Kyle Wiens runs the largest repair community in the world. The company he co-founded, iFixit, has published teardown guides for thousands of consumer electronics products and built its business on a simple premise that the manufacturers of those products spend considerable resources fighting: if something can be fixed, it should be fixed. When the EU passed its Right to Repair directive in June 2024 with 584 votes in favour and 3 against in the European Parliament, Wiens understood exactly what the legislation represented. “This vote will set in motion a wave of new repair-friendly policies,” said Matthias Huisken, Director of Advocacy for iFixit Europe, in the aftermath. The wave is arriving. On July 31, 2026, the rules become law across the European Union.
The product sitting in your pocket right now has a designed lifespan. Not the lifespan the laws of physics would assign it. The lifespan the manufacturer assigned it, engineered through battery chemistry, software policy, availability of spare parts, and a set of design choices that ensure the device becomes unrepairable or artificially obsolete before its hardware wears out. The EU just made significant elements of that practice illegal in its markets. The United States has not.
What Gets Thrown Away and What It Is Worth
The scale of the waste problem is documented in a single publication that every policymaker working on this issue cites, and for good reason.
The Global E-waste Monitor 2024, published by the United Nations through ITU and UNITAR, found that the world generated a record 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022. That is 62 million tonnes of discarded phones, laptops, tablets, washing machines, refrigerators, and the thousands of other categories of electronics that now define modern life. Only 22.3 per cent was formally collected and recycled. The remaining 78 percent went to landfills, informal recycling operations, or shipping containers bound for processing sites in Ghana, Nigeria, and other countries where workers extract valuable materials under conditions that expose them to toxic substances.
By 2030, the UN projects annual e-waste generation will reach 82 million tonnes. The formal recycling rate, on the current trajectory, will decline to 20 percent.
Inside those discarded devices is material worth $91 billion annually, according to the same Global E-waste Monitor, copper, gold, silver, palladium, and rare earth elements that went into the product, which could be recovered and reused, and that instead become environmental liability when devices are abandoned rather than repaired or properly recycled. The phones and laptops that end up in landfills rather than repair shops carry embedded value that is simply written off. The businesses whose design choices shortened those devices’ useful lives do not pay that cost. The communities near the disposal sites do.
How the Phone in Your Pocket Was Engineered to Fail
Planned obsolescence is not one thing. It operates through several overlapping mechanisms, each individually defensible as a design choice and collectively functioning as a system that ensures a device’s useful life is shorter than it needs to be.
Battery design is the most straightforward. Lithium-ion batteries degrade with charge cycles. A phone battery rated for 500 full charge cycles will hold significantly less charge after two years of normal use. This is a physical fact. What is a design choice is whether that battery can be replaced. Gluing a battery into a chassis rather than using screws and a removable back panel makes the phone thinner and slightly more water-resistant. It also makes the battery replacement a procedure that requires special tools, risks damaging the screen, and costs more than most consumers are willing to pay, particularly when the manufacturer has released a new model. The battery wears out. The phone becomes inconvenient. The consumer buys a new one. The old phone goes in a drawer or a landfill.
Software policy operates the same mechanism at the system level. In October 2018, Italian consumer authorities fined Apple €10 million and Samsung €5 million for launching software updates that reduced the performance of older smartphones, resulting in a surge in new purchases. The investigation found that the updates constituted dishonest commercial practices that harmed performance on devices the companies had previously told consumers were fully functional. Italy was not the first to act. France had already passed the world’s first law explicitly criminalizing planned obsolescence in 2015, creating fines of up to €300,000 and prison sentences of up to two years for manufacturers who deliberately engineer products to fail.
