They’re not specifying a type of screw. They’re just saying to use screws instead of glue, make a product possible to disassemble and reassemble without causing it to necessarily break on disassembly.

I’m not hugely in love with the idea of placing legal limitations on designers, but we’re taking about mass market consumer and commercial goods, generally measured in at a minimum, thousands produced and hopefully sold. They’re manufactured in factories that at their best are barely better than sweatshops in countries where the workers have fewer rights and lower wages and sold to people with more money, rights and priveleges. Jony Ive might not be happy if he has to modify his designs to meet a legislative mandate, but I just don’t care. The factories aren’t going to care, they’ll accommodate any change they have to. The factory workers aren’t going to care if they using screws or glue. Customers are going to care then if they can replace their widgets for a lot less money than it takes to buy a new widget. I know I’ll care about that, and I’ll look back with disdain on those few times I simply couldn’t get something repaired and had to replace it.

The market being full of disposable shit sucks. I have plates, ceramic dinnerware, silverware, glassware, cast iron pans and pots that I would like to some day pass on to my descendants because why not? They can sell it on to someone who needs it more, use it themselves, maybe if one breaks it can become part of a mosaic or something nice. I can’t think of a single electronic I own that might, might, serve some useful purpose, and even appliances with the additional and often unnecessary silicon in them are iffy.

If right to repair laws can change the status quo, I am all for that. If that means I’m not doing my part to inflate the economy with higher numbers by wasting more money to more companies to inflate their numbers for shit that will break in an unreasonably short amount of time relative to my lifetime, I think I can live with myself.