iFixit (ifixit.com) is a free online repair knowledge base and community built around one practical question: something broke — how do you fix it yourself? The bulk of the site is hundreds of thousands of step-by-step, photo-illustrated repair guides organized as a wiki, covering phones, computers, game consoles, appliances, cars and even clothing. Around the guides sit an Answers Q&A forum, teardown reviews of new devices and a 0–10 repairability scoring system. iFixit also sells repair tools and replacement parts, and it is well known for its advocacy of Right to Repair legislation. Compared with manufacturers' official support pages, its verifiable distinctions are these: all content is published under a CC BY-NC-SA license that permits non-commercial reuse, its scores and teardowns are independent of any vendor, and its guides reach back to devices long past official support, such as the original 2007 iPhone.

Site Overview

  • URL: https://www.ifixit.com/ (a Chinese-language interface exists at zh.ifixit.com)
  • Type: Repair knowledge base + community Q&A + tools and parts store
  • Cost: Guides, Answers and scores are free; tools and parts are paid products, with a lifetime guarantee on iFixit-designed tools
  • Registration: Browsing and searching require no account; asking questions, editing guides and translating do
  • Interface languages: 12 (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Simplified Chinese)
  • Scale: As of 2026-08-31 the homepage counters show 750,946 free guides and 247,645 Answers solutions (homepage)

The iFixit homepage: three stat cards showing the numbers of free guides, Answers solutions and successful repairs, with device category tiles below

Background

In 2003, college students Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules fixed an iBook G3 that had no official service manual, started harvesting parts from broken laptops to sell online, and wrote up the repair process as manuals — that is how iFixit began (About Us). Guide number 1 in the site's database is the PowerBook G3 Wallstreet keyboard replacement (API record). The team later began taking apart the newest devices right after launch; the "teardown" became a familiar format, and iFixit's repairability scores turned into a reference for media and the industry. The company describes itself as the world's largest online repair community.

Core Features: Guides, Answers, Teardowns and Scores

Step-by-step repair guides. Each guide combines a background introduction, a list of required tools and parts (with purchase links), photo-illustrated steps, plus difficulty and time estimates. Every step carries a comment thread, each page has an "Edit" button for revisions, and an AI assistant named FixBot can be asked questions. The iPhone 13 battery replacement guide is a typical example: it explains that iPhone batteries are rated to hold 80% of capacity for up to 500 charge cycles, lists picks and drivers as tools, starts by removing two pentalobe P2 screws at the bottom edge, and places prominent warnings about lithium-ion fire risk and compromised water seals.

The iPhone 13 battery replacement guide: introduction, required tools list and the first photo-illustrated step

Guides are organized into 16 device categories: apparel, appliances, cameras, cars and trucks, computer hardware, electronics, game consoles, household, Mac, medical devices, PCs, phones, skills, tablets, tools and vehicles (guides home).

Answers forum. Aimed at problems the guides do not cover, it lists questions by device with reply counts and timestamps, filterable by most helpful, unanswered and newest. As of 2026-08-31 the forum counted 247,645 solutions in total, with 58 questions asked in the previous 24 hours, 24 of them still unanswered (Answers).

The Answers forum question list, grouped by device and showing reply counts and posting times

Teardowns and repairability scores. A team of engineers tears down new devices and scores repairability from 0 to 10, listing concrete pros and cons for each device along with the scorecard version used (v2.1, v2.2 and so on). The site notes that the scoring rubric is updated frequently to keep up with new technologies, materials and design trends, so scores should be compared against contemporaries rather than across eras (Smartphone Repairability Scores). Scores cover smartphones, tablets, laptops, wireless earbuds, e-readers, smartwatches, mini PCs, handheld game consoles, headphones and speakers, and the full dataset is downloadable as CSV. The site also cites the French legislative context: France requires electronics makers to display a repairability score at the point of sale, and surveys it references found that about 80% of French consumers would give up their favorite brand for a more repairable product (Repairability).

