“The Realistic Lifespan of Smartphones and the Impact of Repairability Requirements”

How do you arrive at 15 years, why not 10, 20 or 100 years? I think that’s the hard part, because today no one uses their phone for probably 15 years (see also PCs or laptops, technology and technological requirements are still evolving fast enough that a PC from 15 years ago really can’t play the latest games, which you might want to do). Then you should also require game / app developers to keep everything “backward compatible” for that hardware.

By the way, I do agree that Apple unnecessarily limits their repairability, which is unnecessary (I think, security is probably the argument, but that is not very strong). But somehow I also think there are other parameters that probably have an even bigger impact (but I can’t find any numbers that show the proportion of phones that are no longer repaired because the repair is too expensive, versus all the other reasons to to get a new phone.

The figures that I can find, however, seem to indicate that iPhones last the longest of all brands (I even come across a study that shows that purely the brand – Apple and Samsung come out best – is in itself a more important factor for a phone’s lifespan than repairability).

So agree that this should be required by law, I just don’t know if 15 years is realistic. Personally, I would probably like a shorter minimum period, and that after the end of the offered support, they should make things open source so that you can continue for as long as you want. (if they don’t want to throw it open, then they should continue to support)