If you haven’t heard of iFixit yet, then you’ve probably been living under a bridge for the last couple of years. These guys put together tear-down manuals for every piece of new hardware released only days after Apple releases it. If you’ve ever taken a second to look at the innards of an iMac or MacBook Pro online, there’s a pretty good chance that the pictures came from the iFixit team. They’re currently sitting on repair manuals for 91 Mac models and 34 iPod models, with approximately 154,556 images and over 1,000 step by step repair guides. These guides are now free for the public to use, and are being released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
This makes me happy. Really, really happy.
We can only go so longer buying new machines hand over fist because of small break downs, until we run out of places to store these busted machines. Putting them on boats to Africa and China just isn’t an answer. Fixing the machines and extending their lifecycle is the answer, and the iFixit team realizes this. Giving the general public the tools and the replacement parts that they’d need to fix their machines is something I can get behind. So the next time your Mac Mini of iPod craps out on you, take a step back from the problem and figure out if you just need a replacement part instead of a whole new iPod.
