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Comment by kotaKat | Hacker News Reader

"Employees who have an iPhone from Radboud University can continue to use it as long as the device is still functioning. However, returned iPhones will no longer be reissued."

I wonder what the take rate will be from people rejecting the Fairphone and requesting their own SIM instead. The inner IT purchasing cynic in me says this is just a simple way to cull out your purchasing costs by only issuing one quasi-unpopular* device.

* I used to issue out phones at a large hospital and we allowed device choice. We saw ~90% iPhones, 10% Android in our fleet.

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Probably not many, the iPhone only has a 35% market share in the Netherlands.

The Fairphone 6 is a pretty good phone.

That sounds unreal to me. Typically rich countries, like the nordics, are majority iPhone. But then again, Dutch people are know across Europe to be cheapskates so maybe that explains it ;)

You know that it costs the same as the cheapest iPhone?

You know not all Android phones in NL are Fairphones? And you know plenty of ANdroids are much cheaper than a Fairphone?

Which probably explains the 35% market share if that's true.

But I get it, you wanted a cheap shot.

You know there are plenty ones that are more expensive than the iPhone? Like most of Samsungs Flagships, the Foldable ones etc...

Also not everyone wants a shitty OS, that restricts even simple things like picture synchronization to promote their own shitty cloud service

It's not just any phone though. Imagine what it would cost if Apple presented a fair phone

Android is generally more popular in Europe.

The reason is how messaging works. In the US (and Canada?), SMS was affordable since before smartphones, and people kept using SMS once smartphones became common. Apple automatically integrated iMessage into that. Americans are used to texting using the default messaging app, and using an iPhone to text another iPhone provided a better experience than plain old SMS/MMS.

In Europe, SMS was extremely expensive in the late 2000s/early 2010s, so people never really used it, and instead started using cross-platform internet messengers. MSN, Skype, then WhatsApp. Android was/is seen as the same or better quality for a lower price, so why buy an iPhone?

According to the WhatsApp-leak, it is 51.41% Android and 48.59% iOS in the Netherlands.

https://github.com/sbaresearch/whatsapp-census/blob/main/cou...

People who are happy to use services from facebook may also be disproportionately more likely to are happy to use the iOS garden

That’s a wealthy nation.

If Holland is anything like Denmark the cost of employee phones can be budgeted as an operational cost, which means it's basically free. I doubt that is their reasoning. It's far more likely this is a part of the massive anti-US tech dependency wave which is rolling over Europe. Digital sovereignty is a hot topic these days.

As far as what people want... it depends... A lot of people have two phones anyway, since they don't want to pay the additional taxation for using a company phone privately. Also because it's easier to turn it off when you're not working. In education I would imagine a lot of teachers/professors would prefer to not give their private numbers to students.

I think the choice of Fairphone is about digital sovereignty. It's not only repairable, but it's also available with e/os, an android version which is much more independent from Google

The US hasn't turned out to be a reliable partner in the last few months.

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