Right to Repair Is Working, and the Evidence Is in Spare Part Prices

Repair legislation arrived with modest expectations and a lot of scepticism. Several years in, there is enough evidence to judge it, and the results are uneven in an instructive way.

What clearly improved

Parts availability is the headline success. Manufacturers that once sold nothing to individuals now operate parts stores covering screens, batteries, cameras and charging ports. Prices remain high but they exist, and existence is what independent repair shops needed.

Documentation improved alongside it. Service manuals, exploded diagrams and torque specifications that were previously restricted to authorised networks are now published. This is cheap for manufacturers and enormously valuable for repairers.

Battery replacement in particular has gone from a discouraged procedure to a designed-for one in several product lines, with adhesive systems that release rather than tear.

What did not improve

Software pairing is the persistent obstacle. A genuine replacement part can be physically fitted and then refuse to function fully because it has not been cryptographically associated with the device. Manufacturers defend this on security and calibration grounds, and there is a real argument in some cases, notably fingerprint sensors. There is much less of an argument for a battery or a display.

Some jurisdictions have moved to restrict pairing for non-security components. Enforcement is early and inconsistent.

The design question underneath

Rules mandate access to parts, not the ease of using them. A device can be fully compliant and still be glued shut. The gap between legal repairability and practical repairability is where the next round of policy is heading, most visibly through scoring systems printed on packaging that rate disassembly steps, tool requirements and part pricing.

Those scores appear to be changing behaviour more effectively than the mandates themselves, because they are visible at the point of purchase.

What it means when buying

Look for a published repairability score, check whether the battery and screen are sold individually, and search for a service manual before buying. If a manufacturer publishes one, expect the device to remain serviceable. If nothing exists three years after launch, assume the device is disposable regardless of what the law requires.

Repair rules did not make everything fixable. They made the difference between a fixable product and a disposable one visible, which turns out to be most of the work.