Boy that was a long 43 minutes to get everything from what could have been about a 5-10 minute video. Definitely not my style of enjoyed youtuber. So ignoring the clickbait title and intro, and all the bits where he wasn’t talking about his point with the Index, I would say he has a few good and many poor points.
First off, I agree with him in terms of right to repair, and making things more consumer friendly in that regard. Parts ought to be obtainable for us or 3rd party shops to make or attempt to make repairs to broken items vs the current standard of replace and short planned obsolescence. Having said that, I doubt Valve will be the electronics company to start/buck that trend. Samsung’s the only modern major electronics manufacturer I know that makes it easy (samsung parts) and even others who do make parts, like say Sony tend to bury them behind official distributors and make it many step process, never mind lost causes like Apple. Most electronics manufacturers are still fighting against right to repair, and while it’s disappointing that Valve isn’t making parts easily available, it’s also not overly surprising when they’re not forced to by law. It’s also clear from reading support threads for the Index on reddit and the steam forums that many people have success obtaining parts from Valve when there is an issue.
Moving onto some of his arguments that any repair to wands is $300, as they require you send in both wands, or any HMD repair is $500 as they replace the whole thing, I can’t speak for if that was true at or just after launch, but that’s certainly not the case anymore. There are numerous posts of people getting a single wand replaced for drift, and I’ve seen posts of people getting them successfully replaced free even past warranty. As for the HMD, he notes they won’t even send out cables, something they do early now in the attempted solution process, even noted in the 2000 hours video that they did for him twice. As such, if those points were true at some point, they are no longer true now.
Then he goes on to how outrageous it is that the headset isn’t built better, and it would cost $500 to repair if damaged out of warranty. His examples are a puppy eating through the cord or a family member stepping on the headset and breaking off the earphones when it was left on the floor. I can’t speak for his household, but in mine, my 500 and 300 dollar electronic items are treated with care and consideration of their value, similar to my TV, cellphone, tablets, etc. Generally I wouldn’t expect a company to freely fix or replace items mistreated that way, although I would say it would be good if parts were accessible so that you could try a cheap fix before opting for an expensive one through Valve. I suppose if you’re the type to damage your electronics routinely through negligence it would be a bigger issue not to have parts available; however, people are able to get and replace some parts like cables, face gaskets, and even individual HMD speakers through Valve support.
On a personal, anecdotal level, having owned three decent HMDs over the past three years and two cheapos, the Index is still the one I recommend and show friends when they visit (well, not so much last year thanks covid), and while I show off the Pimax it’s not a recommendation. This comes down to the whole product experience, which has to include shipping and logistics, support, and software. While the Index isn’t really best in class in almost any single metric, they are usually sitting in the top handful for all the metrics, versus top/bottom performance that can kill the overall product in many other HMD cases.
