How should we improve basic troubleshooting?

I agree with oldturkey--This is a visibility problem. There are already troubleshooting guides? Who knew?

From my limited experience, the heart of iFixit is the Answers section. I think putting a link to an appropriate troubleshooting guide as an almost automatic comment would do wonders. "No power in iPhone 5? Have you tried this troubleshooting plan? (link) Let us know if you get stuck!"

Re: Board-level repair. There are two elements of this:

1. Troubleshooting a board.
2. The art of soldering/microsoldering.

For the first, you really need an electronics 101--Princeton Review Style. This is something I bet you, OldTurkey, would be great at writing.

• What is an inductor? resistor? capacitor?
• What do those little black chips really do? What is a signal?
• Walk me through some basic circuits based on real life examples--i.e. the iPad mini battery--how does the board 'know' the battery charge percentage?

This is where I am on the learning curve right now, and I'm having a blast. Today I had a friend over and he walked me through the basics of how capacitors and inductors can smooth AC and DC signals. All super practical---based on real life circuits that I repair every day. Inspired by my repair friend Louis's YouTube channel, Zack and I joked that it would be really fun to make a couple of videos of "Things that may or may not be true" as we tried desperately--and failed---to blow the iPad mini backlight filter today. To teach people to specifically troubleshoot their own board-level problem would require schematics--I'm not sure what to do with that.

For the second, the physical art of microsoldering--this is really all about video tutorials. I have had an interest in doing this for a long time. Other than time, the limitation here is a lack of proper equipment. The good news is that, again, my buddy Louis Rossmann has already figured out what the equipment requirements are to make crystal clear microsoldering videos with voice instruction. Now it is only a matter of implementation.

Lots of great stuff here!

I don't have much to add, but I do think it's worth paying attention to the competence level of the reader, and specifically what they are looking for. There are people who don't care about repair and just want a quick and practical answer, and there are people who will pay 5x what the the device is worth for parts because they think it would be fun to repair it. When replying on Answers I've always found it critical to determine which of those two categories the person fits into, because the correct response is very different for each. I’m envisioning sort of a flowchart-like approach, maybe that starts with a big “Fix My Device” button, then something that identifies the device (possibly using Everymac’s serial number identifier, etc.), then simple questions feeling out the intent of the person, and the category of the repair problem, and on into specifics. Sort of an electronic concierge or a web version of Siri which escorts you to the appropriate part of iFixit. I have always liked the fact that any given device has its own “home page”…maybe the concierge could intelligently lead the user to specific questions on this “home page” which have been pre-determined to be representative answers for a specific device and a specific repair. To me it seems that for the most part iFixit already has tons of quality content, and it’s more an issue of how to deliver people to the appropriate content than it is of creating more.

For instance:

FIX MY DEVICE

SIRI: What repair category? (Apple laptop)

SIRI: Enter your serial number (123)

SIRI: I see you have a White MacBook. What repair category? (screen)

SIRI: Is your screen clearly broken? (no)

SIRI: Is the screen lighting up? (no)

SIRI: Do you see a faint image when you use a flashlight? (no)

SIRI: Is the sleep light on the front of the computer illuminated? (yes)

SIRI: An illuminated sleep light on this model laptop indicates the laptop hasn’t yet attempted to display an image because of a lower-level problem. (Refers user to a question/answer related to testing RAM slots)

SIRI: Did this help you with the problem?

Anyway, you get the idea. This is overly simplistic, and doesn’t go in a hundred different directions that it could go, including the issue of viability of repair from the $$$ standpoint, etc.

And then there is the board-level repair universe, which in my mind almost belongs on a different planet than the typical iFixit-level repairs, both in terms of experience level and willingness to do repair. Don’t get me wrong -- I’m very interested in board repair and I’ve been watching Louis Rossmann’s videos nonstop over the last few months, but I think it’s potentially a huge mess to dump basic users who just want their laptop to work into anything resembling a component-level board repair forum. Maybe the concierge should feel out the expert users right off the bat and immediately take them to the “expert forum”. It’s always seemed to me that iFixit is mainly geared toward beginners and getting new people interested in repair (which is valid, and totally makes sense), but if iFixit is going to start getting really technical, perhaps it would make sense to distinguish the beginning section from the technical section (or the “just get my laptop to work” section vs the “crazy repair hobbyist” section)? This might prevent both groups from getting frustrated due to landing in the wrong sandbox.

FYI, this is a tangent, but here’s Louis’ YouTube page for anyone not familiar with his stuff. This guy has an insane amount of high-level repair knowledge and he’s endlessly passionate about business, philosophy, making money, etc.:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2mFZo...