Do you know what a spudger is? I didn’t until I was already fingertips deep into performing open-heart surgery on the Google Pixel Watch 4 and realized that the implement — a plastic stick with one pointy end and one flat end — was already in my hand.
I was following iFixit’s instructions to try to do a full screen replacement on the watch from the comfort of my own home, and spudging, it turned out, was a key part of the process. The spudger is used for pressing, prying, pulling and coaxing the watch’s components in and out of place without damaging the metal elements.
But no sooner had I got to grips with it, when I suddenly had to swap it for a pair of tweezers with pincers sharper than scorpion tails. I wielded them clumsily while trying to peel off a sticker holding the screen connector together. The instructions warned me that in extracting this well-secured scrap of tape, I must be careful not to damage it.
I began to sweat as I tussled with both the sticker and my frustration. If you’ve ever tried to remove chewing gum from your hair, you’ll understand what I mean (though you can’t just fill a smartwatch with peanut butter and hope it still works).
It’s not exactly like I have experience in the field. Call me an ambitious amateur.
Once, for example, around the age of 10, I helped my dad repair our boxy television set with a soldering iron. On a couple of occasions in recent years, under close supervision from the iFixit team at tech shows, I’ve tinkered with laptops and phones. I never electrocuted myself in physics class while playing with circuits. I’m also pretty good at jigsaw puzzles. That’s basically it.
But I wanted to make a go of it because I fundamentally believe product repairability is important. Extending the lifecycle of products means less waste, less need to constantly mine the Earth for rare minerals and less impact on vulnerable communities around the world, including the use of child labor in dangerous conditions. It also means we can get our money’s worth out of our ever-more-expensive devices.
Increasingly, we have the right to repair our own electronics thanks to regulations that compel companies to design their products for easy repair and to make parts and instructions accessible. But it’s one thing to repair a laptop or even a phone. Wearables — from the laudably compact to the fiendishly tiny — are a whole other degree of difficulty, for both manufacturers and consumers.
By early 2025, every US state had introduced some form of right-to-repair legislation, with 10 laws currently in effect (you can check your own state here). Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU Right to Repair Directive is set to come into force at the end of July. Theoretically, we should be starting to see repairability and parts availability trickle down into the tech we buy. In reality, progress is painstakingly slow.
“We are kind of at the point where right to repair has passed legally,” says Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, an advocacy group that offers repair guides for high-tech consumer gear and sells tools and replacement parts.
But compliance? It’s “uneven,” Wiens says.
Making a wearable repairable
As I set out on my repair adventure, I felt pretty intimidated. Not because the stakes are particularly high, but because I’d like to be able to prove that even for me, an idiot with a screwdriver, this is possible. Because if I can do it, so can you.
The Pixel Watch 4, which came out last year, was an obvious candidate for me to tear down (and then rebuild), because Google has been proactive in making this wearable repairable in a way that no other smartwatch maker has yet attempted.
CNET/Andrew Lanxon
“They kind of swung for the fences early, and they’re out ahead,” says Wiens.
The company reengineered its watch from the ground up, without adhesives, so someone like me could disassemble and reassemble it without breaking it. Possible, that is, but not always straightforward.
Throughout history, watchmakers have been considered artisans as much as they are technicians. Working on watches of all stripes requires dexterity, patience, precision and a steady hand — none of which are qualities I innately possess, nor have I done much to cultivate.
I could’ve made this process easier for myself by choosing something larger and less fiddly to repair, but at this point in time, there’s a well-established repair ecosystem for phones, laptops and bigger electronics, whether that be local repair shops or cafes, company-led efforts such as Apple’s Genius Bar or support for self-service repair.
Examine the spectrum of iFixit scores, and it’s clear that many phones still pose a challenge — especially the newer foldable variety — but as a category, repairability has improved significantly over the past decade.
The same repair ecosystem and focus on repair from tech companies are not currently in place for wearables.
That’s an issue, because the number of wearables has been skyrocketing as we adorn ourselves with tech to track our sleep and our workouts, to provide the soundtrack to our lives and to observe and record the world around us. I’m talking not only about earbuds and smartwatches, but also newer gadgets, including smart rings, smart glasses and a whole slew of niche (for now, at least) AI peripherals. These items don’t come cheap and ideally will last at least us as long as, if not longer than, our phones. If we can’t repair them, they’ll quickly end up in the trash, adding to the growing mounds of e-waste piling up around the world.
