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The Future of iFixit discussion

I'd like us to discuss the possible direction iFixit should grow and how best to expand.

Let's kick some ideas around. @kyle has wisely let the answer site be run by the people and garnered old and and young mentors. We are seeing some very good new young people joining in everyday. People like @kaniggit49 Traci Knight this week and @technogeek just today and a host of others that are kicking in everyday. A possible proven pool of giving people to garner new employee from, with a proven record.

Let look at possible product development like OWC has done.

I talked about those simple in-line temperature sensors a while back. I'm recommending them every day on the site.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIDI...

We have to be able to repair the retina displays.

I order in stacks of MBP screen replacements, HD/IR cables and 2.5" SSDs SSHD's, carriers for 3.5" drive to put SSDs in and I have to go to strangers for lot prices.

I need six keyboards today. Where are the replacement MBP keyboards? I also need six wired keyboards today.

All these GPU reflows on so many iMac models, One guy at iFixit with a decent re-work station would do a land slide of business. The GPU issues of the 13" 2011 machines that Apple is not taking care of because they were not in the class action law suit.

https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro...

Shipping costs and international tariffs restrict global sales. Can these problems be over comes with overseas outlets? Maybe @jayeff and @benjamen50 and @pollytintop in Australia has some ideas and @jimfixer in Canada, @zfix in Eastern Europe, @flyingdutchman in Italy. South America - Angela Peñaherrera.

THINK DIFFERENT

Is it time to go public to raise the capital to expand existing services, develop a small R &D for new products? Figure out how to avid the big money investors. Sell your first offering stock only to those that have used the site first, the little guys. Let them buy $100 worth first. No Warren Buffets! You got all their email addresses. They've already done business with you. Always Go Home with the Lady Who Brought you to the Dance.

I got off on a rant about it last night but it's because I'm sitting all alone in an office in WestTexas with little contact with iFixit except for @kaykay. Where's the annual iFixit team meeting or booth in Vegas at a exposition. Sure I may get a hint of something the day before it's going happen. I'd like actually have some human contact with the people I'm working with.

Where's the employee contact list with job descriptions?

OK, now you know how I feel. Please kick in, kick me, kick ideas, kick it up a notch, kick ass.

Answer this question I have this problem too

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You don't have to respond to all I put up here, pick an aspect. Say something about just one thing. Give me some proof of life!

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@mayer I fundamentally agree with you. Here is one of my comments from a similar discussions we had on Are there any plans in taking iFixit into a different direction?

"fixit is a commercial site that allows us to be part of a growing movement. We should honor this and assist fixit, as a commercial enterprise, to succeed. Why not get fixit into selling the tools that are needed for the repairs, i.e. recall stations (LCD separators ;-) logic board vises and rework stations?""That is the direction I would love to see this go. This needs to happen without turning "Answers" into a "wee wee contest" of the commonly found "my tool is bigger and better than your tool"." Do I believe that iFixit provides a great service? Absolutely. Do I believe iFixit should financially benefit from this and experience and economic growth? Absolutely. The decision of where iFixit wants to go, belongs to @kyle. He alone knows what he needs to do with this (well maybe with input from his board of directors ;-)

I still support the original iFixit mission as outlined amongst other place right here. I will continue to do so until the day I get either kicked off or decide to retire. I have always loved the idea of getting devices out of peoples proverbial kitchen "junk drawer" and make them useful again. I am talking about devices like Xboxes (original and 360) as well as PS2 PS3 etc. How many phone 5s and 6s have you seen in an landfill etc? Bet not to many. I am convinced that there is a whole lot of people out there that do not have the financial means to upgrade their phones, game consoles etc as often as we think. It should be our goal to help keeping those going.

Okay I am over my ranting about the social aspect of repair and repurposing.

I think @mayer that you are on to something that could work but don't make it a goal for iFixit. Make it ours. Why not come up with a viable idea and then let iFixit run with it? Develop a tool, part or technique that will enable a better repair. Using the old Nike slogan "Just do it". Why wait for others to develop it? It is people like you as well as all the other pro's that know what is needed. So design, develop and build it. Then get with iFixit and see if this will be something they might be interested in. Let the smart people like @kaykay @rachel and all the other great people on iFixit do the market research. May be a survey monkey questionnaire would work. Something that would determine what devices people are really using and which once they would like to get repaired. Let's find out what is really out there and make it a global perspective. How about reverse engineering the GoPro cameras? Ever seen a schematic for one of those out there? How about checking into the failure of the PS4 power supply? How about trying to find a fix for that? You bet we could keep that out of landfills and out of the slums of India and Africa where they are being dumped. Thanks to @tronicsfix for sending me a couple so that I, a mere volunteer, can at least get some x-rays and check traces and components. Do you think offering a service like that would increase traffic to iFixit and thus open up more of the market? Throw a couple of schematics and parts list out there and I bet you get plenty of traffic. Yet it still supports the original intend of iFixit and thus would have my full support.

