android installations are bloatware and spyware heaven. Just putting a de-Googled AOSP based ROM on your phone does wonders for mitigating "telemetry" and going for a proper Linux OS like postmarketOS allows for full disk encryption too. Is this going to prevent your telco from spying on your GPS location? No, but it's a huge step in the right direction.
I daily drive a PinePhone Pro and it's pretty much the closest you can get to a secure/private smartphone. The modem being a separate module is a huge step in the right direction here as it reduces the attack surface that the modem can perform on your data, not having access at all to the RAM, camera, microphone (IIRC gets routed to modem only when in a call, determined solely by the application processor). Unfortunately the modem is also the GPS source so it doesn't protect against that. The PinePhone modem also has open source firmware but it only runs on the application processor of the modem module, not the actual DSP.
My reasons for going with Linux phone are more to do with the fact that I want a pocket Linux PC for doing development stuff on though and less about the security aspect. I don't run FDE but I like knowing it is an option.
The baseband firmware isn’t very secure I agree, but there’s a lot you can do to the application processor OS to make it more secure and more private without tinkering with the modem side.
Yes, but it doesn't matter very much if the baseband is compromised, because then the attacker has complete control over the entire phone.
Does the PinePhone isolate the baseband processor like the Librem 5 does?
The Aptera Solar EV is all about right to repair! 80% of all maintenance can be done with an allen wrench! You can also change out any of the components you see fit to alter. Sooo cool!!
I'm not familiar with 3BP's design process for the Droplet, but Aptera's design is 100% based on aerodynamics. Aptera's engineering team is amazing and as long as it made sense regarding wind resistance, it was selected. The trunk can become a tent with the Aptera too, pretty ingenious.
It's wild how bad it was for awhile. People at the time complained about like iPods or old smartphones being repair unfriendly and, to be fair, they were. However, because of how hard newer phones are to repair, you see some people opine for those days and buy older devices to repair.
I was able to repair the back glass of my Samsung note 10+ when it cracked. Felt nice to be able to fix *something. * Maybe a screen I could replace, but if anything else failed, or if I want to keep some kind of warranty. I'm SOL.
Fuck the subscription model, it creates the incentive to produce devices that don't last, and software that's a temporary fix.