iFixit

Achievement Unlocked: 50,000 Repair Guides Now on iFixit

This week, we’re publishing the 50,000th repair guide on iFixit. These guides span 13,500 devices and have helped millions find the information they need to fix their stuff. Thanks to these guides, millions of electronics have been kept out of landfills—and they’re still being typed, texted, and tinkered on by the fixers who own them.

Educator repairs a device

While 50,000 guides is a huge accomplishment—one we owe to our wonderful community of tinkerers—it’s what happened along the way that we’re really proud of. A huge portion of these guides, ~30,000 or so, were written by students in our education program.

Through the iFixit Technical Writing Project (iTWP), we work with universities coast to coast to teach technical writing and repair. Our mission: teach students to teach the world. It sounds simple, but there are a lot of layers (just like onions and ogres).

I’ve been leading our Education Program since 2012. On any given day, my team functions as educators, content curators, technical experts, and repair ambassadors. I couldn’t be prouder of them. Together, we’re coaching students to produce real-world repair documentation that will continue to be an invaluable resource for fixers everywhere for, well, forever.

While the feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive, running a project of this scale hasn’t been without its challenges: finding a way to give every student the time and attention they need with a small staff, getting enough unique devices for students to work on, and ensuring the mechanics of the project work smoothly across hundreds of classes. We do our best to work within each classroom’s existing framework to help students grow a wide range of skills. The result? We’ve had 19,000 students successfully complete the program.

It takes a village

This achievement isn’t something that iFixit could have done alone—it’s something that we’ve accomplished together. Something to be proud of. And it’s a legacy that will continue to be useful for as long as fixers are willing to pick up a screwdriver.

So, thank you, for being part of our community, for sharing your knowledge and your words, and for helping us to making a lasting difference.

Even though we’ve come so far, there’s still a lot of work ahead. We have rights to defend. We have more guides to make. We have questions to answer. And, together, we have a world to fix—one device at a time—with our technology, our screwdrivers, and our words. That’s where you come in.

There are millions of devices out there that still need repair documentation. Nobody knows how to fix everything, but everyone knows how to fix something—which is why we put together this quick video showing you just how easy it is for you to create a guide on iFixit yourself.