Proprietary repair ecosystems lock out independent repair shops. When a manufacturer requires that replacement parts be sourced only through its authorized network, priced at levels that make repair economically irrational compared to replacement, and paired with software tools that lock a repaired device unless the manufacturer certifies the repair, the effect is to create a monopoly on the repair market for every device the company sells. Wiens retroactively reduced the iPhone 14’s repairability score from 7/10 to 4/10 after documenting how Apple’s part-pairing requirements meant that independent shops using third-party parts were forced to send customers’ personal information to Apple and agree to multi-year audits as a condition of completing a repair. The phone could be fixed. The manufacturer repaired economically and practically unattractively.
What the EU Law Actually Requires
The European Parliament passed the Directive on Common Rules Promoting the Repair of Goods Directive 2024/1799 with 584 votes in favour and just 3 against on April 22, 2024. It entered into force on July 30, 2024. Member states had until July 31, 2026, to transpose it into national law. That deadline is now.
The directive creates several concrete obligations. Manufacturers of covered products, including mobile phones, tablets, washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, electronic displays, and servers, must offer repair services at reasonable prices and within a reasonable timeframe, even after the original warranty period expires. They must supply spare parts and repair tools to independent repair shops and consumers at non-deterrent prices. They must publish indicative repair costs on publicly accessible websites. And when a consumer chooses repair over replacement within the warranty period, the legal guarantee is extended by 12 months from the date the repair is completed.
That 12-month extension is structurally significant. Under previous EU law, the two-year legal guarantee ran from the date of purchase. If a product developed a fault in month 18, the consumer had only six months of warranty coverage remaining and often faced pressure from the retailer to accept a replacement rather than a repair, because replacement was simpler for the retailer to process. The new rule means that choosing repair resets a meaningful portion of the guarantee clock, making it the more attractive economic choice for the consumer in many scenarios.
The European Commission’s official directive page confirms that manufacturers cannot refuse to repair a product solely because it was sold before July 31, 2026. The retroactive scope prevents manufacturers from building a wall between old and new product generations in their repair obligations. A phone sold in 2024 is covered by the repair obligation that takes effect in 2026.
The directive also requires the Commission to develop an EU-wide online repair platform by July 31, 2027, making it easier for consumers to find local repair options and compare costs. The platform is intended to create a market infrastructure that makes independent repair commercially viable because, without a functioning independent repair market, the right to repair at a reasonable price is an empty promise.
The Gap Between What Passed and What Was Needed
The directive is a significant step. It is not the comprehensive transformation of product design that repair advocates spent years campaigning for.
The covered product list in Annex II of the directive is specific and limited. It does not cover all electrical and electronic products. Hairdryers, electric toothbrushes, kitchen appliances below certain thresholds, and many categories of consumer electronics are not included in the initial scope. Thomas Opsomer, a repair policy engineer at iFixit Europe, noted in response to the law’s passage that “an opportunity was missed for measures applying to all electric and electronic products.”
The directive also does not mandate repairability in the design of products; it does not require manufacturers to make phones with replaceable batteries or prevent the use of proprietary screws. What it requires is that manufacturers offer repair as a service at reasonable prices with available parts. A phone can still be glued shut, still use proprietary fasteners, still pair parts in software, as long as the manufacturer offers repair through authorized and independent channels at reasonable prices. The design-for-repair requirements that repair advocates have pushed for most aggressively remain in the broader Ecodesign framework, where separate regulations for specific product categories can impose repairability requirements on future designs.
That broader framework is moving. Repairability scores on energy labels for smartphones and tablets became part of EU retail requirements in 2025, rating devices on an A-to-E scale for ease of repair. Manufacturers must indicate on a visible label how easily their device can be repaired, taking into account the number of disassembly steps, the availability of replacement parts, and the software update support duration. The label does not require a high score. But it makes repairability a visible consumer choice factor in a way it has never been before.
What Manufacturers Say and Where They Are Right
The strongest version of the industry argument is not that planned obsolescence is desirable. It is that the economics of device manufacturing are more complex than the repair-friendly narrative acknowledges, and that some of the design choices that limit repairability serve legitimate purposes.
