This year’s report said, “Although Lenovo has improved its compliance with French consumer law to some extent by providing more repair score PDFs on its website, we urge the company to resolve this multi-year issue.”
The PIRG report concluded that many of the eight most popular laptop brands in the US “remain fairly stable in terms of laptop repairs”.
However, Proctor told Ars that vendors have improved consumers’ access to parts, tools and information, but improvements around ease of disassembly “take longer to be realized.”
He also praised vendors’ efforts to release more repairable designs, such as Apple’s MacBook Neo.
phone repairability score
Lenovo’s Motorola brand earned the best grade.
Lenovo’s Motorola brand earned the best grade.
Credit: US PIRG Education Fund
PIRG’s scores for phone makers this year are based on the European Product Registry for Energy Labeling (EPREL), a scoring system created by the European Commission in June 2025 to score the repairability of smartphones and tablets. It is based on six factors:
- depth of separation
- Fastener
- tool
- Availability of spare parts
- software update
- repair information
US PIRG used different criteria for this year’s report.
US PIRG used different criteria for this year’s report.
Credit: US PIRG Education Fund
The PIRG report said Apple and Samsung scored so low under the EPREL criteria partly because all scored phones are guaranteed to receive updates for five years, not longer.
PIRG noted that Apple has made progress in phone repairability by moving away from parts pairing, when companies need to verify parts through encrypted software checks for them to function, and through the introduction of repair assistants. However, the author of the report regretted that the third-party Face ID replacement still doesn’t work. The report states:
Apple has also expanded its Activation Lock anti-theft feature to individual parts, which repair advocates warn will leave a large number of perfectly functional components stranded – locking them out of the repair ecosystem altogether.
Apple is not alone: parts pairing and software restrictions remain an industry-wide problem facing consumers and independent technicians alike among manufacturers.
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