iFixit is a private company in San Luis Obispo, California. Founded in 2003 while the founders were attending Cal Poly, the company sells repair parts and publishes free wiki-like online repair guides for consumer electronics and gadgets on its web site.[4] The company is also known for their "teardowns" of consumer devices. [5]
iFixit product teardowns of new Apple products are carried[6] by PC World,[7] the Mac Observer,[8] NetworkWorld[9] and other publications.[10]
Founder Kyle Wiens aims to reduce electronic waste by teaching people to repair their own gear[11] and offering tools, parts, and a forum to discuss repairs.[12] In 2011, he travelled through Africa with a documentary team; a short film is in progress [13] and stories of "fixers" met on the trip are posted on the company's activism-oriented blog, ifixit.org.[14][15]
iFixit provides a SaaS platform known as Dozuki to enable others to use iFixit's documentation framework to produce their own documentation. An early adopter was O'Reilly Media, whose Make and Craft magazines use Dozuki to feature community guides alongside instructions originally written by the staff for the print magazine.[16]
In September 2015, Apple removed the iFixit app from the App Store in reaction to the company's publication of a teardown of a developer pre-release version of the Apple TV (4th generation) obtained under Apple's Developer Program violating a signed Non-Disclosure Agreement and as such their developer account was suspended.[9] iFixit has since worked on developing a more user friendly mobile site so mobile users can still access iFixit.