Prices for the new iPhone 16 that debuted in September start at $799, while the iPhone 16 Pro Max starts at $1,199, but cost doesn’t seem to discourage smartphone consumers from upgrading them frequently.
More than 1 in 10 Americans (11.89%) get a new phone once a year, and another 4.2% do so every six months, according to a Slashgear poll. Most (55.4%) upgrade every two to three years, but even that seemed excessive to participants in two recent Climate Week panels in New York about extending the lifespan of electronic devices.
“A number of people I talk to upgrade their phone because they think that they need the new camera, and it’s like, let’s all be real: the camera on the iPhone 10 is absolutely fine,” Corinne Iozzio, editor in chief of climate-action publication one5c, said at a panel in New York on September 24, referring the iPhone released in 2017. “I guess your crummy Instagram photo is a little bit better now, but nobody noticed.”
One way to increase the lifespan of devices, and thus help stem the growing problem of electronic waste, Iozzio and others argue, is to enable consumers and independent repair shops to fix devices when they break.
Right-to-repair laws, like one that took effect in the state of New York in 2023, require electronics manufacturers to make original parts and instructions for their devices available to consumers and independent repair shops.
The laws have been championed by electronic device resellers, like Back Market, which participated in this year’s Climate Week.
Battery up: Thibaud Hug de Larauze, the co-founder and CEO of France-based Back Market, said at the event that even when someone manages to successfully replace the battery in a smartphone, they’re apt to get a warning message to the effect that the part isn’t recognized, and, “You’re not safe, or we are not responsible for what happens to you after you use this.”
Such “parts pairing” messages are the bane of resellers and do-it-yourselfers, and right-to-repair laws like New York’s aim to help address the problem by requiring manufacturers to provide authorized parts to anyone rather than requiring consumers to come only to them for repairs.
“If you have a dead battery, you can just replace it without feeling threatened,” Hug de Larauze said.
“At Google, we don’t believe in the practice of parts pairing,” Nicole Azores, manager of government and public affairs, Google, said during the event. “That’s because we want our users to have the choice on the type of part they used to repair their products.”
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To that end, Google formed a partnership with iFixit, which provides repair guides and sells replacement parts for thousands of devices. For its phones and tablets, Google provides iFixit with genuine parts.
Azores continued that Google considers it an ongoing process to keep asking, “How do we continue to make it better for our users to have access to these parts and tools?”
Irreparable harm? Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, noted at the event that as recently as the early 1990s, in “every community in America, there was a local TV repair shop,” as well as a camera repair shop, but that they closed en masse when manufacturers “stopped selling parts.”
As a result, this may be the first generation where consumers expect to have to replace electronics—and the growing number of small and large appliances that include non-replaceable lithium batteries—within a few years.
“If you went to our parents or our grandparents and said, ‘Would you ever buy a thing that stopped working after two years with no remedy?’ they would look at you like you were insane, but that is the status quo right now,” Wiens said.
Ready and rating: Right-to-repair laws have passed in eight states, including Oregon and Colorado, both of which passed this year, and bills have been introduced in 30 others states thus far this year, according to the Public Interest Research Group.
Along with getting more states to pass right-to-repair laws, advocates also are pushing for a requirement for electronic products to have repairability ratings or an index akin to the Energy Star ratings that indicate energy efficiency.
A bill introduced in the New York state legislature would require manufacturers to display a repair score of from 1 to 10. France implemented a repairability rating system on electronic devices in 2021.
“Right now, if you go to Walmart and you want to buy two toasters and they’re both 20 bucks, which one will last a decade?” asked Wiens. “There is no way to know. If we had the repairability index, we could.”