plastic chisels), and screwdrivers in afordable, everything-you-need kits. Working with iFixit, you can replace a cracked
screen or a fried battery for a lot less than if you were to take
your problem to an Apple store, which might not be an
option for you anyway, depending on where you live. Plus,
iFixit won’t try to sell you a new phone. (Apple ignored
repeated requests to comment for this story.)
Then again, iFixit doesn’t like Apple either. At iFixit headquarters in San Luis Obispo, California, the recycling goes in
cans labeled with iFixit’s logo—it resembles a Phillips screw
head—while the cans with the Apple logo are for trash. In
eight state legislatures across the country, the two companies
are fghting over so-called right-to-repair laws (see “You Gotta Fight
for Your Right to Repair,” right) that,
if passed, will loosen Apple’s strict,
cradle-to-grave control over everything it sells and eat into its stupendous repair revenue. Apple doesn’t
report just how huge that repair revenue is, but trade journal Warranty
Week estimates that one proxy for
that—sales of Apple’s extended-warranty repair program, AppleCare—
delivered the company a staggering
$5.9 billion worldwide in 2016. “It’s
the world’s largest extended-warranty
program,” says Warranty Week editor
Eric Arnum. “Bigger than GM’s. Bigger
than Volkswagen’s. Bigger than Best
Buy’s or Walmart’s.”
IFixit wouldn’t be here if it weren’t
for Apple and everything about it—
its innovation, its ubiquity, and its
arrogance. IFixit is basically a parasite
if you think about it that way. Or may-
be a pilot fsh, swimming with the
shark and subsisting on its leftovers.
Yet that doesn’t begin to capture the
fullness of this company’s radical
mission, or the ambition of its founders, both of which Wiens has spent
much time refecting on.
“I’m really concerned about the
transition in society to a world where
we don’t understand what’s in our
things,” he says. “Where we are afraid
of engineering, afraid of fact, afraid of
tinkering. When you take something
like a phone or voice recorder and you
take it apart and you understand it
enough to be able to fx it, a switch
fips in your brain. You go from being
just a consumer to being someone who
is actually a participant.” This may not
be as cool as having your own backyard car lift. But still, it’s pretty cool.
WIENS AND SOULES BOTH GRE W UP in Oregon, but they didn’t
meet until they got to California Polytechnic State University,
where the motto is “Learn by doing.” That was 2003, and
they’ve been together ever since—as friends, roommates,
50-50 business partners, and river kayaking buddies. (When
Wiens announced he was getting married, his other friends
told him he would have to divorce Soules frst.) Wiens talks
more than Soules and sleeps less; he’s the public face of iFixit,
its chief explainer and grand strategist. Soules oversees opera-
tions and manages iFixit’s China supply chain; he’s also a pilot
and a clarinetist. At Cal Poly, they bonded over their shared
geekiness. “I remember him going home for Christmas
break,” says Soules. “He had a big,
old-fashioned desktop computer. He
brought it with him on the train.”
Wiens’s other computer was an
Apple iBook G3, the curvy, candy-
colored laptop known as the “toilet
seat Mac.” He dropped it one day, and
it broke. Wiens was unfazed. As kids,
he and his brother were always taking
apart and reassembling old radios and
kitchen appliances that their grandfa-
ther bought for them at Goodwill. He
“spent his life making and maintaining
things,” Wiens wrote of his grandfather
in a eulogistic essay published on The
Atlantic’s website in 2013; he schooled
Wiens in the war against “entropy: the
second law of thermodynamics that
guarantees everything will eventually
wear out”; and he sent him of to col-
lege with a toolkit and a soldering iron.
Wiens needed a G3 repair manual.
He searched in vain online. Apple
doesn’t share such knowledge with its
customers. That ticked him of. It was
his computer, after all. Bought and
paid for. Why shouldn’t he have access
to its inner workings? “This shall not
stand,” Wiens remembers thinking, and
so was born the idea for a business.
Wiens and Soules worked it out
over the next several years. Initially,
they thought they’d write their own
repair manuals and sell them, but—frst
lesson—information is a tough sell. (No
one would pay for eHow’s articles or
videos, either.) Parts and tools, on the
other hand, aren’t, so Wiens and Soules
became online resellers, clearing out
the screwdriver shelves at Sears, ordering hard-to-get parts from catalogs,
and flling orders, Michael Dell–like,
from their dorm. They called their
fedgling company PowerBook Fixit,
until Wiens got scared that Apple might
•YOU GOTTA FIGHT
FOR YOUR RIGHT TO REPAIR
Eight states are mulling
legislation that would thrill
iFixit—and anger Apple
THE FIRST CAR I owned was a 1970-something
Ford Maverick. When you opened up the hood,
it was easy to do whatever you had to do—new
plugs, new belts, oil change. Cars today are
packed to the gills with circuitry and software.
But that doesn’t mean they’re unfxable by
anyone other than the manufacturer, despite
what car companies would have us believe.
Such was the impetus behind Massachusetts’s Right to Repair ballot initiative of 2012,
which voters approved by 86 percent to 14
percent. It gave car owners and independent
repair shops access to the same diagnostic
tools, repair manuals, and frmware that
licensed dealers have.
Now lawmakers in eight states are
pursuing legislation that would extend the
concept to cover computers, smartphones,
and tractors. “Repair is impossible without
access and information,” says Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the lobbying
frm Repair Association. One such bill was
introduced in January by Lydia Brasch, a
state senator for a rural district in northeastern
Nebraska. She’s tired of driving 80 miles to
Omaha—to the only Apple store in Nebraska—
to get her computer fxed. Her husband, Lee,
is a ffth-generation corn and soybean farmer
who’s had similar issues with his $300,000
John Deere combine. (John Deere, says
Gordon-Byrne, is “the Apple of farming.”)
Apple, which did not respond to multiple
requests to comment for this story, is not
happy with what’s happening in Nebraska—
and Kansas, Minnesota, New York, Tennessee,
Illinois, Massachusetts, and Wyoming.
Recently, the company sent a delegation to
the state capitol in Lincoln to have a word with
Brasch. Apple’s lobbyists were “respectful,”
she reports. They ofered to back of if she
exempted smartphones. Then they tried to
scare her, warning if the bill passed, Nebraska
would be “a mecca for hackers and bad actors.”
But Brasch isn’t buying it. “How many
billions do you need?” she wonders. “There
should be a little piece of the apple for the rest
of us to share.”
