iFixit Wrapped: 2022 in Review

The year is wrapping up and the time for celebration is here. Kick up your feet, put off the to-fix list for a little longer, and take a moment to pat yourself on the back. The repair community is stronger than ever. As 2022 comes to a close, we can look back with an enormous amount of pride. We’ve been fixing manufacturers’ broken repair systems at every level—teaming up with major manufacturers to sell genuine parts, establishing the first electronics Right to Repair law (!), and helping millions of people repair their stuff.

We thought we’d take the time to gush a bit about our fixer family—both to recognize your work, and yeah, to have an awesome uplifting montage for you to share with friends and family. We could all use some good news to close out the year and start the next fresh, right?

Okay, okay, you’ve got cookies to eat and the dog is definitely going to eat that wrapping paper, so let’s make this fast:

Right to Repair Victories

• 23 State and 5 Federal Right to Repair bills were introduced in the US. 
  • 2 State bills passed: 
    • In Colorado, powered wheelchairs users now have the right to buy parts and get repair manuals. 
    • This week, New York signed the first proper electronics Right to Repair bill into law.
• Right to Repair legislation was introduced in countries around the world, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Germany, and New Zealand.
  • The European Union will mandate a single universal charger for all portable devices starting in 2024 to minimize e-waste; many more EU Right to Repair proposals are pending.
  • A year in, the French Repairability Index is going strong and providing a map for more such consumer advice.

Tech News Highlights

• With an eye to the repairable future, manufacturers are increasingly embracing repair. We’re happy to be able to provide official parts from some of the biggest names in tech:
  • Valve Steam Deck—the launch went almost too well. Don’t worry, we have inventory again.
  • Google
  • Micron Crucial
  • Samsung—let’s hope they follow up with repairable phones, too!
• After a rollercoaster will they/won’t they, Apple finally launched their DIY repair program. While we have some… opinions, we’re happy to see them acknowledge what we knew all along: everyone is a genius.

More 2022 repair wins:

• The completely redesigned iPhone 14 is the most repairable iPhone in years! If easy screen, back glass, and battery replacements become the norm, that’s great news for repair.
• Apple finally settled the lawsuit against them for their infamously faulty butterfly keyboard. It’s a shame—an easily replaceable keyboard could have saved them the 50 million dollar headache.
• The Framework laptop was already one of the most repairable laptops on the market, and this year it became fully upgradeable!
• Microsoft, pushed by their shareholder resolution, finds that repair is better than replacement—reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 89%.

The iFixit Community

Here’s to you! The thousands of guides you wrote this year, and all the helpful comments and answers on community questions, guides, and blog posts, are truly amazing to see. 

• iFixit.com hosts 2.5 million community members—some of you have been here a decade—and we’re not doing too shabby on social media either.
• You collectively earned 2,300,621 reputation points by:

• The Top Fixes by Device were:
  • iPhone X, iPhone 11, and Nintendo Switch had the most visited guides.
  • DJI Mini 2 was the top device in Answers.

iFixit at Home

• Here are some of the fixes our team members accomplished this year:

• We raised enough money from holiday bundle sales to support over 2,500 Repair Cafés. These organizations are an essential part of changing throwaway culture around the world.
• We launched the new king of device opening: Anti-Clamp. And when you add googly eyes, Anti-Clamp becomes a phone-eating monster named Clampy.
• We also unveiled our next generation of ESD-safe work mat, FixMat. FixMat combines an updated version of our Magnetic Mat with sloped storage compartments for two ways to organize small parts.

As for the Fixmases yet to come, they won’t be without their challenges. Software locks are becoming more common, and more pernicious. Whether it’s purposeful repair sabotage or negligent software, parts pairing and serialization are the next headaches to tackle.

We’ve also got to get Right to Repair to go national—congress and the FTC have been cracking down on manufacturers violating consumer rights and are specifically investigating the repair landscape, so things are already looking up.

Despite ongoing challenges, the repair community is rising to meet and surpass them with grace and style. In the next 365 days, we’ll have new repair protections to look forward to, exciting tech news to break, scalding opinions to share, and a wonderful community to share it all with.

It’s hard to believe that in 2023, iFixit will celebrate its 20th anniversary. It feels like yesterday we were making paper manuals and selling parts out of a dorm closet. At the same time, it also feels like we’ve always been around—and in many ways we as fixers have been. The fixer spirit has been around as long as tools have, after all—perhaps even before that. Given all the victories we’ve had, and all the ones yet to come, we’re happy to say: we’re just getting started. 

Happy New Year!

Love, iFixit ✨ ?