The shelves stretch upward in long industrial rows inside iFixit’s Chattanooga warehouse, stacked with bins containing the innards of modern life: Google Pixel screens, Lenovo keyboards, Bose headphone cushions, iPhone displays, Roomba brushes, batteries, screws and tiny replacement parts most consumers never realize exist until something breaks.
Inside the sprawling Tennessee facility, cofounder and CEO Kyle Wiens walks through the aisles, a curator of the modern repair economy. At one point, he gestures toward the shelves and casually observes, “You could, with all the parts here, build an iPhone.”
The company motto stretches in giant painted letters along one wall: “Never take broken for an answer.”
That slogan functions as the philosophy behind a company that has evolved from a dorm-room repair website into one of the world’s largest repositories of DIY information, a retailer of specialized tools and parts, a vocal advocate for right-to-repair legislation and, increasingly, a collaborator with the very manufacturers it once challenged.
Today, iFixit operates three warehouses, sells nearly 100,000 SKUs online and maintains more than 132,000 repair guides used by roughly 100 million people annually. But Wiens says the company’s ambitions extend well beyond helping consumers replace cracked phone screens.
“Our mission is to enable people to fix everything,” he says. “Whether it’s a faucet, a phone or a refrigerator, we want to help people keep the things they own working longer.”
From broken laptop to repair platform
The origin story behind iFixit has taken on an almost mythical quality in tech circles, though Wiens says it began with a simple frustration: he couldn’t find repair information for his broken laptop.
In 2003, Wiens was a freshman at California Polytechnic State University when the power plug on his iBook G3 loosened. Having spent nearly all his savings on the laptop, paying for repairs was out of the question.
More troubling was the fact that he couldn’t find instructions explaining how to fix it.
“I thought, ‘It’s a loose solder joint; I’ll have to solder it.’ But when I started to take apart my laptop, I saw that the repair was going to be more complicated than I’d thought it would be.”
Armed with the soldering gun his grandfather had given him before college and a determination to solve the problem himself, Wiens eventually completed the repair. Then he decided nobody else should have to struggle through the process blindly, wrote a repair manual and uploaded it online.
“Every Mac site in the universe pointed at it,” he recalled in a 2024 interview. “So, (iFixit cofounder Luke Soules and I) wrote more manuals and started selling the parts. By the time we graduated, we had 20 employees and were the go-to Apple resource online.”
That early frustration still drives the company’s mission today, even as the business has expanded into a Tennessee-based operation serving customers around the globe.
“Information about how to fix products should be as widely distributed as the products themselves,” Wiens says. “It should be a fundamental right to have access to information about how to fix our things.”
Repair as both business and activism
Wiens openly admits that iFixit exists at the intersection of commerce and advocacy.
“I spend too much time on the activist side of things,” he says. “I probably should spend more time running the company, but I’m passionate about creating broader change in how people think about repair.”
That dual identity has become central to iFixit’s growth. What began as a company pushing against manufacturers has gradually evolved into one that also works alongside them.
Today, the Chattanooga-based company writes repair manuals for companies including Microsoft and Google, publishing those guides online for free. The company also consults with manufacturers on repairability during product design.
“We do a fair amount of work for Google,” Wiens says during the warehouse tour. “We even helped with the design of their newest laptop, so we’re working alongside manufacturers to make products more repairable from the start.”
Asked whether it was easy convincing Microsoft to let iFixit write and distribute its repair manuals, Wiens quickly answers no. But he says iFixit’s reputation eventually became impossible to ignore.
“Everyone knows we’re the market leader. We’re better at writing repair manuals than anyone else. So if you want the best repair documentation, you come to us.”
Documenting a disposable world
Inside a small room tucked into iFixit’s Chattanooga headquarters, employees work at desks surrounded by cameras and photography equipment. One team member carefully documents the teardown of a newly released Apple laptop.
“No one has documented how to repair it, so no one really knows how it’s put together,” Wiens says. “We figure we might as well be the ones to map it out.”
The process remains painstakingly hands-on.
“We get a product, take it apart, figure out how it’s put together, reassemble it and then write a repair manual,” Wiens explains.
The guides are also collaborative. Every repair step includes an edit button that allows users to suggest improvements or clarifications.
“If you’re following something that’s unclear, you can suggest a change, and we’ll review it and publish it,” he says. “That way, the guides are constantly getting better.”
Keeping pace with the endless flood of new devices, however, has become difficult.
“It’s impossible,” Wiens says with a sigh. “The sheer number of products and SKUs we deal with is mind-bending.”
Only about eight employees focus primarily on writing repair manuals. To scale further, iFixit increasingly incorporates documentation supplied directly by manufacturers.
That strategy has helped the company become an important source of information for industries far beyond consumer electronics.
“iFixit has become one of the largest centralized sources for medical equipment repair information – everything from hospital beds to vital sign monitors,” Wiens says. “We’re usually not creating those manuals ourselves. We’re getting the information from manufacturers and making it accessible.”
A growing Tennessee business
Although iFixit’s public identity centers on repair advocacy, it’s also a major retail and logistics operation with deepening roots in Tennessee.
The company operates out of a 50,000-square-foot warehouse in Chattanooga and distributes products nationwide. Its business is roughly split between tools and replacement parts.
One aisle inside the warehouse contains the company’s latest in-house product: a USB-C-powered soldering iron, its first major electronic tool developed internally.
