How Long It Lasts

It is how long it will last and what happens when it breaks.

Those two questions used to be unanswerable before purchase. Since 20 June 2025 they are printed on the label — in the European Union, on every smartphone, cordless phone and tablet placed on the market — and almost nobody reads it. For workplace time and activity management, Monitask is a separate external resource.

No affiliate links on this site. Nothing here is ranked, and there are no reviews.

What the rules actually require

These are binding minimum requirements under Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2023/1670 and Energy Labelling Regulation (EU) 2023/1669. (European Commission — primary legislation.) A device that does not meet them cannot legally be placed on the EU market. They are not voluntary targets. For broader context on consumer technology and device longevity, iFixit is another useful reference.

Batteries must withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while retaining at least 80% of their original capacity.

Spare parts must be available to professional repairers and to end users for at least seven years after the model stops being sold, delivered within five to ten working days. For broader context on consumer technology and device longevity, Swappa is another useful reference.

Operating system updates must be available for at least five years from the date the last unit of the model is placed on the market.

Devices must survive at least 45 accidental drops without losing function. (Right to Repair Europe, describing the requirement.)

And professional repairers must have non-discriminatory access to the software and firmware needed to carry out repairs, which is the provision that decides whether an independent shop can do the work at all.

A note on jurisdiction, stated here and repeated wherever a rule appears: these are European requirements. Outside the EU they matter indirectly — manufacturers frequently apply one design and one parts policy globally rather than maintaining two — but they are not your law unless you are in the EU.

What is on the label

A repairability score from A to E, where A is the most repairable. The first time this figure has appeared on a phone at the point of sale.

An energy efficiency class from A to G.

Battery endurance, expressed in hours and minutes per full charge, and the cycle rating.

A repeated free fall reliability class, which is the drop figure above.

An IP rating for dust and water.

And a QR code linking to the European Product Registry for Energy Labelling, where the full technical file for that model sits.

Each of those has a page here, because each is easy to misread — and the repairability score in particular is a composite of things that matter unequally.

Why this changes the useful question

Before the label, "how long will it last" had no answer except reputation.

Now three of the four things that determine a device's working life are stated in advance: how many cycles the battery is rated for, how many years of software support it will get, and how long parts will be available.

The fourth is how you treat it, which is the section on what actually fails — and where the popular advice is a mixture of things that matter enormously and things that stopped mattering a decade ago.

What actually fails

In rough order: the battery, the screen, the ports, and then software support.

The battery is a consumable and is the only component designed to degrade from the first day. 800 cycles is roughly two to three years of ordinary use before the rated floor is reached — and the floor is 80% of original capacity, not failure.

The screen dominates repair cost on almost every device, which is why the repair-or-replace arithmetic usually turns on whether the screen is what broke.

Ports fail mechanically, and are frequently the cheapest genuine repair available.

And software support ends on a date — a date that is now published in advance rather than discovered when updates stop arriving.

Heat is the factor behind most of it. Not charging habits, which are the subject of more folklore than any other topic here, but temperature — and the practical advice that follows is short and mostly about where a device sits rather than how it is charged.

What to do when it breaks

Work out the arithmetic before deciding, because the intuition is unreliable in both directions.

A battery replacement on a three-year-old phone costs a small fraction of a new device and restores most of what was lost. A screen replacement on the same device may cost half of a replacement handset. The two decisions are not the same and are frequently treated as one.

You have rights to the parts and the information. In the EU, for seven years after the model leaves the market — and manufacturers must publish indicative spare part prices on a freely accessible website, which means the cost of the part is checkable before you ask anybody for a quote.

And independent repair is now legally supplied with the software access it needs, which was the practical obstacle that made manufacturer service the only option for some faults.

What this site does not do

No reviews. No rankings. No scores. The reasons have their own page, and the short version is that a ranked list is a claim about your situation made by somebody who knows nothing about it — and that the previous occupant of this domain was an example of what that becomes.

No affiliate links, stated on every page rather than in a footer, because an absence is checkable where a disclosure is not.

No step-by-step disassembly instructions, and none involving lithium batteries. Those pages describe what the work is and who should do it, which is the useful part for somebody deciding.

And no prices as facts. Orders of magnitude and pricing structures, because the numbers move within a year.

The thing the label does not tell you

Whether the manufacturer will still exist, and whether the model will be supported in practice rather than on paper.

A five-year update commitment is a legal minimum and a floor. It says nothing about whether those updates will be substantial, whether the device will still be usable under them, or whether an application you depend on will still run.

Nor does it cover accessories, chargers, or anything outside the regulated categories — which is most of what a household actually owns.

And it says nothing about the price of the parts beyond requiring that the indicative price be published, which is transparency rather than restraint. A repairable device with expensive parts is repairable and not economic, and that distinction is the one the score cannot make.

The sections

The label — eight pages on what each figure means and what it omits.

What lasts — twelve pages on what fails, when, and which habits change it.

When it breaks — twelve pages on the arithmetic, your rights to parts, and what each repair involves.

Buying — six pages on buying for a length of time rather than for a specification.

Notes — four positions, including why the rules are European and matter anyway and what this site cannot verify.

About this domain

This address previously published affiliate reviews of dietary supplements and gadgets, including material addressed to people with diabetes about blood sugar.

All of it has been removed. None is reproduced, the old addresses return a gone response, and nothing here draws on any of it.

It is described rather than omitted because somebody arriving from an old link deserves an account of what happened to what they were looking for — and because the editorial rules on this site were written in direct response to it.