“While Lenovo has slightly improved compliance with French consumer law by providing more PDFs of repair points on its website, we urge the company to address this perennial problem,” this year’s report said.
PIRG’s report concluded that many of the eight most popular laptop brands in the US have “remarkably durable laptop repairability.”
However, Proctor told Ars that while consumer access to parts, tools and information from suppliers has improved, improvements in ease of disassembly are “taking longer to implement.”
He also praised vendors’ efforts to release more repairable designs Apple MacBook Neo.
Phone repairability scores
Lenovo’s Motorola brand was awarded the best price.
PIRG’s scores for phone manufacturers this year are based on the European Product Register for Energy Labeling (APRIL), a rating system created by the European Commission in June 2025 to assess the repairability of smartphones and tablets. This is based on six factors:
- Dismantling depth
- Connectors
- Tools
- Availability of spare parts
- Software updates
- Repair information
US PIRG used different criteria for this year’s report.
Apple and Samsung scored so low under EPREL’s benchmarks in part because all phones scored are guaranteed to receive updates for five years, PIRG’s report said.
PIRG noted that Apple has made progress in repairing phones by moving away from pairing parts, meaning that companies require parts to work through encrypted software checks, and through the implementation of this feature. Repair assistant. However, the author of the report lamented the replacement of third-party Face ID still not working. The report adds:
Apple has also extended Activation Lock’s anti-theft feature to individual parts, which repair advocates have warned will end up with a large number of perfectly functional components – leaving them completely out of the repair ecosystem.
Apple isn’t alone: parts integration and software limitations remain an industry-wide problem that consumers and independent technicians continue to face across manufacturers.
