The AirPods Pro “could have been easily made repairable with minimal effort.”
Could there be a star rating on products like with the energy star rating? Start with 5 stars and for every egregious anti user repair sin take a star off? Would probably go into negative stars? Not user openable with standard tools, dock a star. Glued not screwed together, dock a star. Uses proprietory parts when standard alternatives are readily available, another star gone. Non user replacable battery, you’re now knocking on the door of a big fat ZERO stars!
But will it make any difference? Most cars are at least mildly user serviceable, but how many people change their own oil or even replace their own battery? Many do no maintenance whatsoever and drive it until it dies then they buy or lease a new one.
There’s a whole industry that specializes in “a new car every 3-5 years”
You don’t have to actually be able to do it yourself for it to be beneficial. If I am, lets just say for the sake of argument, completely hopeless and don’t know my quick web search pentalobes from my tri-points I should still be able to take a thing to a repair shop and they should be able to use standard tools to open it and use standard or at least affordable parts to repair it. We’re not talking about “changing oil is hard” because you can take your car to a workshop and they’ll do it for you. We’re talking about you can’t change the oil, you have to throw the car away and buy a new one.
This is already the case for many Apple products including Macs, phones and tablets. One edge case for headphones doesn’t sway me.
If you’re wondering about the downvotes, I got brigaded by PRC simps. Lemmy doesn’t yet have the protection against this that Reddit had.
There is the ifixit repairability score.
I see now that France have something like this already. It’s fairly new and it’s up to the manufacturers to say how well they score on each criteria but it’s a start! French repair index
Yes, I love what they do but I think it’d have to be independant / not tied to commercial interests to be adopted widely.
