I don't know what landlords are like in European countries, but some landlords in America forbid people from connecting any kind of AC exhaust port to a window.
It's funny that in this case the law now protects you.
Generally anything you do indoor that falls under normal usage(painting walls, hanging furniture with big screws,etc.) is ok without approval, at least in my country/city(austria) and the land lord can't deny any of this and is not even required to be notified.
As you would have an open window and a not so noise machine running this would be ok, but energy efficiency is quite bad and you lose the benefits of the thermal insulation of your building.
Yeah, the GP comment is classic HN. Wildly vague, with no supporting evidence. The planning rules in the US are fractally complex compared to "Europe".
It can be hard to justify the cost of installing and maintaining any form of household cooling in colder areas of Europe. Additionally a lot of apartment buildings don't have them, and most landlords probably wouldn't appreciate a tenant installing one without permission. Evidently heatwaves are becoming common enough now that most people should probably keep a window AC unit ready in case of emergencies though.
> I've never had "repairability" raised to me as an engineer.
What kinds of hardware do you engineer exactly? Tons of companies have repair technicians on staff. I'm sure every datacenter in the world has individuals frequently swapping faulty parts out of servers, and those servers are often designed to keep that kind of maintenance from being a chore.
It's one thing if you're talking about board level repair, but part swapping is something that end users do by themselves all the time. I've certainly swapped phone batteries before. I've helped friends replace their cracked screens.
In fairness however, for products that are being engineered for portability first there is certainly a case to be made for keeping things compact at the expense of reparability. That certainly doesn't explain away the behavior of companies that deliberately hinder repairs by blocking replacement parts, or making replacement parts impossible to obtain. That NEEDS to be illegal, and that is a big part of what right to repair is about.