A study published in Nature last December by researchers from Cornell University and the University of Chicago found that demand for health-focused wearables could approach 2 billion units by 2050. Cumulatively, they have the potential to generate 100 million tons of e-waste, increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide.
By far, the biggest contributor to these devices’ carbon footprint is the production of their printed circuit boards. The researchers concluded that if devices are designed to be modular and repairable, their circuit boards can be reused time and again, extending their lifecycles and reducing the need to constantly mine for new materials.
“There’s an opportunity in not just the raw engineering design, but in little touch points within the product that kind of nudge or guide the consumer to understand either how to repair their products or what to do with it at the end of life.”
Matt White, head of sustainable design, Cambridge Consultants
Here we have both a problem and a solution — so why aren’t tech companies doing more to implement it? For a long time, there’s been a perception that wearable tech is simply impossible to repair, which has led many companies to avoid trying. Instead, they tend to rely solely on recycling and trade-in programs to offset the environmental damage.
When it comes to repairability, wearables pose, without a doubt, “the most challenging frontier of consumer tech,” says Matt White, head of sustainable design at deep tech powerhouse Cambridge Consultants. But it’s a challenge that he has first-hand experience overcoming.
I first met White at CES 2026 in a dimly lit Las Vegas hotel suite with his colleagues. The show is famous for its endless stream of shiny consumer tech launches, but the team brought something very different — a proof-of-concept repairable smartwatch called Ouroboros.
The idea behind the project was to identify the roadblocks to repairability, whether engineering, cultural or legislative. What the team discovered, says White, is that building a truly repairable product requires not only a determination from its inception, but also a commitment to it as a north-star priority throughout the design process.
“It’s a business transformation, it’s not just a product design transformation,” he says. “That takes a lot of guts, it takes a bit of a leap of faith and a bit of a bet on innovation for companies to do that. I think that the reward is there, but it requires the right kind of mindset.”
CNET/Andrew Lanxon
How I repaired a Pixel Watch
Google is already seeing that reward, even though it released the Pixel Watch 4 only last summer.
“The reception after launch has been better than we could have hoped for,” says Francis Hoe, group product manager for Google Pixel Watch.
First up, there was the acknowledgment from iFixit, which awarded the device a 9/10 repairability score, that Google had created the most repairable smartwatch on the market (most watches, like the popular Apple Watch, score 3 or 4 out of 10 at most).
This was validating, Hoe says, but he also appreciates the way the community of Pixel Watch owners has responded. He says he loves to go on Reddit and see people promoting its serviceability, as well as discussing how easy they found the watch to repair.
“It’s a little surprising,” he says. “But it’s good to see that feedback.”
One such Reddit user who completed a successful repair said the iFixit guide was easy to follow, and it took them less than an hour (much better than my 90 minutes).
“I’m familiar with doing maker projects, soldering, etc, but I think anyone could do this pretty easily,” they said. “I do have small hands, so not sure if that helped.”
There were some nerves around how people would actually find the process of repairing the device, according to Hoe. And having taken it apart and put it back together again, I can understand why. On the iFixit website, it ranks replacing the screen on the Pixel Watch 4 as “moderate” on the difficulty scale, and says it should take between 30 minutes and one hour.
By the time I tightened the final screws in the Watch, I was about to hit the 90-minute mark. But ultimately, despite the fiddliness of the operation, I completed it.
The remarkable thing about the Pixel Watch 4 is that from the outside, it looks almost identical to the Pixel Watch 3, but the two products share almost no DNA. Even the screws that hold the watch together, one hidden under each watch band, are a new addition. Previously, there was just glue.
“Seeing things like the Google Watch and smartphones becoming more repairable, but not sacrificing IP68 and 69 ratings for it, proves that actually that’s not really a compromise that has to be made.”
Ben Hatton, analyst, CCS Insight
The assumption was that once the device was sealed, that would be it, says Hoe. Now that things have to go in and out, both the components and the order in which they’re assembled have been completely rearchitected. Many parts have been shrunk, the haptic engine was swapped for an alternative, and the connectors needed to be extra robust to survive being attached and detached. The battery was a particular challenge.
“If the battery gets smaller, battery life gets worse, and that’s obviously a huge selling point of wearable devices,” says Hoe. “It meant fundamentally changing our battery strategy.”
The last thing Google wanted to do was make any part of the Pixel Watch experience worse for the sake of repairability, whether that be reducing battery life, increasing the device’s size or making it less waterproof.