Elsewhere are specialized bit kits designed to open everything from gaming consoles to iPhones.
“Our logo is a Phillips screw, which is a standard anyone can use,” Wiens says. “We believe in open standards.”
The company’s repair kits pair parts, tools and instructions into all-in-one solutions. One of its most popular products addresses a notorious flaw in the Nintendo Switch.
“One of the most common Nintendo Switch problems is what’s known as stick drift,” Wiens says. “After a while, the joysticks start malfunctioning and your character keeps drifting to the left. If you’re in the middle of a game, it’s infuriating.”
Rather than replacing the console, users can swap out the joysticks themselves using iFixit’s kits.
“Hundreds of thousands of people have changed the joysticks,” Wiens says.
AI and the future of repair
Like most internet-based businesses, iFixit is now confronting another technological shift: artificial intelligence.
Historically, most users discovered iFixit through Google searches. That behavior is changing as consumers increasingly rely on AI systems like ChatGPT for troubleshooting and information gathering.
“Most people have traditionally found us through Google searches,” Wiens says. “But that’s starting to shift as more people rely on tools like ChatGPT instead of traditional search.”
Rather than resisting that transition, the Chattanooga company has developed its own AI-powered repair assistant called Fixbot.
“AI thinks it knows how to fix everything,” Wiens says. “But when it gets down to actual model-specific repair, none of the AI tools out there do it well.”
Fixbot attempts to solve that problem by grounding every answer in documented repair information and manufacturer manuals.
“Every single line, every sentence that Fixbot gives you is backed up by a citation to a source and a service manual,” Wiens says.
He describes the tool as an expert diagnostic system capable of interpreting appliance error codes, identifying likely failures and directing users toward the proper parts and repair guides.
“Fixbot works like an expert diagnostic assistant,” Wiens says. “Once it figures out the problem, it can direct you to the right replacement part and the repair guide you need to fix it.”
Products that cannot be saved
Despite iFixit’s mission, Wiens is candid about the limits of repairability.
Some products, he says, are intentionally designed in ways that make repair virtually impossible. AirPods have become his favorite example.
“AirPods get a zero out of 10,” he says, referring to the company’s repairability scores, which rate products on a scale of zero to 10 and appear alongside each SKU. “Cannot be done. You’ll destroy it trying to repair it.”
The scores have become one of the most influential elements of iFixit’s teardown coverage, helping consumers understand the long-term costs of owning and repairing their devices.
Wiens points to foldable phones as another cautionary example.
“So you buy a foldable phone for $1,500, and if the screen breaks – which is pretty likely – replacing it can cost another $1,200,” Wiens says.
Repairability, he argues, is fundamentally about transparency.
“You need to look at the repair process before you buy something,” Wiens says. “Once you see the difficulty level and what’s involved, you have a better sense of what owning that product is actually going to be like.”
Rebuilding the repair economy
For Wiens, the conversation ultimately extends far beyond electronics.
He sees repair as both an environmental issue and a community investment strategy, particularly in manufacturing-heavy states like Tennessee.
“My cellphone represents roughly 250 pounds of raw material pulled out of the ground,” he says. “And yet we use these devices for a couple of years, toss them in a drawer and go buy another one.”
He points to refrigerators as another example of declining durability.
“Refrigerators used to last 30 or 40 years,” he says. “Now the average lifespan of a refrigerator is seven years.”
Consumers often assume modern technology should naturally produce longer-lasting products. Wiens argues the opposite has happened because manufacturers optimized for replacement cycles rather than longevity.
“They do,” he says when asked whether companies still know how to make durable appliances. “But they choose not to.”
He notes that many of the nation’s appliances are manufactured in Tennessee.
“Because of that, I think it’s fair to challenge companies like Whirlpool Corporation and GE Appliances and say, ‘You’re building these products in our communities. You can build them to last longer.’”
Wiens also frames repair spending differently than many consumers do.
“A lot of that money you’re spending on repairs is employing the mechanic down the street,” he says. “His kids go to the same school as yours.”
By contrast, he argues, constantly replacing products exports economic value elsewhere.
“When you choose to repair something – whether you fix it yourself or hire someone locally – you’re investing in your community,” he says. “When you choose to buy something new, you’re investing in someone else’s community.”
Repairing more than devices
As iFixit enters its third decade, Wiens says the company’s broader goal remains cultural as much as commercial.
He wants consumers to rethink their relationship with ownership itself.
“We need to do a better job of taking care of the things we own,” he says. “Right now, we’re buying too much stuff and replacing it far too quickly.”
He contrasts today’s disposable devices with the tools handed down through generations.
“I still have tools that belonged to my grandfather, and one day, I’ll pass them down to my kids,” he says. “They were built to last, and we need more products that people can keep and value for decades.”
Back inside the Chattanooga warehouse, employees continue photographing electronics, documenting teardown steps and reverse engineering devices no one else has yet mapped.
The work can seem oddly meticulous in an era built around instant upgrades and annual product cycles. But Wiens believes repair still represents something larger than fixing gadgets.
“I’d like to see the repair economy become a much bigger part of American life again,” he says. “Right now, only about 3% of Americans work in repair-related jobs. Imagine what our communities would look like if that number doubled and more people were fixing things instead of replacing them.”
In the aisles of iFixit’s Tennessee headquarters, surrounded by replacement parts for the devices people usually throw away, that vision no longer feels theoretical.