Who Owns iFixit?

iFixit began in 2003 in a dorm room at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Freshman engineering students Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules broke an iBook G3, discovered that Apple provided no repair instructions, and fixed it anyway. They began buying broken laptops, harvesting the parts, and reselling them online. When they could not find manufacturer repair guides, they wrote their own. The first manual they posted drew 10,000 page views in its first weekend.

The business grew through the 2000s on two parallel tracks: selling repair parts and tools, and publishing free step-by-step repair guides. The free guides drove traffic, and the traffic converted into tool and parts sales. That loop, documentation funding commerce rather than the reverse, became the company's durable model.

iFixit's teardowns became a media fixture in the late 2000s. Each major device launch, especially iPhones and iPads, brought an iFixit teardown that rated repairability and revealed internal design details manufacturers did not publicize. The teardown tradition made iFixit the de facto public source for how consumer electronics were actually built.

In 2012 the company spun out Dozuki, a B2B software product that lets manufacturers create interactive work instructions and manuals, monetizing the publishing platform iFixit had built for itself.

Through the 2010s and 2020s iFixit became the most prominent advocate for right-to-repair legislation in the United States and Europe. It lobbied for repair access laws, published repairability scores that pressured manufacturers, and partnered with companies including iFixit's repair program collaborations with brands like Logitech, Lenovo, and Google on official parts and guides. The company also expanded into a full retail operation selling tools, replacement parts, and repair kits for phones, laptops, game consoles, and other devices, and opened its European operation in Stuttgart, Germany.