Tech companies often use the difficulty of waterproofing as an excuse for not prioritizing modularity and repairability, says Ben Hatton, connected devices analyst at CCS Insight. But the direction of travel is beginning to change.
“Seeing things like the Google Watch and smartphones becoming more repairable, but not sacrificing IP68 and 69 ratings for it, proves that actually that’s not really a compromise that has to be made,” he says. “That major argument against preventing water ingress is starting to be maybe debunked a little bit.”
Those IP ratings indicate resistance to dust and water infiltration. The 6 in the first position indicates the highest level of dust protection, while the 8 or 9 in the second position are high marks for water resistance.
With the Pixel Watch 4 being a sports and fitness device, making it waterproof was a nonnegotiable, says Hoe. Again, this was previously accomplished with adhesives, which aren’t compatible with self-repair, so they had to experiment with alternatives.
The Pixel Watch 4 does come with an IP68 rating, and I got to see first-hand how Google has used O-rings — donut-shaped rubber bands — to create a tight, leak-free seal on both the external screws and around the screen. Getting the tiny O-rings back on the 2mm screws was another tricky part of the reassembly process for me, like playing an ant-size game of Hoopla, but it will be essential if I’m ever to wear the watch in the shower.
Given the potentially dicey trade-offs, many companies would’ve thrown in the towel on repairability. White, who has worked on many different products over the years, says he’s seen multiple times when companies set out to make something repairable but abandon that design principle when it might hold up a project.
“Keeping it sacred is very, very hard when you know engineering teams are getting pressure that you know this has to be released next month in order to hit this milestone and that milestone,” he says. “Then, it’s the first thing in the firing line.”
For Google, repairability eventually won out in internal debates.
“Every time that there’s an inflection point of trade-offs that have to be made, I think we always try to come back to the user and what are we hoping to deliver with this product,” Hoe says. “The trend is usually people are using the devices longer and longer, so it wasn’t something that we wanted to walk away from.”
Fairphone
A modular approach to headphones
When it comes to challenging the status quo, no one in consumer tech is doing it quite like Fairphone. The Dutch social enterprise is best known for its sustainable, repairable smartphones — the mere existence of which throws down the gauntlet to the entire industry, including giants such as Apple and Samsung.
Around 2021, the company decided to branch out into audio products and has since released a series of products, most notably the Fairbuds, which are earbuds, and the Fairbuds XL, which are over-ear headphones.
Perhaps because they’re so small, often relatively inexpensive and viewed as a peripheral rather than a device in their own right, people tend to treat headphones as disposable. You’ve probably had at least one pair of headphones break, but did you think to try to repair them?
If your answer is no, don’t feel ashamed. There’s been a long-held belief that headphones are impossible to repair. That’s just started changing.
It’s only in the past few years that iFixit has been handing out repairability scorecards to wireless earbuds, and only in May that it started marking headphones. In both categories, only one company has managed a perfect 10/10 score.
This Fairbuds XL, in particular, is the company’s “most fun” to repair, says Chandler Hatton, Fairphone’s CTO. “It’s a little bit chunkier, and you can feel a little bit more comfortable taking it apart.”
Earbuds, meanwhile, posed a trickier challenge. Our ears aren’t typically load-bearing body parts, so there’s a trade-off between weight and battery size. The small batteries inevitably burn out sooner than we’d like, so we end up chucking them and buying new ones.
“The way that we combat it is to make it super simple to upgrade it to the point that it would be quite silly to throw it away, because you realize: Hey, this thing that I have is valuable, and I can very easily purchase something for very little money and spend 5 minutes putting it into this device,” says Hatton.
Giving a device a second or even third life can prevent a piece of tech from ending up gathering dust in a drawer, he adds, noting the sense of confusion many people feel when they don’t want to admit they might never use something again.
Ultimately, to build repairable tech, you do need to start with repairability as a design principle, says Hatton. If every component needs to be soldered to a printed circuit board, you’re asking people to do too much to repair it. Instead, you need to take a modular approach and ensure the most commonly replaced components are actually accessible.
Another major benefit of making a device modular and repairable is that it can be backward compatible. When Fairphone launched the latest version of the Fairbuds XL, it made the new driver available so people with the earlier model could upgrade their headphones without buying a whole new pair.