The smartphone repairability scores page: each phone lists pros, cons, year and the scorecard version used

Store, Manufacturer Partnerships and Advocacy

  • Store: sells iFixit-designed precision tools (lifetime guarantee) and tested replacement parts, including genuine parts sourced from manufacturers such as Samsung and Google; orders over $75 ship free within the US (homepage, About Us).
  • Manufacturer partnerships: collaborates with Google, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Motorola, Patagonia, Polaroid, Valve and others to provide official parts and documentation for selected devices (homepage, "Our Allies").
  • Right to Repair advocacy: iFixit campaigns for repair legislation alongside repair.org, repair.eu, PIRG and the EFF, maintains a dedicated advocacy section and publishes ongoing teardown and repair-policy reporting (About Us).

Accounts and Open Capabilities

  • Reading guides, Answers and scores requires no account; an account is for participation — asking, commenting, editing guides and translating.
  • A public REST API (2.0) exposes public guide data that can be read anonymously (verified during research), useful for programmatic access to guide structure, steps and images.
  • Guides can be embedded on third-party sites; built-in internationalization exists for Simplified Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, Korean and Italian, with community translation through a dedicated interface (Content Licensing).

Copyright and Content Policy

  • License: all site content is published under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike; verified 2026-08-31). You may freely copy, adapt and translate the guides for non-commercial purposes with attribution and a link back to iFixit, and derivatives must carry the same license. Commercial use requires a separate license (contact legal@ifixit.com). The site footer likewise states "Licensed under Creative Commons".
  • AI training restriction: using site data to train machine learning or AI models is explicitly listed as a violation of the terms of use; commercial licenses, including for large language model training, are negotiated separately (Content Licensing).
  • Contribution terms: submissions must be original, public-domain or compatibly licensed, and must not infringe third-party rights. Contributors keep the copyright to their own material and may use it however they like, including commercially, but submitting it grants iFixit nonexclusive rights to republish and relicense the work (Content Licensing).
  • How contribution works: the guides are a wiki — every page has an edit link, and any registered user can revise steps, text and images. The company says guides are vetted by its in-house team of experts, and new guides are created from a wiki-based template (About Us).
  • Relationship to the store: the freely licensed knowledge base and the tools-and-parts shop operate side by side, with purchase links embedded directly inside guide steps. The NC term means anyone may reuse the content non-commercially, while iFixit's operations are funded by tool and parts sales, manufacturer partnerships and commercial licensing.

Use Cases

  • Checking steps, tool lists and safety warnings before opening a phone, laptop, console or appliance.
  • Judging before purchase how repairable a device is, using repairability scores and teardown reports.
  • Assessing whether an older or second-hand device is still practical to repair.
  • Searching or asking in Answers when a guide does not cover the specific failure.
  • Finding independent teardown data and reporting when following e-waste and Right to Repair policy issues.

Limitations

  • Content is mostly English: 12 interface languages exist, but guide translation coverage is uneven; the Chinese site has a complete interface while most guide text remains in English.
  • Device and parts catalog skews toward the North American market: guides are written for US-market models, coverage of regional variants sold elsewhere may be incomplete, the store prices in US dollars and the free-shipping threshold applies to domestic US orders only.
  • Repairs are at your own risk: even detailed instructions cannot prevent damage from mistakes; lithium-ion batteries carry fire and explosion risks, opening a device compromises water seals, and warranty implications must be judged yourself.
  • Scale figures are self-reported: counters such as 750,946 guides and 100M+ successful repairs come from the homepage, and the counting methodology is not published.
  • Scores age: a repairability score reflects the standards and findings at teardown time; scorecard versions evolve with technology, so direct comparisons across device generations are imprecise (as the site itself notes).
  • FixBot is an AI assistant: the site positions it as a "friendly AI repair assistant"; its answers should be cross-checked against the guide text and community discussion.

Similar Sites

  • RepairWiki: a community repair wiki run by The Repair Association, oriented toward professional repair technicians.
  • repair.org: an iFixit advocacy partner and a central source for Right to Repair legislative news.

References