The Unauthorized Guide to iPhone, iPad, and iPod Repair
We’re all about getting the knowledge and tools for repair into the hands of as many people as possible. So when Timothy Warner asked us to collaborate on his upcoming book about fixing and maintaining iDevices, we jumped on board and helped out.
The book—The Unauthorized Guide to iPhone, iPad, and iPod Repair: A DIY Guide to Extending the Life of Your iDevices!—was just published and is now available for purchase in all the usual places.
A combination of Warner’s experience as an Apple Certified Repair Technician and loads of full-color photos, The Unauthorized Guide is an awesome resource for amateur and professional fixers alike. It’s filled with step-by-step repair instructions for nearly every iDevice, info on recovering from water damage, and tips for sourcing, repairing, and reselling broken iDevices.
We’ve thoroughly reviewed the book for technical accuracy, and are proud to give it our full approval and backing.
iFixit Community Survey: The Results Are In
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The Joy of Old Tech
What’s the oldest piece of technology that you own? That’s the question radio host Nora Young asked listeners on the CBC program Spark. Cue the nostalgia: callers waxed poetic about everything from 10-year-old MP3 players to ancient, reliable typewriters.
The theme of the show was mindful gadget consumerism. It’s no secret that upgrade cycles for nifty electronics have gotten quicker: the allure of newer, faster, and shinier is hard to resist, especially if you love electronics. But, Young asks, if we really love our gadgets, why are we in such a rush to get rid of them?
To that end, Young spoke with a handful of electronic experts who get tech, keep tech, love tech, and fix tech. The roster included Anil Dash, whose website, Last Year’s Model, celebrates keeping old(er) gadgets instead of buying new ones; Gina Trapani, creator of LifeHacker; discerning gadget reviewer Brian Lam of The Wire Cutter; Ian Urbina of The New York Times and author of a recent exposé about the state of CRT recycling; and our very own CEO Kyle Wiens, who talks gadget design and repairability.
Check out the full show in podcast form. And we put the same question to you: What’s the oldest gadget you refuse to get rid of?
How Repairable Is Your Tablet?
Every time you walk into an electronics store, you’re making a choice. Every gadget you buy is a vote cast. We want people to make informed decisions, as their vote influences how hardware manufacturers choose to design in the future. Some may care that their tablets are easy to repair and upgrade; others may not. For those that do, we’ve aggregated our repairability scores for the best-selling tablets into one convenient resource: our Tablet Repairability List.
We weren’t able to list every single tablet, but this is a good start. We have to disassemble each tablet to score it, so additional hardware will show up as we perform more teardowns. Our hope is that through customers’ votes, manufacturers will create long-lasting, easy-to-repair hardware that we can all love.
iFixit Community Survey: Win a Nexus 7
Fixers Assemble!
We have a noble quest for you: help fix the world. Share your repair experiences with us by completing the first-ever iFixit Community Survey. We want to know what you fix, how, and why. We’ll analyze the results and share on iFixit.org so we all have a better perspective on the global repair community.
A quest is only as good as its loot—so we have some giveaways: a Nexus 7 (one of the world’s most repairable tablets) and 7 iFixit Pro Tech Toolkits. Winners will be randomly selected from people who complete the survey during the next week. The earlier you complete your survey, the more chances you’ll have to win.
Repair fixes the world—one device at a time. Let’s help the world do it better.
iFixit and Make to Part Ways
Three years ago, we started working with Maker Media—the inspiring people behind Make Magazine and Maker Faire—to see what an open source, community-driven DIY project database would look like. And so, Make: Projects was born—a combination of iFixit’s community technology and Make’s library of great projects. Our goal was to build a Wikipedia of how-to projects, a central repository where ideas could flourish and instructions could get better over time.
Since we launched the site, it has become a popular resource. Make: Projects has more than 3,000 projects. And the site was used by half a million people in December alone.
It is with sadness that I announce Make: Projects will be moving off of iFixit’s Dozuki community platform on February 28. The projects will still be accessible and URLs will be redirected, but it will no longer be in a wiki format. This means that the Make: Projects API will shut off permanently, and any of Make’s HTML embeds used across the internet will stop working.
In addition to the new host of content on makeprojects.com, we’ve posted all of the projects on archive.org. They will remain in their native oManual format, which we developed in conjunction with O’Reilly, so you can use and share the data freely.
I’m more committed than ever to the belief that DIY should be an open source venture. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before, and every time we share what we know, we make the world just a little bit better.
We are makers and we are fixers. Information on how to make, build, and fix things in the real world wants to be free. We want to help make that possible: this week, we’re making our publishing software, Dozuki, free for anyone to host open source, community-driven instruction manuals.