Waterproofing and structural integrity genuinely require tight tolerances that are incompatible with easily removable batteries and panels. The devices that survive drops, water immersion, and years of daily use are often the ones whose components are most thoroughly sealed. A phone designed for easy battery replacement is generally less water-resistant than one that is not. That tradeoff is real, and consumers who have watched a phone survive a rain shower because its manufacturer sealed it properly are not experiencing planned obsolescence; they are experiencing a genuine engineering tradeoff.
The speed of technological change in consumer electronics also means that the bottleneck to a device’s useful life is often not repairability but software support. A phone with a replaceable battery and readily available parts that receives no security updates after three years is insecure to use, regardless of its physical condition. Software support duration is arguably more important to a device’s practical lifespan than its physical repairability, and the EU’s repairability label accounts for this by including software update duration as a rating factor.
The manufacturer’s argument deserves acknowledgment because it is partly correct and because the right policy response is one that distinguishes between genuine engineering constraints and deliberate extraction of upgrade revenue. The Italian fines for software slowdowns were appropriate precisely because they addressed deliberate choices rather than genuine technical constraints. The EU directive is appropriately calibrated to require repair access rather than prescribe specific design choices.
The United States Has Not Moved at the federal level.
As of June 2026, the United States has no federal right to repair law. Several states have passed legislation. California enacted a digital right to repair law in 2023, and Oregon followed. The Federal Trade Commission has stated that unauthorized repair restrictions may violate antitrust law and has issued guidance encouraging manufacturers to end repair monopolies. But the comprehensive federal framework that would apply the kind of binding manufacturer obligations the EU directive creates does not exist in American law.
The contrast matters because the United States generates its own substantial e-waste stream, because American consumers face the same manufactured obsolescence that EU consumers face, and because the absence of federal law means the patchwork of state legislation creates compliance complexity for manufacturers and unequal consumer protection depending on geography. A consumer in California buying a phone has repair rights that a consumer in Texas buying the same phone does not.
The same structural dynamic that produces the pay gap between what American workers are owed and what they actually receive operates here at the product level: the mechanism of extraction exists, the harm is documented, the legislation is theoretically available, and the political will to enact it federally has not materialized. The EU acted because environmental pressure, consumer advocacy, and a functioning legislative consensus converged. The US has the advocacy and the data. It does not yet have the consensus.
The same logic that governs Africa’s solar energy potential, where the resource exists, the need exists, and the investment gap persists because the structural conditions for capital deployment do not apply to right to repair in the United States. The policy tools exist. The implementation gap is a political choice.
Australia enacted criminal wage theft penalties in January 2025. France criminalized planned obsolescence in 2015. The EU created binding repair obligations in 2024 that take effect in 2026. The common thread is that each of these jurisdictions decided the cost of inaction had become politically unsustainable. The same recognition drove the EU to act on the digital economy in ways the US has not, from data protection to AI regulation to platform liability.
The Phone That Lasts Until It Is Fixed
The European Union’s Right to Repair directive will not eliminate planned obsolescence. It will not force manufacturers to design replaceable batteries or abandon proprietary repair ecosystems overnight. What it will do, starting July 31, 2026, is require that repair is offered as a genuine option at reasonable prices, with available parts, with a 12-month warranty extension that makes the choice economically rational for consumers.
The 62 million tonnes of e-waste the world generated in 2022, the $91 billion in recoverable metals thrown into landfills, and the 78 percent that was not recycled, represent the accumulated cost of a system designed to replace rather than repair. France decided in 2015 that the design of products for premature failure was a crime. The EU decided in 2024 that repair must be an accessible right. The 584 to 3 vote in the European Parliament was not close.
Kyle Wiens has been taking apart electronics and teaching people how to fix them for two decades. He described the EU repair directive as “a step in the right direction.” The direction is toward a phone that lasts until it breaks and can be fixed when it does. The phone in your pocket was not designed that way. Starting this month, if you live in Europe, your manufacturer is legally required to help you keep it working anyway.
