The drawer exists in every household: dead phones, tangled cables, a tablet that still works but stopped updating. It accumulates because devices do not announce their end of life — they fade, slowly and unevenly, until replacing them feels like a decision that should have been made a year ago. A more useful way to think about lifespan is to stop asking how long a device “lasts” and start asking how long it remains safe, supported, and pleasant to use. Those three clocks run at different speeds, and only one of them is set by the hardware.
Lifespans by category, realistically
Phones: five to seven years of service from a flagship is a sound expectation, and the software clock now matches — Google’s Pixel 8 and later carry seven years of OS and security updates, Samsung commits seven years to the Galaxy S24 series and beyond, and Apple, while publishing no formal schedule, has historically supported iPhones for five to seven years. Budget Android phones are the exception: update commitments of two to four years are common, which caps their realistic life regardless of hardware condition.
Laptops: five to eight years of hardware service is ordinary, and the battery is the only component with a published wear-out schedule — Apple rates MacBook batteries to retain 80% of original capacity at 1,000 charge cycles. The binding constraint is the OS. Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025, after which Microsoft stops shipping security fixes; a PC left off that list is finished as a daily machine even if the hardware is fine.
TVs: seven to ten years of hardware life is typical, with panel degradation gradual and backlights the most common eventual failure. Software is again the constraint — streaming apps drop support for older smart-TV platforms years before the panel dies, and the common remedy is an external streaming box, which converts a software problem into a hardware problem for around $50 rather than a TV replacement.
Battery: the common denominator
Nearly every device in the drawer died of a battery before it died of anything else. Lithium-ion cells are consumables, and the wear curves are published. Apple’s battery service page states the design targets: 80% of original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles for iPhone 14 and earlier, 1,000 cycles for iPhone 15 and later, and 1,000 cycles for MacBook, iPad and Apple Watch. At one cycle a day, 500 cycles is roughly a year and a half, and 1,000 is closer to three years — so most devices cross their design wear point somewhere in years two through five, depending on use.
The economics follow directly. A battery replacement is the cheapest major repair in consumer electronics and the one that most often buys years of additional service — the decay after 80% is gradual, and a device on a fresh cell is functionally close to new for daily purposes. Charging habits shift the curve modestly; the myths around it are addressed separately in laptop battery care myths. What shifts it most is heat and time, neither of which can be opted out of entirely.
Headphones and fixed tech: failure by abandonment
Headphones: three to five years for true wireless earbuds, with battery degradation the limiter — the tiny cells cannot be economically replaced, and owners report the runtime shrinking until daily recharging becomes tedious. Wired and over-ear Bluetooth headphones with replaceable pads can run a decade or more, which is why the battery, not the driver, decides the category.
Adjacent appliances and fixed tech — routers, smart speakers, security cameras — mostly fail by abandonment: the vendor ends cloud or app support, and a perfectly functional device becomes a paperweight. Before buying anything cloud-dependent, the support question is the only one that matters.
Software support is the real lifespan clock
The pattern across every category is the same: hardware outlasts the software commitment. A device stops being safe to use — banking, email, anything with credentials — the day it stops receiving security patches, and app compatibility usually erodes a year or two before even that. This is why the update policy belongs at the top of every purchase checklist: buying a phone with seven years of support means the hardware will die of old age, while buying one with two years means the calendar will kill it.
The clock starts at launch, not at purchase. A Pixel 6 bought in 2023 inherited a window that opened in October 2021 — five years of support ran out around October 2026 regardless of when the box was opened. This is also what makes the second-hand market tractable: the support years remaining are countable, and a two-year-old flagship from a seven-year vendor has more useful life left than a new budget phone from a two-year vendor. The regulatory floor is rising — EU Ecodesign Regulation 2023/1670 has required at least five years of OS and security updates for smartphones sold in the EU since June 20, 2025 — but the manufacturer’s published commitment remains the number to check.
Repair versus replace: a decision framework
Three checks, in order, resolve almost every repair-or-replace question.
First, the software clock. Is the device still receiving security updates, and will it for two more years? If no, replace — repairing an unsupported device funds a security liability. If yes, continue.
Second, the third-rule. Will the repair cost less than roughly a third of a comparable replacement? Below that line, repair is almost always correct for a supported device. Above it, the repair only makes sense for specific attachments — a machine with rare configuration, data, or fit that a new one cannot replicate.
Third, the wear profile. Is the failure a consumable — battery, pads, a cable, a fan — or a core component — logic board, panel, compressor? Consumable failures always favor repair, because the repair resets the dominant wear item rather than the whole device. Core-component failures in cheap devices favor replacement, because the repair prices like a fraction of a new unit. A $279 out-of-warranty iPhone screen repair is a judgment call on a current flagship; the same bill on a five-year-old phone is a replacement signal.
The framework has one honest complication: timing purchases so replacements happen deliberately rather than emergently. Buying on your schedule rather than the failure’s schedule is materially cheaper, which is the subject of when to buy electronics.
The drawer, and what it is actually for
The e-waste number worth knowing is quiet rather than alarming: most of a device’s environmental cost is spent by the time it is manufactured, which means every additional year of service is nearly free environmental savings. This is not a guilt mechanism; it is a pricing insight. It says the optimization is at the margins — one more battery cycle year, one more OS patch year — not in heroic gestures.
The drawer itself is the inventory of unmade decisions. Working devices can move to second duty: the replaced phone becomes a dedicated navigation or music device, the old tablet a recipe screen. Devices that no longer receive security updates should not hold accounts or sensitive data, whatever else they do. Everything else has a real recycling path — manufacturer trade-in and take-back programs exist precisely for the drawer’s contents, and battery-bearing devices in particular should not go into household waste. A drawer that gets emptied every two years is the realistic end state; the goal is that fewer things arrive in it early.