It’s important to the company to make tech that’s also appealing and affordable, says Hatton. She doesn’t want to ask people to compromise on their design and comfort standards. Repairability can’t come at the cost of an avant-garde product that might alienate people and make them less willing to take a chance on a smaller brand.
“We want to build on the things that are already there and be part of the conversation, part of the ecosystem and part of the trends that are going on,” says Hatton.
CNET/Andrew Lanxon
Repairability as state of the art
For now, companies, including Fairphone and Google, are leading by example, but at some point that example might form the basis of a legal precedent.
Europe’s battery regulation, which will come into force in 2027, requires most portable consumer electronics to have easily user-replaceable batteries. Just as the EU regulation mandating USB-C charging made it the global charging standard, it’s expected that the new rules will affect the design and repairability of products worldwide.
There are exemptions for devices where battery access would compromise water resistance, or for ultra-compact designs where physical constraints make safe battery access impossible. But these exceptions exist for only as long as there’s nothing in the state of the art — or in the market — that proves it’s possible to make a battery accessible or waterproof after all, says White, the consultant.
Now that Google has shown it’s possible to make a smartwatch with an IP68 rating and a user-replaceable battery, that could shift what’s considered state-of-the-art.
“Whether it be for a ring or whether it be for smart glasses or whether it be for headphones, it’s a real opportunity for companies to go… this is now the state of the art, and everyone else has to follow,” says White. “You can use it as a tool to enact change across the entire sector, and also gain all of the benefit of being the first one to do it.”
With both regulation looming and product precedents being set, there is enormous potential for tech companies to force competitors to raise their own game by developing replaceable battery solutions first. If you hold a licensable patent for such a solution, it could even prove profitable.
“It could turn into an e-waste nightmare if there’s not due consideration designed into these things.”
Matt White, head of sustainable design, Cambridge Consultants
European regulators might be slow, but their power shouldn’t be underestimated. Even Apple switched its proprietary Lightning port to USB-C on all the iPhones it sells globally.
Apple has made significant strides in repairability, says iFixit’s Wiens, who has publicly and successfully exerted pressure on the company over the years.
“They really, genuinely, I think, do believe in repair and making it last longer,” he says. “Broadly, the iPhone does last a long time, and it’s great resale value.”
He’s less impressed when it comes to the Apple Watch and AirPods. (Versions of the latter consistently receive a 0/10 iFixit score, and Wiens describes the lack of repairability as “egregious.”)
The Apple Watch, meanwhile, poses a “fixable design problem,” says Wiens. One of the main issues — prevalent across the industry, especially with games consoles — is the availability of parts and manuals, which Wiens sees as lacking when it comes to the watch.
He directs me to a letter sent by Apple to the Minnesota attorney general in February and posted on Reddit, in which the company points to its online Self Service Repair store as proof of its compliance with the state’s right-to-repair law regarding the Apple Watch. This resource contains documentation and opportunities to buy parts for many Apple products, but not the Apple Watch.
A spokesperson for Apple said the company meets the requirements of Minnesota’s right-to-repair law, and that it’s the first smartphone maker to support a push for federal right-to-repair regulation.
The miniature design of the Apple Watch presents challenges, but the company is rolling out same-unit battery repair service for a growing number of models over an expanding range of regions. Display repairs for certain models are also under development, as are further enhancements to overall Apple Watch repairability.
“We’ve seen big improvements from Apple and almost market-leading improvements in some respects,” says Ben Wood, chief analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, who cites an easily delaminated glue the company invented to simplify iPhone disassembly. It’s the kind of thing that could be rolled down to the Apple Watch and other small products to increase ease of repair.
Wood adds that he wouldn’t be surprised, especially given Apple’s progress in cutting emissions associated with the manufacture of recent Apple Watch models, to see a more easily repairable Apple Watch in the near future.
Quinten Klein
Smart glasses: “Definitely fragile”
While the established players in established wearable product categories are taking active strides toward sustainability, the same can’t be said for the up-and-comers.
Quinten Klein, a 30-year-old business development and operations contractor, dangles a pair of first-generation Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses in front of his camera from his home in Los Angeles.
“If you can see in here, I’ve taken off one of the arms,” he says, as the inside edge of one of the glasses stems flaps open.
This is the fourth pair of Meta Ray-Bans Klein has tinkered with, he tells me. The speakers on his first pair of Ray-Bans broke out of warranty, prompting him to take matters into his own hands. Reddit is filled with complaints from people just like him, who have been left with a non-functioning pair of smart glasses relatively soon after buying them.
