Two deadlines are worth separating, because coverage keeps merging them.
The first has passed. EU member states had until 31 July 2026 to implement the Right to Repair directive, which covers phones, tablets and household goods. It obliges manufacturers to make spare parts available and forbids design and contract techniques that obstruct repair.
The second is the one with teeth. From 18 February 2027, any smartphone, tablet, wireless earbud or laptop sold in the EU must let a user replace the battery using commonly available tools — no solvents, no heat gun, no proprietary kit.
That second sentence is a hardware requirement, not a paperwork one. It cannot be satisfied with a support page.
Why the battery rule is the difficult one
Making parts purchasable is a supply chain problem. Making a battery user-swappable without heat or solvents is a mechanical design problem, and it collides with a decade of industrial direction: thinner devices, adhesive-bonded assemblies, water ingress ratings achieved by sealing everything.
A device designed today ships into that deadline. The engineering decisions that determine compliance are being made now, not in 2027.
Where manufacturers currently stand
PIRG's Failing the Fix 2026 scorecard grades manufacturers on how easily devices open, whether parts and documentation are available, and where companies stand on repair policy. The phone grades:
| Maker | Grade |
|---|---|
| Motorola | B+ |
| C− | |
| Samsung | D |
| Apple | D− |
On laptops the spread is tighter and the floor is higher — HP moved up to a B− this year — but Apple again finishes last, at C−.
The gap between Motorola and Apple on phones is not a rounding difference. It is roughly the distance between a device built to be opened and one built not to be.
This is not only a European rule
The EU is not the largest smartphone market, but it is a market no major manufacturer will exit, and repairability is expensive to implement regionally. A separately engineered EU-only chassis costs more than one design that satisfies the strictest rule.
That is how the USB-C mandate played out: legislated in Europe, then shipped worldwide because maintaining two connector designs made no sense. The same logic points the same way here.
What to watch
- Devices launching through 2026. Battery removal difficulty on this year's models is the clearest signal of who is engineering toward February 2027 and who is planning to argue about it.
- The gap between policy and product. Several manufacturers publicly support repair while scoring poorly on how their hardware actually opens. The scorecard measures the second.
- Whether prices move. Repairable design carries a bill of materials cost, and it arrives in the same window as the memory shortage already pushing device prices up.
For buyers, the practical read is simple: a device bought now will likely be less repairable than the equivalent sold in two years — and the battery in it is the part most likely to fail first.
