Since June 2025 every smartphone sold in the European Union carries an energy label, and behind the label sits a Product Information Sheet in a public register. Scan the QR code on the box and you get the sheet: battery endurance, water resistance, how scratch-resistant the glass is, how repairable the phone is.
The register holds two sheets for an iPhone 15 with 128 GB of storage. One was filed by Apple. One was filed by a Slovak refurbisher. They agree on the battery's rated capacity to the milliamp-hour — and then they disagree about the phone.
The two sheets
| Declared parameter | Apple (reg. 2247679) | Telcos s.r.o. (reg. 2704402) |
|---|---|---|
| Rated battery capacity | 3 349 mAh | 3 349 mAh |
| Battery endurance in cycles | 1 000 | 1 000 |
| Repeated free fall without defect | 90 | 90 |
| Energy efficiency class | B | B |
| OS-update guarantee | 5 years | 5 years |
| Battery endurance per cycle | 34 h | 28 h |
| Ingress protection | IP68 | IP65 |
| Immersion depth | 6,00 m | n.a. |
| Screen scratch resistance (Mohs) | 4 | 6 |
| Charger required output power | 5 W | 20 W |
| Repairability Index | 2,96 | 3,35 |
The two sheets differ by a whole ingress-protection class, by two steps on the Mohs scale, by six hours of battery life and by 0.39 of a repairability score. They describe one phone, in one register, under one regulation.
How we know it is the same phone
Everything above depends on the two sheets describing the same device, and the specification they agree on is what settles it.
The rated battery capacity is that discriminator. Across all 901 unique smartphone records in the register, only these two declare 3 349 mAh. The figure identifies one Apple model uniquely, because Apple's other batteries declare different capacities: 3149, 3561, 3582, 3692, 3988, 4005, 4056, 4383, 4674, 4685, 4823 and 5391 mAh. Battery capacity is the first field that would diverge if the sheets described different devices, and here it matches exactly.
Both sheets also carry the identical spare-parts and repair-instruction weblink, pointing at Apple's own self-service repair page.
And this is not one refurbisher's transcription slip. Telcos has seven iPhone registrations in the register — the 13, 13 mini, 13 Pro, 14, 14 Pro, 15 and 15 Pro — and all seven declare Mohs 6, IP65, 1 000 cycles and 90 falls. The pattern is systematic, which makes it a methodology story rather than a typing error.
Both records are live, and Apple's has already been revised
The register's status fields confirm both are current: each is marked published, from a verified organisation with a verified trademark, and neither carries an end-of-market date.
⚠️ Apple's record is version 2, republished on 30 October 2025. That matters, because it means the Mohs 4 is not a stale first draft that nobody revisited. It survived a revision.
The divergences, in the direction they run
battery endurance: (34 − 28) / 34 = 17.65% lower on the refurbisher's sheet
repairability: 3,35 − 2,96 = 0.39 higher on the refurbisher's sheet
scratch resistance: Mohs 6 vs Mohs 4 = two steps harder on the refurbisher's sheetThey do not all flatter the same party.
What this does not mean
None of this means the refurbisher is inflating its label. Two of the three divergences cut against its own commercial interest. Declaring IP65 rather than IP68 is arguably the honest move for a refurbished phone. Opening a device breaks its adhesive seals, and Apple's own material says water resistance can decrease with normal wear. A refurbisher who declines to inherit the factory rating is being conservative about the thing that matters most. And nobody publishes a battery-life figure 17.65% below the manufacturer's in order to sell more phones.
That leaves the Mohs 6 as the odd one out — the single divergence that flatters a refurbished unit on a property refurbishment cannot improve, since nobody re-hardens cover glass. The likeliest explanation is not bad faith but that the harmonised scratch test is cheap, coarse and run independently by each supplier, and different laboratories get different answers on the same glass.
Nor has anyone here been shown to break the law. We could not read the regulation's annex — the EU's legal database served us a bot challenge on every attempt and told a real browser it was temporarily unavailable — so we cannot tell you the permitted value range for the Mohs field, how the test is defined, or whether a refurbisher is even obliged to register. We are not calling this a breach, because we did not read the text that would decide it.
And the register is not the failure in this story. On the contrary, this contradiction is findable in an afternoon only because the Commission publishes the entire database, free and machine-readable. No other jurisdiction does. You cannot find the equivalent disagreement about a phone sold in Singapore, because there is nothing to look in.
What to do with it
Read the label as a declaration by whoever put that unit on the market, not as a measurement of the phone.
If you buy a refurbished iPhone in the EU, scanning the QR code on the box does not tell you what Apple measured. It tells you what the refurbisher declared — and on this evidence the two can differ by a full IP class. If water resistance is the thing you care about, the refurbisher's IP65 is the number describing the unit in your hand, and it is the lower one. Treat it as the operative figure rather than assuming the factory rating followed the phone through refurbishment.
The same reasoning applies to the repairability index, which is a score about a supply chain — spare parts, documentation, software updates — rather than a property of the object.
Where this comes from, and what will date it
Both Product Information Sheets were read directly from the EU's product register: registration 2247679 filed by Apple, 59,410 bytes, and registration 2704402 filed by Telcos s.r.o. of Bratislava, 59,788 bytes. The status, version and publication dates come from the register's own record for each. The 901-record capacity census was run across the register's smartphone entries. Every percentage above is arithmetic on the two sheets.
⚠️ We verified that the second sheet is the same generated template rather than a look-alike page by confirming it carries both the regulation citation and the scratch-resistance field label. What we could not obtain is the regulation's own text, so nothing here asserts what the annex requires — and we do not know which laboratory produced either Mohs figure, because neither sheet says.
This dates slowly. Both records are live with no end-of-market date and Apple's has already survived one revision cycle. It dies if the refurbisher amends or withdraws its registration, or if a market-surveillance authority forces the two into line. The first scheduled moment when the underlying test methodology could change is the Commission's review of the regulation, due by September 2027.
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