FAILING THE FIX

Part of that measure requires the European Union to create repairability and durability labels for consumer products, which the European Commission is tasked with developing, with the goal of addressing the shortening lifespans of electronics.vii France debuted the first repairability scores in January 2021, ahead of an EU-wide law requiring other countries to follow suit.viii These labels are mea. [...] Those criteria are: availability of repair documentation (manuals and service guides), ease of disassembly (how easy or hard it is to open the device), availability of spare parts, affordability of spare parts (calculated as a percentage of the cost of the whole product), and a device-specific category. [...] Across the 62 phones we scored, the average total French repairability score was 6.94, and the highest score belongs to the Samsung Galaxy A03s with an 8.4 – but the device only scored a 9.4 out of 20 for disassembly. [...] The French score gives valuable information about the design of the product and an indication of the support the manufacturer provides to the repair ecosystem. [...] Because a large portion of the French score gauges access to repair manuals and spare parts, and that access can change over time or from country to country, we wanted the score to reflect the design of the product more prominently.