“They’re definitely fragile,” Klein says. “They’re not easy to repair — not because the job isn’t easy, [but] because things just don’t work once you repair it. Things don’t go back together right, and it’s packed tightly. It’s one of those things where they’ve obviously designed it never to be opened up again.”
“Glasses are hard. But come on, you’ve got to find a way to make the battery swappable on these smart glasses, otherwise it’s a disposable product.”
Kyle Wiens, CEO, iFixit
On the Gen 1s he shows me over the video call, he’d replaced the battery with one from the Ray-Bans Gen 2. This time, he’s been extra careful not to cause any serious damage so that he can keep on using them rather than have them be another sacrifice to repairability science.
“You’re still going to end up damaging some little parts, like the bottoms here — the plastic is just so soft,” he says. “The glue, once you’ve broken it off, it’s really hard to get off of the little plastic edges. It’s definitely not something that I would recommend to any casual user.”
Once he was in, the battery on the Gen 1 glasses was actually pretty easy, says Klein. The front half of the glasses’ arm nearest to the lenses is very simply organized and connected (the back half, where the speakers reside, is more of a mystery).
“It’s the putting it back together part and the reliability once it’s together part that is not really there,” he says.
This is something I relate to from my tinkering with my Pixel Watch 4. The reassembly was by far the most fraught part of the process. “I’m not sure what kind of glue they used, but I’ve been trying to work with different industrial glues to copy it,” says Klein.
Smart glasses (especially those without screens) are currently experiencing explosive popularity, with research published by IDC this week showing 167% year-on-year growth in the first three months of 2026. Let’s hope those 2.25 million units stand the test of time.
“It could turn into an e-waste nightmare if there’s not due consideration designed into these things,” says White.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta is the market leader in smart glasses, with over 69% market share, according to IDC. No other company currently boasts more than 3.5%, but several promising challengers are poised to enter the fray with competitive products.
Glasses from Google, Samsung, Gentle Monster, Warby Parker and Xreal are all on the verge of hitting the shelves. Meanwhile, the Alibaba Qwen smart glasses I tried at MWC in Barcelona in March had swappable batteries on the ends of the arms — the first hint of any repairability we’ve seen in this emerging product category.
Thanks to his intrepid approach to DIY repair, Klein has shown that if you can get inside the Meta Ray-Bans and close them up again, battery repair is not only possible but straightforward. But access to the device’s innards is so prohibitive that in an iFixit teardown, the team deemed the glasses “unrepairable.”
The generous way to think about this is to acknowledge that it is new technology and that Meta is still figuring it out.
“You’re packing a considerable amount of tech into a crazy, already predetermined form factor that you can’t deviate much from,” says Carsten Frauenheim, iFixit’s global head of design for repairability. “Their engineering challenge is high, and I think their priority is just tackling that right now.”
Wiens has a more take-no-prisoners attitude. “Glasses are hard — we’re at the bleeding edge of this,” he says. “But come on, you’ve got to find a way to make the battery swappable on these smart glasses, otherwise it’s a disposable product. … I’m going to continue to hold their feet to the fire until they get the battery repairable.”
A spokesperson for Meta said the company was always looking for ways to improve the overall lifecycle of its products, focusing on durability and longevity as key considerations during hardware development. The company follows circular economy principles, including “reusing hardware components, increasing the use of recycled materials and responsible supply chain practices,” they said.
“We have several programs in place to keep devices in use and out of landfill,” they added. “We also offer refurbished products where available, extending the lifecycle of existing hardware.” Lenses are fully replaceable and customers, having trouble with warrantees should reach out to Ray-Ban or Oakley customer support directly.
Compared with upcoming interlopers into the glasses game, such as Google, Samsung and potentially Apple, Meta has relatively little hardware manufacturing experience, which could put it at a disadvantage. It’s likely that they’ll include some of the learnings from making other products in their portfolios repairable, Hatton says. “Maybe that could steer Meta into a more sustainable outlook.”
Smart rings: Reason to hope?
Other makers of wearables, including smart rings and AI peripherals such as pendants and clips, don’t appear to be doing much better — though there are signs of hope.
Earlier this year, smart ring maker Oura filed for a patent in the US with a replaceable battery design. The company hasn’t commented further on this, and there was no such component in the Oura Ring 5, which debuted in May, but it still feels promising at a time when very few companies designing emerging wearable products seem to have repair on their agendas at all.
