- 2regulations
- ~halfis jurisdiction-free
Why European Rules Matter Anyway
Most of the durability figures on this site come from two European regulations. (Ecodesign (EU) 2023/1670 and Energy Labelling (EU) 2023/1669.)
If you are not in the EU, they are not your law, and this page says plainly what they are and are not to you. For a separate workplace perspective on device availability and work records, Monitask's cognitive offloading provides additional context.
What they are not
Not enforceable by you. A manufacturer's obligation to supply parts for seven years is an obligation in the European market. You cannot invoke it from outside, and a support line will say so.
Not a guarantee that your device meets them. A model sold in one market may differ from the same-named model sold in another — less often than people assume and often enough to matter. For broader context on technology, repairability and consumer devices, European Environmental Bureau is another useful reference.
And not a substitute for your own consumer law, which may be stronger or weaker in specific respects and which is the thing to look up for your own country.
What they are
A design floor that frequently applies globally.
Manufacturers rarely maintain two designs. A device engineered to survive 45 drops and 800 cycles for the European market is generally the device sold everywhere, because designing two is more expensive than designing one to the stricter standard.
A parts policy that frequently applies globally, for the same reason — running two supply chains and two documentation sets costs more than running one.
And a source of comparable figures. The label is the only place a battery endurance number is measured the same way across manufacturers, and that comparison is useful wherever you read it.
How to use them from outside
As specifications rather than as entitlements.
Look up the label figures for a model you are considering. The registry is public and does not check where you are.
Ask the seller whether the model you are buying is the same one, which is a fair question with a checkable answer.
And check the manufacturer's own commitments in your market, which are frequently published and are what you can actually rely on.
The regulatory ripple
Whether European rules become a global standard is a genuine question and not a settled one.
The pattern has occurred before with other product regulation, where a large market's requirements became the design baseline.
Whether it happens here is not yet demonstrable — the regulation is recent, and claims in either direction are predictions rather than observations. (This is a statement about the state of evidence rather than a forecast.)
What is observable is that the figures now exist and are published, which is useful regardless of how the wider question resolves.
Other jurisdictions
Several have their own repair legislation with different scopes, different covered products and different periods.
France operates a repairability index predating the European one, with its own scale — and the two are not the same figure.
Various US states have right-to-repair legislation, varying substantially in what they cover.
Look up what applies where you are. This site describes the European framework because it is the most comprehensive and the most recently changed, not because it is the only one.
Why this site uses them anyway
Because they are the only regulated, comparable figures that exist.
Before them, durability was a marketing claim and repairability was an assertion. Now both are measured to a common standard and published.
A reader anywhere benefits from that, even where the legal obligation does not reach them — because the figure describes the device rather than the market.
And the alternative would be writing about durability with no numbers at all, which is what the material this site replaced did.
The honest limitation
A reader outside Europe gets less from this site than one inside it.
The label pages describe something they may not see in a shop. The parts rights pages describe an entitlement they do not have.
What transfers is the reasoning: the failure order, the heat argument, the repair arithmetic — none of which depends on any regulation.
Roughly half the site is jurisdiction-independent, and that half is the part written for everybody.
What to do if the figures are not available where you are
Three substitutes, in order of usefulness.
The registry, which is public and reachable from anywhere — and holds the technical file for any model placed on the EU market, including models sold in your country under the same name.
Independent teardown publications, which assess repairability by dismantling devices and are not jurisdiction-bound.
And the manufacturer's own published commitments in your market, which are what you can actually rely on locally.
None replaces a regulated label. Together they answer most of the same questions with more effort.
The date to remember
20 June 2025.
Devices placed on the EU market from that date carry the label and meet the requirements. Devices placed before it do not have to meet the ecodesign requirements — though the label obligation extends to models still on sale. (Right to Repair Europe.)
Which matters when buying anything from existing stock, and is worth one question: was this placed on the market before or after.
A device manufactured earlier and still boxed is legitimately on sale and is not covered by the design requirements, which is a distinction nobody at a counter will volunteer.
Reading a regulation number
The citations on this site look forbidding and are simple.
"(EU) 2023/1670" is the year and the sequential number. The text is published, free, in every official language, and searchable — and the operative requirements are considerably shorter than the document.
Worth knowing because it means any claim on this site is checkable at source, which is the point of citing them rather than describing them vaguely.
The short version
- Most durability figures here come from two EU regulations, and outside the EU they are not your law
- You cannot invoke a seven-year parts obligation from outside the European market
- They function as a design floor that frequently applies globally, because maintaining two designs costs more than one
- The label is the only place battery endurance is measured identically across manufacturers, which is useful anywhere
- Use them as specifications: look up the registry, ask whether your market's model is the same, and check the maker's local commitments
- Whether European rules become a global standard is genuinely open, and claims in either direction are predictions