In the midst of a cost of living and environmental crisis, there are a few ways we can save money while supporting the environment, including holding onto our mobile devices for longer, fixing them if they get broken or buying a refurbished version.
In fact, some manufacturers are now releasing repair kits for their phones that are designed for home repair. This is all feeling a lot like the best-selling spiritual book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ which can only be a good thing.
As well as the financial and environmental reward of repairing a possession rather than replacing it, ‘Zen’ states that there is also a spiritual and therapeutic reward if you repair that possession yourself. Hence the reason why people spend hours tinkering with classic cars or fixing their own bikes. It is good for your mental health as well as your pocket.
So if this is something you would like to turn your hand to – or just pay someone else to do on your behalf – which manufacturers produce the devices that are the easiest to tinker with? A study carried out by The Electronics Hub looked at iFixit’s average repair times and the level of difficulty of the instructions found online.
For those of you who aren’t aware of iFixit, it is a global community of people helping each other repair things and has an online portal housing thousands of repair manuals, tutorials and how-to guides.
The Electronics Hub found that the 2019 Motorola Moto G7 handset was the easiest to repair and only took around 25 minutes. Second and third places were Samsung with the Galaxy A40 and last year’s S22 Ultra, closely followed by Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro Max and iPhone 13.
The most-recent iPhone 14 wasn’t too far behind, demonstrating how Apple are attempting to make repairs easier.
On the other end of the spectrum, it took iFixit testers over an hour to fix the Google Pixel 7 making an at-home solution difficult to achieve.
What’s clear is that the easier it is for us or manufacturers to repair tech, the longer we can keep using it, and the less new stuff that needs to be made – and that can only be a good thing – for our phones, our pockets and the planet.