For those, such as Wiens, who are campaigning for the right to repair, the lack of care and attention being given to repairability by companies experimenting with new product categories is ultimately dispiriting.
“I get we’re excited with the shiny new, but you can’t go and mine a hole in the Earth every day of raw materials, get stuff made by children … then drag the supply chain all around the world to make something that we’re going to sell to you for $400, and then it stops working in 18 months,” he says. “This is not OK. It should not be ethically tolerated.”
In the face of unrepairable products, companies only have trade-in and recycling schemes to fall back on. Both Meta and Oura offer these, but in the long run, they won’t meet the requirements of right-to-repair legislation, and it’s hard to measure how thorough any recycling truly is.
CNET/Andrew Lanxon
What you and I can do
All of this brings me back to my own attempts to repair the Pixel Watch.
It’s all well and good for companies to invest in making their products easily repairable and recyclable, but the onus is also on us, as consumers of those products, to follow through by repairing or recycling. If we leave them in a drawer for years gathering dust — something I’ve been guilty of doing — or dispose of them irresponsibly, we’re not playing our part in keeping the circular economy a true circle.
In a survey last year by the University of Bradford in northern England, researchers found that 73% of people were willing to repair their electronics. The majority were motivated by cost savings and the fun of a DIY project.
Those who were reluctant to repair their tech cited lack of skills, tools, knowledge and time as major barriers. Lack of time is a personal issue and often a matter of priorities and perception. As for the other three, iFixit and other self-service repair stores, including Apple’s, have people covered.
Still, for many of us, a psychological shift might be required to add a repair chapter to the story of our ownership of any given item. If we can make this shift, we might be able to find the time after all. We’re out of practice right now — most of us don’t spend our evenings sitting in front of the TV darning our own socks.
Tech companies could also do more to hold our hands through this process, says White. “There’s an opportunity there in not just the raw engineering design, but in the messaging, in the [user experience] of the product, in little touch points within the product that kind of nudge or guide the consumer to understand either how to repair their products or what to do with it at the end of life.”
Our consumer culture is one of abundance, so the skills and inclination to fix and mend have been replaced by the ease of disposing of and replacing. But if we can get out of that habit, there may be untapped and unacknowledged benefits in repairing our broken things.
Consider the Ikea Effect, a term coined in 2011 by three academics from Harvard, Yale and Duke who published the results of three studies in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Together, their findings showed that people tend to cherish items they’ve built themselves, placing much higher value on them than on items they’ve simply purchased.
Most of us are familiar with the feeling of satisfaction of completing a Lego set, for example, as well as the way we tend to value the finished product — often not wanting to tear it down, but instead displaying it somewhere we can admire it. Our effort creates attachment, and the same might well be true of items we successfully repair.
Tech companies can help make repairs more fun for us, too. At every step of the journey, the Pixel Watch team had to think about what people would experience if they went fishing around under the hood. That meant not just making it easy to take apart, but making it aesthetically pleasing.
“We’re not thinking about just the outside, but how do we drive the inner beauty of the device, so that when you’re taking it apart, it feels like something we considered,” says Hoe. He points to the printed Google branding on the battery’s metal, the way the components line up to create a smooth surface, and the lack of sharp edges. “It wasn’t an afterthought, essentially,” he says.
We could well start to see our technology not simply as utilitarian items destined sooner rather than later for the rubbish heap, but instead as something partially crafted by our own hand, into which we have poured time, labor and care. We might subsequently make more effort to keep our tech safe and give it a responsible send-off when it finally does take its last gasp.
Likewise, handholding us through our confusion over what to do with our broken products is a way for tech companies to establish goodwill among customers.
“It’s a really great opportunity for the brand to build loyalty and stickiness,” says White. “In my mind, it feels like a win-win.”
The legacy of the Pixel Watch, says Hoe, is that it’s already proven people do actually care about repairability.
I found my experience of replacing the Pixel Watch’s screen both deeply fun and satisfying. It also massively boosted confidence in my own capabilities. Having completed one repair, I now feel less intimidated at the thought of getting out my screwdriver, my tweezers and, yes, my spudger to crack open more of my damaged tech.
There’s one particularly pricey pair of headphones sitting in a drawer that is calling to me. I’ve been putting off dealing with them, but they’re already broken. It’s at this point that I have to ask myself, what’s the worst that could happen?
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