IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 123

Soapbox

The Right to Repair
By Kyle Wiens

I

hunched over my desk and considered
a small heap of screws and plastic
brackets. They sat there, impassive-
apparently unconcerned with my existence. I, on the other hand, was very
concerned with theirs.
The brackets and screws were
"extras." When you repair something,
there are not supposed to be any
"extras," especially when those "extras"
were once part of your laptop. I remember thinking to myself, "I broke it. I can't
believe I broke it." I was 18 at the time,
and a broken laptop felt a lot like the end
of the world. At the very least, it was the
end of my laptop.
To be fair, the computer was broken
to begin with. Days earlier, I'd plopped
the computer onto my bed in a fit of
post-midterm enthusiasm. The computer bounced off the bed with equal
enthusiasm and crashed to the floor.
Like many cash-strapped college
students, my options were limited. I
needed to fix the laptop I had. But I felt
confident. As an engineering student, I
was pretty well versed with the insides
of computers. And while Apple did not
provide the public with repair information, I thought I could fix my iBook
without instructions.

EMPOWERING OTHERS TO FIX
Turns out I was wrong. But I realized
that if an engineer could not figure out
how to fix his computer, other people
were probably struggling, too. And
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2015.2463411
Date of publication: 29 October 2015

didn't those people have a right to
repair the stuff they owned?
So, my friend Luke Soules and I
wrote a computer repair manual and
posted it online. One repair guide turned
into a dozen repair guides, then a hundred. Now, our company iFixit (www.
ifixit.com) is the world's free repair
manual, with over 10,000 online repair
guides on everything from Apple Watches to water pumps and tractors to tablets.
A decade later, and iFixit's mission
is more relevant than ever. Laptops fall
off beds. Cellphone screens shatter.
Equipment sputters and dies. People
still want to fix their stuff, but, increasingly, they cannot.

Laptop computers have become increasingly modularized to the extent that many
primary systems can be easily repaired by
simply replacing the screen or main motherboard; however, manufacturers do not
always encourage distributors to make
spare components and subsystems available to the end user.

THE REPAIR MARKET-
OPEN OR CLOSED?
Repair used to be an open market-an
activity that fell under the purview of
hardware store hobbyists and mom-andpop repair stores. That is not the case
anymore. You cannot go to the hardware
store and buy a new screen for your
iPhone. Corner mom-and-pop repair
stores are disappearing from communities, one by one. Independent repair
operations just cannot stay afloat when
manufacturers will not sell them spare
parts. Like Apple, many electronics
companies have stopped releasing service and repair information-both to the
public and to independent repair folks.
The shift has had a hugely detrimental effect on people's livelihoods and on
consumer choice.
When Nikon stopped selling repair
parts to independent repair techs in

As devices get smaller it becomes more
challenging to repair them; manufacturers
have an increasing role to play to enable
fixers to keep devices working and reduce
increasing levels of waste from modern
electronics.

2012, they effectively shut down trusted
neighborhood camera repair shops that
had been in business for decades. For
Nikon, it was a masterstroke of business
acumen: an instant repair monopoly. In
the absence of competition, owners had

october 2015

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IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

123
http://www.ifixit.com
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015