As volunteers, the only thing we can do is drive traffic to the business of iFixit. For that we need to continue to provide quality answers.

Darn brother I think I am way off on a tangent here. That's what happens when you start working with NGO's on corporate social responsibility :-) Good thing I am not a bleeding heart liberal. Thanks to @kyle and his great team for letting me use this space as my soapbox :-))

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All right, great points and fine insight. To date I have received no responses for the tool ideas I have submitted or for retooling. I haven't had that many and I know this is of minor concern when it comes to running a company, @kyle really doesn't have the time to follow up. But if someone was head of R & D, he would be interested. But I don't know who to really contact as there is no contact list. These are California young people and I don't know them. We are Texas Lone Rangers. We have had to do it on our own. That's probably why know the answers, we had to go find them ourselves and still do. We just do it for everyone else now. I'm sure no bleeding heart liberal, I'm about as Laissez-faire as you can get. You and I have probably been watching the same thing tonight, and I actually have some hope for this country that I thought I had lost. The problem seems to me is that we know a different country than what we have now. I was still young vibrant growing and full of hope and people to excel and do things in life. I think that's what was attractive about iFixit and why we elected to give so much to it. We want it to succeed. But the kids are coming out of liberal universities with liberal ideas. Entitled. But these iFixit kids were Eagle Scouts with instilled values and want to help the world and I'm willing to do my best to help them. We are needed, someone needs to step up to the soapbox and be willing to be socially incorrect and get the rotten tomatoes thrown at them.

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Let's do your own R&D team. You love the reflow of the iMacs and got a tool for it. Lets make it better. Let @kaykay figure out how many people would love to fix the RROD or YLOD on their consoles. You know now it is a chip design error prone to failure. A reflow can possibly resurrect the consoles, but it is not a permanent fix due to the design. How can those consoles be resurrected? You need to develop a tool so that anybody could use a station like yours and then design something that will prevent the error from occuring again. Or at least limit the chances. By looking at someone to build it, I am sure that @jimfixer would have access to some tools to build something like a better heatsink which potentially could help. Build a better mouse trap and see if ifixit is willing to distribute it. You see where I am going with this. "Just do it" Lets bring back a few Vectrex and Atari 2600. Retro is in. How about developing a repair kit for those? Most common failed components with the proper guides. All available through iFixit:-)

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@oldturkey03 - Yes. Big idea. It's right at midnight so let me sleep on this and respond tomorrow.

I'd also like to hear from @mactechplus who's worked with me for over twenty years and been learning these reworks.

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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.

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@kyle. after reading this and thinking on it for a day. I'm very disappointed in your lack of cognition. I gave you the answers on how to grow and not be under corporate control. You just didn't listen. I'm very disappointed with you.

Look at how even small projects raise needed capital with something like kickstart.com

Just a game like Pillars of Eternity got 77,000 backers. http://eternity.obsidian.net

You don't even need that. Your database already contains your investors. It's your customer list!

You have the names addresses, emails of all the people who have bought from you.

You only allow those people to buy your stock. Say $100 - $500 worth for every order they've made.

Need more. Allow all the people who've asked questions to invest $100 in it.

You determine the net worth of your company, apportion percentages of earned ownership. Figure how much money you need to raise and what percent of the net worth would be given cash required.

I don't know your companies structure. You allow employees to invest. You do an offering for 5-10% of the worth of the company. You and whoever started the company retain 90% ownership and total control.

Now you have a means of retaining employees via stock options, incentives.

Every new customer can buy a part and an additional option to buy into the company.

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@mayer I think @kyle is actually pretty smart about this. It is not just the startup capital that you'd have to worry about. Longevity and survivability of such a venture will become a priority. I am certain that within a year or so cheap imports from Asia are going to stop. I predict that we will see an increase on tariffs for parts coming out of Asia. Things like GST and VAT come to my mind. No matter how much the Asian governments are going to subsidize their market, we will get hit with higher excise and duty on imported items. This will drive prices up, so ifixit may get negatively impacted by this.

I further predict that the market for "board level repair" components and tools will be shrinking. I base this on the recent developments in the "Right to Repair" movement. There is no legal requirement for manufacturers like Apple, Toshiba and the likes to have to publish any off their schematics. I believe that these will continue to be considered the companies intellectual property and no law is going to touch that. Unless companies voluntarily publish schematics of their "end of life" devices, the cottage industry of board level repair will have to continue to rely on dubious semi-illegal sources to obtain schematics. This will become more difficult as new devices get introduced and the big companies will go after the repair shops for using those schematics. As we have seen in the past with Toshiba, this can be done pretty effectively. Once the black market schematics are no longer available the industry will falter. There will be few left standing but not enough to make a difference. Any industry that is build around such sources will decline. Just because repair is noble does not mean that repairers are nobility. There is no entitlement to those documents and anybody needing those will be at the mercy of the black market supply. I believe that we are in the heydays of this now and will see a tremendous downward spiral within the next few years. That will leave only a parts and tools market for aging devices. Not very lucrative or cost effective for iFixit to "go public"

The current setup of ifixit allows @kyle et al to roll with the punches and adjust to market change without having to answer to a board of directors or share holders. It's pretty smart to play it safe until the future becomes a little less murky.

