How to buy tech that lasts

When we buy a gadget these days, we rarely assume that it will endure.

We expect to play a video game console only for as long as companies make games for it. We expect to use a smartphone or a laptop for just as long as the battery has juice or until it can no longer run important software.

At some point, we feel that we must upgrade. We must have the latest and greatest camera. We must have apps that run faster. We must have brighter screens.

Here’s the thing: This is all the doing of marketing professionals, seared into our subconscious. The reality is that consumer electronics, such as your phone, computer or tablet, can last for many years. It just takes some research to obtain tech that will endure. This exercise will be increasingly important in a pandemic-induced recession, which has forced many of us to tighten our spending.

“It’s a matter of buying what you need, not what the company is telling you that you need,” said Carole Mars, director of technical development and innovation at the Sustainability Consortium, which studies the sustainability of consumer goods.

Strategically choosing tech with a longer shelf life is not intuitive. It involves assessing how easy or not it is to repair a particular product and determining when it makes sense to invest more money. Here are some questions to consider for the long run.

Is the tech easy to repair?

The next time you shop for an electronic product, try this exercise: Before you buy it, find out whether you or a professional can easily fix it. If so, then go for it. If it’s too difficult, make it a hard pass.

Vincent Lai, who works for the Fixers’ Collective, a social club in New York that repairs aging devices, offered several approaches to assessing whether a gadget can be straightforwardly fixed:

— Consult ifixit, a website that offers instructions on gadget repairs. For some products, the site tears apart gadgets and does an analysis on its ease of repair.

Apple’s iphone SE, for example, has a repairability score of 6 out of 10 (10 being the easiest to repair), so it could be a device worth considering for the long haul.

— Check if local technicians can service the device. Plenty of technicians have the parts and ability to service popular phones like iphones and Samsung Galaxy devices. But if you want to buy a handset from a less popular brand, like Oneplus or Motorola, it’s worth calling around first to find out if anyone can fix it in case something goes wrong.

— Find out whether there’s a community of enthusiasts. Sometimes there are no local fixers who can help with a product, but there may be enthusiasts who write their own guides that you can follow.

Is the battery replaceable?

One of the clearest indicators of a product’s durability is whether the batteries are replaceable. Gadgets that work without wires are powered by a lithiumion battery, which can be charged only a finite number of times before it deteriorates.

Fortunately, most phones and laptops have batteries that can be replaced by professionals.

But more compact products have components that are glued together and tightly sealed up, making their batteries impossible to replace. Wireless earphones like Apple’s Airpods and Bose’s Quietcomfort 35 are examples of popular products with irreplaceable batteries. Once the batteries die, you have to buy a new pair.

Is the product reliable?

Like household appliances, tech products have failure rates — the ratio of working to defective units.

These rates can give you a sense of a brand’s reliability. Consumer Reports, well known for publishing reliability ratings for household appliances, compiles similar reliability data for smartphones, laptops, tablets, TVS and printers by surveying subscribers who own the products. People tend to have more problems with products that have moving parts, like printers with ink cartridges, than with electronics like TVS or tablets, said Jerry Beilinson, a technology editor at Consumer Reports.