The law requires that manufacturers have repair material availability parity between their authorized shops and independent shops. Basically, they can't unfairly restrict access to repair materials.
A startup isn't prevented from making whatever "unrepairable" alternative it wants. In fact, if it has no repair operation of its own, it's not required by the law to do anything at all. Most startups fall in that category.
Hey, I head the editorial team at iFixit and honestly appreciate the feedback. Totally fair to suggest we should've flagged our relationship with Lenovo at the head of the article. It's a tricky thing, to figure out how to message our business relationships with companies when we're also scoring their devices. I've added a fuller note about our business relationship with them to the beginning.
What Lenovo pays us for: They send us devices. We score them and report internally on their repairability. Lenovo has actually made their repairability snapshot reports public, so you can see some of the documents we've given them, for instance: https://www.ifixit.com/Document/sunTY6dbbJvOMRjP/Repairabili...
What Lenovo doesn't pay us for: Any particular score (they've worked really hard for the 10/10). This blog post/press release.
There are other companies paying us for similar services, and most of them do not get 10/10s or glowing coverage on our site. Companies don't get any extra credit for working with us instead of providing repair in another way.
To be clear, our repairability scoring is an objective system that involves engineers taking apart dozens of devices in each category to calibrate each scorecard. Making a new scorecard takes us hundreds of hours. Giving a score to a product using that scorecard is also a time-consuming human thing, disassembling a product, building out a disassembly tree (like the one in the snapshot I linked above), turning the process into something legible to our spreadsheets.
M5 MacBook vs. ThinkPad E14 Gen 7, the ThinkPad wins on modular storage, modular memory, battery replacement is dead simple, it’s easier to get inside, and you only need a Phillips screwdriver and a pry tool for most common repairs. A lot of the concerns you bring up ("easily breakable," "flimsy") are matters of durability. We generally prefer clips over glues, and we didn't find the clips to be unusually breakable in our testing. Durability matters, but we try hard to separate it from repairability in our scoring. Assemblies and soldered ports absolutely played into why the E14 Gen 7 didn't get a 10/10.
Re: AI-generated prose... we do indeed use LLMs to support our small team of human writers when drafting content. That said, we don't publish anything without multiple humans reviewing. In this case, we were thorough in our human fact checking, but I agree we missed the mark on style.
A startup isn't prevented from making whatever "unrepairable" alternative it wants. In fact, if it has no repair operation of its own, it's not required by the law to do anything at all. Most startups fall in that category.