I do believe that iFixit needs to continue to fight the good fight. Push legislators and industrialists to see the benefit in repairs from an environmental and economical point of view. Convincing industries that it must become part of their corporate social responsibility to release schematics, at least of the EOL devices, this is where iFixit can continue to maximize its impact.

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@oldturkey03 - well thought out and spot on. I tried to get the Apple test for the nVidia 8600 issue last week so I could repair the stacks of failed MacBook Pros I have and make them useful. Not a chance. It's a corporate world run by greed now and a guy like me is passe. My ideas of growth are outdated. The new machines are not meant to be repaired just replaced. The days of Apples integrity and quality products and customer service died with Steve Jobs. I've seen the company I loved and fought for turn into something I can't stand. The quality that I was once so proud of fade and decline. It now takes a class action law suit for Apple to admit to any fault. I might have a few days of usefulness helping people fix their aging machines but those days are quickly coming to a close. I'll shut up, go read my Don Quixote, it's not my business.

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@danj the @ designations appear to be case sensitive. See how using a capital in the @kyle does not turn blue.

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@kyle - Are you up to suppling the raw keyboard assemblies for the Unibody & Retina series systems? I would start there.

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@mayer - Let me be a bit of a Janus here.

IFIXIT has been a great spark of inspiration! The message is clear and people are listening. Manufactures like Apple have made great leaps into using renewable energy, getting away from ecology unfriendly materials (like Mercury) and setting up recycling as a mandate.

But, many have failed to address repairability! Even with the score card IFIXIT posts people seem not to care as much as we do. Often I see people post responses that blame the manufacturer for some failing or another instead of accepting their own failing by not doing the research upfront.

Jumping back here, some of it I can understand as speed in manufacturing as well as product saturation is where the profits are. Can they make systems which can be both sellable and repairable? Thats the rub here ... How can we drive that?

As it now stands the direction Apple and the others appear to be aiming for $1000 throwaway systems! Can Apple or even the others survive in that landscape? Are we able to as well?

Then that gets into the parts issues you brought forward. While I would like IFIXIT to offer more I'm not sure it makes economical sense for them. Maybe acting as a storefront similar on how many of the department stores work makes better sense. Here the given product is given standing so lets say OWC thermal sensor is listed on the HD page in the guide that points to OWC's page and the sale of the part is within OWC's domain but IFIXIT gets something for the sale. IFIXIT wins here as they get something for the re-direct and OWC gets the added business.

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But do they get something for the link to them? I have no idea. I know their (OWC) product is way overpriced and there is no competition. In my opinion this (heat sensor issue) was an attempt by Apple to control the market. But then they declare a 2011 and earlier machines legacy and won't even supply parts rendering the machine useless if the hard drive fails. That ticks me off. That's corporate greed and against everything this site stands for, repairability.

Glued in batteries, proprietary SSD cards, displays that can't be repaired. Non upgradable RAM. Keyboards that can't be replaced.

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$40 dollars is about what I would expect here, given the manufacturing costs and the limited market for any of the sensors. Sure, I'd love to pay less Mayer ;-}

I'm torn here on what Apple has done with some of its design choices. The thermal sensor issue should never have happened. I'm not sure if Apple alone here is guilty. Part of the problem is the flood that hit Thailand messed up the HD companies which slowed the JEDEC standard effort and then the failure of Apple to use the standard once it was ratified. But thats water over the Dam we're stuck with what we have a nonstandard 3.5" HD's in the '11 onward 27" iMac's and the older '9 & 10 models have their own issues with their funky sensor cable.

The SSD mess is also one I can understand a bit but its time for Apple to make the leap to the standard PCI'e M.2 SSD's. There is no reason to be different here any more the industry has caught up and are hitting the limits of the current M.2 standard.

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Sadly soldered in memory gets into the failure of the socket. As you have seen people are brutal and the socket tabs are just too fragile! This is a train wreak.

So I can see why Apple (as well as the others) are moving this way. The other fact is the needed speed of the memory I/O channel with DDR4 & DDR5 which will hit us next year or so.

I do agree there is a group of users who's needs are not being met with what Apple is offering now in the laptop space. We need 16 GB of RAM and deep storage which none of the Retina series offer! I need a 15" and even a 17" light weight system which has at least two easily accessible M.2 connections (serviceable access) and the ability to install some memory daughter board forget the current module design! Basically, I want something durable and expandable.

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Glued in battery was a mistake! I'm surprised Apple hasn't corrected. Clearly Apples design team is out of touch of what made Apple Apple! a few years ago when the value of the system was its repairably and durability.

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mayer will be eternally grateful.