- 4things, in order
- 800cycles rated
What Fails First
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Devices fail in a predictable order, and knowing it changes both how you treat one and when you replace it. For a separate workplace perspective on device availability and work records, Monitask's self-reporting bias provides additional context.
The order
One. The battery. The only component designed to degrade from the first day, and the first thing to make a device feel old.
Two. The screen, by accident rather than by wear — and the repair that dominates cost on almost every device. For wider device-longevity and hardware context, U.S. Department of Energy is another useful reference.
Three. Ports and connectors, which fail mechanically from insertion cycles and pocket debris.
Four. Software support, which does not fail so much as expire — and which now has a published date rather than an unknown one.
Everything else is a minority of failures. Boards, cameras, speakers and buttons do fail, and rarely enough that planning around them is not useful.
The battery
Rated for at least 800 cycles at 80% remaining capacity under the EU requirement. (Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2023/1670 — European requirement; outside the EU manufacturers may or may not meet it.)
A cycle is a full charge's worth of energy, not a plug-in. Two half-charges are one cycle, which is why the number is larger than it looks.
For ordinary use that is roughly two to three years before the rated floor — and the floor is 80% of original capacity, not failure. A device at 80% works; it simply needs charging more often.
Ageing has its own page because the folklore around it is extensive and mostly obsolete.
The screen
The most expensive common repair and the one most people meet first.
On many devices the display assembly is a substantial fraction of the replacement cost of the whole device, which is why the repair-or-replace arithmetic usually turns on whether the screen is what broke.
The regulation addresses this indirectly: the drop resistance requirement — at least 45 accidental drops without loss of function (Right to Repair Europe, describing the ecodesign requirement) — and the drop class on the label, which is a figure worth reading for anybody who has broken one before.
Ports
Wear items, and frequently the cheapest genuine repair available.
A charging port that has become unreliable is usually dirt before it is damage, and the distinction matters because one is free to address and the other is a repair.
Where it is genuinely worn, replacement is a modest job on most devices and is one of the repairs an independent shop will do routinely.
Software support
The failure that is a date.
Operating system updates must be available for at least five years from the end of placement of the last unit of the model. (Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2023/1670.)
Which means the expiry is now knowable in advance rather than discovered when updates stop — and it is the factor most likely to end the life of a device that is otherwise working.
It has its own page because the practical consequences arrive before the date does: applications drop support, then services, then the device becomes unsuitable rather than broken.
What this means for keeping a device
Plan for one battery replacement. On a device kept four or five years, it is the expected maintenance rather than a fault.
Protect the screen, because the economics of that repair are the worst on the list.
Clean the port before concluding it is broken.
And check the support date before buying, since it sets the outer boundary regardless of how well the hardware holds up.
What ends a device's life in practice
Not usually a single failure.
A device with a tired battery, a scratched screen and two years left of updates does not break — it becomes not worth the next repair, and the decision arrives as an accumulation rather than an event.
Which is why the replacement decision is worth making deliberately rather than at the moment something stops working, when the pressure is highest and the options narrowest.
A five-minute review once a year — battery health, support date, what is already broken — turns it into a plan rather than an emergency.
The failures that are not the device
Two worth separating, because both get blamed on the hardware.
Storage that has filled. A device with no free space behaves like a failing one — slow, unable to update, crashing applications — and the remedy is free.
And an application that has outgrown the device. The hardware is unchanged; what runs on it got heavier. This is the commonest reason a device "suddenly got slow", and it is worth establishing before concluding anything is wrong.
Laptops and other categories
The order differs.
On a laptop the battery still leads, followed by the keyboard, the hinge and the storage drive — and the screen is a much rarer failure because it is not carried in a pocket.
On small appliances the pattern is different again and the regulation does not cover them, which changes what you can expect entirely.
This page is about phones and tablets, which is where the label applies and where the failure order is most consistent.
The one that is genuinely unpredictable
Water.
It does not follow the order and it does not wear out — it either happens or it does not, and when it does the outcome ranges from nothing to total loss with little in between.
The IP rating promises less than people assume and is the figure most likely to be relied on wrongly.
The short version
- Four things in order: the battery, the screen, ports and connectors, and software support
- The battery is the only component designed to degrade from day one, rated for at least 800 cycles at 80% capacity in the EU
- A cycle is a full charge's worth of energy rather than a plug-in, so the number covers more time than it appears to
- The screen dominates repair cost, which is why the repair-or-replace decision usually turns on it
- Ports fail mechanically and are frequently dirt rather than damage, which is free to address
- Software support expires on a date that is now published in advance, and it usually ends the life of hardware that still works