Hey, great discussion! Lemme add my two bits. iFixit’s goal has always been to help people fix their stuff. As we continue to grow, we are focused on providing members with the tools/parts/guides and encouragement to do so.
We’re thrilled to see new contributors on iFixit and appreciate the mentorship and encouragement you’ve provided to them. It's really encouraging and heartwarming to see more folks helping each other fix things.
We're a small organization there's no way we could do this without you. This community is crucial to our success. We’re happy to develop any tools or provide additional resources to support your contributions—so just let us know if you have any ideas!
We’d love to be able to move more quickly in supplying techs with the parts and tools they need. Unfortunately, we’re often restricted by finding quality suppliers and finding space to stock everything we’d like to. We’d love to hear from the community what types of parts and tools they need and we will do our best to prioritize them in our development cycle. And I know you've suggested things in the past! Just keep in mind, we've got a very small tool development team that is focused mostly on consumer products. We can't be the amazon or ebay that has everything, so we're just trying to cover the basics. It's relatively rare for us to develop a part or tool ourselves. We'd much rather provide a marketplace for someone else that's doing it.
You can link guides and answers to parts from any vendor out there. And of course we'd like to add to what we've got. Send me a prioritized list of stuff that we should be selling and I'll see if I can talk the parts team into getting some of it.
We know that our international shipping costs are not always ideal :( We’re actively working on to streamline our shipping services to make the costs to the customer cheaper. I just got back from Brazil, dodging mosquitos and trying to figure out how to make repair easier there. In the near future, we’re looking into global distribution centers to make shipping both faster and cheaper. But don’t forget about our EU store! It's been a smashing success and we're adding new products to our Stuttgart warehouse all the time.
We've stayed small and independent so we can try new things without being tied to the bottom line or a corporate overlord. In exchange for being independent, we have to deal with limited capital — a lot of times we go slower than I'd like. But that's okay!
If someone wants to make a new repair gizmo like the iSclack, we're happy to sell it. And if you can find us a source of parts that's only available in bulk quantities (like ICs in a big roll), we can act as the middleman.
Some things are better handled by connecting all of us together. We probably won't start doing board repairs for Pros ourselves, but others have. For the GPU issues, Louis Rossmann has been doing a pretty good job of picking up that business. And Jessa's been constantly fixing backlight issues for repair shops. Pro Talk is a great place to connect with those folks.
And lastly, we’d love to spend more time with our community and an iFixit convention is definitely not out of the question. In the meantime, @kaykay’s planning on running some Google Hangouts soon to get to know the community better and have free-flowing discussions like this in a more beer-friendly medium.
You guys rock.
