‘Failing the Fix’ scorecard grades Apple, Samsung, Google, others on how fixable their devices are

Has this ever happened to you? You spend good money on a new device, expecting years of use—then it breaks, and fixing it is nearly impossible. Many phones and laptops on the market are designed to be so difficult to fix that they become essentially disposable once they start to malfunction.

Consumers should be able to choose electronics knowing they are durable and fixable, but right now manufacturers and vendors aren’t making that information easy to access or understand. How can we know which products are designed to last and which are destined for the dump?

This annual report calculates a repairability score for the most popular cellphone and laptop brands, and grades which manufacturers are designing devices to last and which are “Failing the Fix.”

What did we find?

1. Cellphones from all of the major manufacturers are getting more repairable.
   The four most popular smartphone brands in the U.S.—Apple, Samsung, Motorola and Google—have all improved or maintained their cellphones’ repairability since last year. Specifically, they have all gotten easier to disassemble, which is what makes the biggest difference for people who want to open up the phone to fix it. Apple had the most improvement in this area, followed by Motorola.
2. Laptops are pretty stagnant in terms of repairability—we’re not seeing a lot of change.
   There was not significant improvement across the eight most popular laptop brands in the U.S: HP, Apple, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung and ASUS. While Apple and Dell laptops both saw some improvement in ease of disassembly (though Apple still fares the worst by far), the other brands saw minimal to no change from 2024 to 2025.
3. Eight out of 10 brands we looked at were part of an anti-Right to Repair trade association.
   Associations such as TechNet and the Consumer Technology Association fight against the Right to Repair, and almost every laptop and cellphone manufacturer we looked at belonged to at least one of them. You can read more about how and why this affects brands’ ultimate grade in the Methodology section of the full report. Google was the only manufacturer to fully offset its deductions for anti-repair memberships through legislative work: The company supported four Right to Repair bills in the past year.

The biggest takeaway from this year’s “Failing the Fix” is: Devices are getting more repairable, but it’s not happening fast enough. In other words, advocating for Right to Repair is having an impact, but there’s still a lot of work left to do.

Why does this matter?

When you spend hundreds—or even thousands—on tech, you should know whether it’s designed to last or destined for the landfill. High prices don’t always mean repairability, and that’s a problem. Consumers deserve products that are durable, fixable, and made by companies that respect your Right to Repair.

1. It saves the environment.
   The prevalence of unfixable stuff is a mounting problem for both consumers and the planet. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that electronic waste is the fastest growing part of our domestic municipal waste stream.
2. It saves you money.
   Another PIRG report found Americans could save a total of almost $50 billion a year if we were able to repair our products instead of replacing them.
3. It protects consumers.
   We don’t know which products are designed to last before we buy them. Right to Repair scores, similar to the scoring system used by this report, provide transparency in the marketplace by providing consumers with a simple way to compare repairability across products. You can think of repair scores like fuel economy stickers on cars, but for tech repairability.

This report is part of a larger movement: Right to Repair legislation have been introduced in 20 states this year, and four states have passed laws including the first electronics Right to Repair law in New York, the first law restricting a harmful software practice called “parts pairing” in Oregon, and multiple laws enshrining comprehensive repair rights in California, Colorado and Minnesota. At the federal level, the FTC has been increasing its investigations into manufacturers that fail to disclose expiration dates for their products’ support, do not comply with nationwide warranty requirements, or that engage in anticompetitive repair practices. If we’re going to maintain and accelerate the positive trajectory of major tech manufacturers improving their products’ repairability, we need to continue to advocate for policies like these that empower consumers, promote manufacturer responsibility, and address the growing harms of e-waste on the environment.

How are the grades calculated?

Since January of 2021, France has required companies to provide an index of detailed information about how fixable certain consumer technology products are, and to post an overall repair score out of 10 once the product goes on sale. Our fourth edition of “Failing the Fix” reviews the detailed repair information from 104 devices and tracks changes in fixability since our last report.

This year, we’re including Samsung in the list of laptop manufacturers we analyzed, as data shows that it’s among the most popular laptop brands in the U.S. In addition, instead of including all of the device models available from each manufacturer’s website, we’re limiting our sample to the 10 most recently released devices from each brand, or the top 10 devices featured on the website. This ensures that our data reflects the repairability of the newest devices and those that are most prioritized by each brand. It also allows us to more accurately compare our findings to previous data, and to calculate a repairability score for the brand as a whole.

To calculate a final grade for each manufacturer, we include data for each qualifying device. We start with the five categories from France’s repairability index, but we more heavily weigh the disassembly score because we think this better reflects what consumers think a repairability score indicates and because the other categories can be country-specific. Because consumers’ ability to fix their devices is limited by efforts to stop the Right to Repair, we remove points from companies who are members of trade groups that lobby against repair legislation. Finally, we grant points to manufacturers that are actively supporting Right to Repair legislation.

Here’s the breakdown of the factors that determine the grade for each device, and subsequently each manufacturer:

• Documentation: Does the manufacturer provide free service manual information to consumers?
• Disassembly: How easy is it to open and repair the device? Our grade weighs this score more heavily than French scores because of its importance to repairability, and because it is the same across different countries.
• Parts availability: Is it easy to find replacement parts?
• Parts pricing: Are spare parts affordable?
• Device-specific category: This includes several factors that are specific to laptop or phone repairability, such as the availability of software updates.
• Membership in trade associations which lobby against the Right to Repair: We remove points if the manufacturer is a member of trade organizations that lobby against the Right to Repair such as TechNet or Consumer Technology Association (CTA).
• Support for Right to Repair legislation: We add points for every piece of Right to Repair legislation supported by the manufacturer in the past year.

What do we recommend?

Consumers should choose products from manufacturers with the highest fixability grades using our scorecard, such as ASUS and Acer laptops and Apple cellphones. They should also prioritize manufacturers that have good track records with Right to Repair, such as Google. Because cellphone repairability is improving while laptop repairability is staying basically the same, consumers should be extra cautious about making a major investment in a new laptop without first understanding whether they’ll be able to repair the device if it breaks.

We also asked independent repair shop owners what they look for when advising customers to choose a repairable and long-lasting device.

Dave Winsor, owner of PC Consulting, Inc. in Seattle said, “I look for a device that can be opened and accessed with simple tools available from most online retailers.”

Joe Pilat, founder of Joe’s Gaming & Electronics in northern Washington state, said, “I look for a device that doesn’t require soldering for basic repair and has the option to remove and add storage and memory. But mostly, I look for durable design from brands with a track record of prioritizing their consumers.”

Repairability grades like the ones here in “Failing the Fix” provide important information for consumers so they can make the best purchasing choices for their budget. However, the more permanent and more standardized solution is to provide repair scores in stores. In other countries, retailers like Amazon already display this information. American consumers also deserve to know which products are fixable before they make an expensive purchase. It’s ridiculous to spend hundreds of dollars on tech that is unfixable and therefore disposable. 

It’s important to note that even with improvement from some manufacturers, fixability is not improving fast enough given the growing e-waste problem. Alongside the movement for repair scores, the coalition of organizations fighting for Right to Repair, which includes PIRG, iFixit and Repair.org, has been calling for better access to the parts, tools and information needed to repair modern devices.

Advocacy and education are important, of course, but all parties need to step up and take action to solve this problem. Manufacturers should design products that are easier to open up and repair, and they should not be joining trade associations that lobby against the Right to Repair. Retailers can voluntarily display Right to Repair scores that already exist to provide market transparency. Lawmakers can help by restoring our Right to Repair to ensure that we can fix our stuff, and requiring repair scores so we know which products are designed to last.