There are also rankings that measure how repairable a piece of technology is. In France, a report card with a lot of label was born last year. Each new electrical and electronic product is assigned a score on a scale from 0 to 10 in order to be clearly visible to the consumer. The index takes into account numerous parameters such as duration, availability of technical documentation; ease of disassembly, availability of spare parts on the market and delivery times. The relationship between the selling price of the parts and that of the device is also measured.
The index de reparabilité has a site (https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/), you can find not only smartphones but also household appliances, computers, tablets, televisions and electronic products for gardening. It is not up to date, there are many products missing but there is a ranking. Among the highest ratings we find the French Athesi smartphones, the Athesi RT55 model “deserved” a nine out of ten. The Google Pixel 6 reaches the sufficiency, 6.3 for the Pro and 6.4 for the normal one, as well as the iPhone 13 Pro (6.2) while the Samsung Galaxy S21 gets an excellent 8.2.
The initiative did not appeal to DigitalEurope, the association representing the European digital technology industry, which said it was concerned about excessive market fragmentation. Furthermore, the French repairability indices are not the result of third-party evaluations, but of those who design the devices. To understand this, they take the information from the producers.
The approach of iFixit which essentially evaluates the repairability after having disassembled the device, with a score that goes from 0 to 10. The 0 means that the device is not repairable, 10 indicates that it is easy to fix. “The device – reads the site – must also have a free public service manual available from the manufacturer”. On the website (https://it.ifixit.com/) you will find nine categories.
To stay on the smartphone in the first places we find the Fariphone 2 and 3 (the evaluation of 4 is missing) with a round ten. For those unfamiliar with it, we are talking about a small producer born in 2013 in the Netherlands that makes sustainability its creed and also for its latest addition – the Fairphone 4, for sale online starting from 579 euros, has decidedly focused on materials. of recycling and from responsible sources and conflict-free areas and on the concepts of modularity and repairability. It costs more than the others but promises to be long-lasting, as long as you have the desire and time to use screwdrivers and components. Good scores, however, are recorded by the Motorola Droid Bionic of 2011 and the Nokia Nokia 8110 4G of 2018.