practicehacker

I would put iFixit right up there with Fancy Hands (see prior post) as a platform for showing off the possibilities of crowd-sourcing. It demonstrates what people can do when the Web creates a frictionless environment for cooperation: namely, prices drop, costs trend towards zero, and the resulting burst of activity creates an entirely new horizon. Simply awesome.

You’re probably familiar with iFixit. We link to their teardowns and home fixing guides all the time on CrunchGear; they mostly focus on Apple, and their light and informative tone is a welcome addition to such a dry topic as hardware disassembly. Well, they’ve decided that merely providing help for Apple users isn’t enough, and are today launching a “global repair community” with the aim being user-level repairs of any device.

Such a project is well-timed; the relationship between user and manufacturer is becoming more one-sided. It doesn’t trouble you that the devices we use every day are so poorly documented, or constructed in such obscure ways, that one has to be an Apple-qualified technician or Dell customer service person to fix a simple problem? I’ve actually had a long post gestating on this very topic, and now iFixit has gone and eaten my lunch.

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