An important part of iFixit’s work is our collaborations. We might sell official parts for repair, or we may work with a manufacturer to help them design more sustainable, repairable products in the first place. Either way, it’s about promoting repair from the other direction, fixing problems at the source, instead of waiting for things to break.
This year, iFixit’s repair solutions consultant Beatriz Pozo Arcos passed on the good news that brand-loyal buyers are more influenced by service and quality than they are by price. This makes total sense. If you can easily get spare parts, and repair your products, then you’re more likely to stick with the same brand. For example, I love my Baratza Encore coffee grinder because the company not only offers spares via international dealers but also makes its own repair guides and videos. And it doesn’t hurt that it also grinds coffee really, really well.
As for collaborations, in October we announced DIY repair options for Microsoft’s Surface, bringing spare parts for 15 Surface models, along with disassembly videos, step-by-step and troubleshooting guides, and Microsoft’s own service manuals.
We also added genuine parts for Logitech mice to the iFixit store and created the guides to install those parts. Need to replace the battery in your handy little MX Anywhere? We’ve got you. There’s also a brand-new parts and repair hub for HP laptops. For phones, we’ve got plenty of Nokia G22 parts and continue to expand our Google Pixel offerings. Plus, we’ve teamed up with Crucial/Micron to provide SSD storage upgrades and guides.
We’re especially excited about a 2023 collab that could finally fix Mario Kart stick drift: We added the Gulikit Hall Effect replacement joystick for the Nintendo Switch (for both the Switch Lite, and the Joy-Cons of the dockable Switches).
Like wrinkles, clicking joints, and a sudden, inexplicable attraction to beige slacks and jackets, Joy-Con drift comes to us all eventually. The “drift” is phantom controller movement caused by worn contact pads on the controller’s circuit board and makes it tricky to reliably control your game. Despite being a well-known and inevitable problem, Nintendo continues to use the same joystick tech. The answer is this replacement part from Gulikit, which uses the interaction between a magnet and an electrical field to sense movement. You might not need it today, but when your Joy-Cons eventually succumb, it’s good to know there’s a (nearly) permanent fix available.
Another important “partnership” is with South Korea: We added Korean to our list of supported languages (English, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch). This makes a lot of sense because Korea, as detailed in this article by our very own Sandra Hiller, is pretty hot on sustainability, responsible recycling, and now repair. Given that South Korea is also home to many tech-industry titans, the fit is pretty obvious.
And finally, let’s take a look at the other end of the chain—iFixit’s extensive lineup of tools. We updated our Repair Business Toolkit aka “a whole repair shop in one bag,” with new tools including the Anti-Clamp and FixMat. And then there’s the iFixit Fast Charger, which is everything you’d expect in an iFixit charger—it’s fast, providing up to 65 Watts, with a 6-foot cable that can happily handle 240W, and it’s small, thanks to the GaN (Gallium Nitride) tech inside. And speaking of inside, part of the case is clear, so you can check out the innards.
And this wouldn’t be a proper year-end article if we didn’t mention our own iFixit holiday gift guide, where you will find selected tools for gamers, repair beginners, and, yes, hacksmiths.
But my favorite is probably the Mini-Saber, a butane-powered torch for Jedi and non-Jedi, which comes in iFixit blue, perfect for any time you need a lot of heat, fast.
And that’s it for 2023. We have more new things for you next year—they may or may not rhyme with “otter” ?
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