iFixit launches live 0–10 laptop repairability scoreboard

Laptop repairability used to live in teardown videos, forum posts, and the vague feeling that some machines were nightmares to open. That was useful, but not very usable when you were actually choosing what to buy. Now iFixit has turned that scattered judgment into a live public scoreboard for laptops — a searchable list of models graded from 0 to 10 on how fixable they are. Basically, it’s trying to make repairability behave like battery life or weight: one more spec you can compare before you spend money. ### What actually launched? iFixit’s new laptop scores page pulls together teardown-based repairability ratings into a single running list. It says its engineers tear down current laptops, score them from zero for effectively unrepairable to ten for easiest to repair, and keep the rubric updated as designs and service practices change. The page is meant to be browsed like a buyer’s guide, not hunted down like an old teardown. ### What does a 10 even mean? Not “a technician somewhere can fix it.” iFixit’s standard is closer to “a normal person or local shop can get in, swap common parts, and put the thing back together without drama.” The score leans heavily on design for repair — 90% in the published rubric — with service documentation as another explicit factor. Easy disassembly, common tools, access to failure-prone parts, manuals, and a real repair ecosystem all count. ### What kinds of things raise or kill the score? Modular parts help. Adhesives, rivets, weird fasteners, and buried components hurt. A good laptop score usually means the battery, storage, memory, keyboard, ports, and fan are reachable without dismantling half the machine. A bad one usually means one repair cascades into five more steps — the laptop version of having to remove your kitchen sink to change a lightbulb. ### Who’s winning right now? At the top of iFixit’s current laptop list are Lenovo’s ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 and T16 Gen 5, both shown with 10/10 scores. iFixit highlights replaceable battery access, readily repairable or upgradeable storage and memory, individually replaceable Thunderbolt ports, and what it calls a best-in-class keyboard replacement procedure. That’s a big deal because these are mainstream business laptops, not niche hobbyist machines. ### Why is Lenovo’s result getting attention? Because it suggests repairability is crossing over from enthusiast virtue to corporate default. iFixit frames the new ThinkPads as the kind of laptops IT departments buy in bulk, not special-purpose repair showcases. Two years earlier, Lenovo’s repairability-focused T14 generation scored 9/10. Now the company has pushed into perfect-score territory on models aimed squarely at the business mainstream. ### Is anyone else improving? Yes — and Microsoft is the clearest example of how much this can change. iFixit says the original Surface Laptop once scored 0/10, while the Surface Laptop 7 reached 8/10, with magnetic access, published manuals on launch day, and clearer internal labeling for repairs. So the scoreboard is not just a hall of shame. It also makes progress visible. ### Why does a public score matter more than another teardown? Because a single score travels. Procurement teams, school districts, and regular buyers can use it without watching a 20-minute disassembly. PIRG has been pushing this exact idea in its “Failing the Fix” work — turning repairability into a simple buying signal and arguing that shoppers rarely requires repair information on products and where broader repair labeling is getting more formal. ### So what changes now? The big shift is that repairability gets a shelf label, even if unofficially. Once a number exists, brands can compete on it, buyers can filter for it, and bad designs become easier to spot before they break. That does not force companies to build repairable laptops overnight — but it does make “hard to fix” harder to hide.