I will repeat again what I'm saying since they announced the Fairphone 4: being able to repair the phone is good, but what I really would like to see is for them to go the framework route and design a phone with a standardized form factor. It doesn't need to be crazy modular, I'd just like to be able to upgrade mainboard/camera/display/storage/battery independently, and I'd like to push product development around these components instead of coming up with yet another iteration of an ethical-but-full-of-compromises device every two years.
Promising 8 years of upgrades is only useful if your hardware is not sub-par. The Fairphone 3+ I bought was already "meh" when I bought it, after 3 years it felt sluggish. I wanted to upgrade parts of it, not a whole new device.
Your phone feels slow either because you are now used to faster devices or because the software used is becoming bloated. There is no reason a phone feels slower except for these two reasons (or maybe if thermal got worse over time but it should not).
Personally I don’t care if a phone feels slower compared to other devices as long as it is not becoming slower because of crap software updates.
It is not just the CPU. The camera was sub-par, the display was just okay, storage capacity is always important if you are like me and don't want to be dependent on the cloud... all those things can be improved independently, and consumers would benefit if they could upgrade them whenever the price/performance/availability reached a satisfactory point.
Promising 8 years of upgrades is only useful if your hardware is not sub-par. The Fairphone 3+ I bought was already "meh" when I bought it, after 3 years it felt sluggish. I wanted to upgrade parts of it, not a whole new device.