We may finally be in an era where the right to repair—in which people are empowered to fix the electronics they own, phones in particular—is the law in many places. Manufacturers aren't so happy to lose extra revenue from making repairs, though, so they have another option: to make their devices almost impossible to fix. At least, that’s how it feels.
It turns out that iPhones are actually easier to fix than they were a decade ago. That's just one of the findings from ElectronicsHub in its research, using the repair guides for all the phones listed on industry fixture iFixit. It reports that the easiest-to-repair phone is the Motorola Moto G7, and the hardest to fix is the Google Pixel 7.
Apple had been steadfastly against the right to repair with third-party parts—probably because its phones appear more often on the easiest-models-to-fix list. The company has since launched self-service repair stores.
When we look at the entire line of phones from each company, Apple comes in fifth on the list of the easiest brands—behind Asus, HTC, LG (which is no longer in the phone business), and Samsung. The hardest brands to fix come from Sony, Xiaomi, and Huawei—but the latter two don't have much traction in the United States.
Going back through the iFixit guides for a decade, ElectronicsHub gave phone brands a ranking for each year to see whether they got easier or harder to fix. Apple phones got easier, on average, but took a dip with the release of the iPhone 14 models—in particular, the 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max are harder to fix. Moto hit a peak of repairability in 2019 but now ranks below Apple. Samsung was dropping almost yearly until making a big stride forward with its 2022 releases.
The trend-line in white averages all the vendors and found that repairability in general went down. For the study's methodology and more details on the right to repair, read the full report at ElectronicsHub.