iFixit sits at the intersection of practical electronics work and sustainability: a huge, free library of repair manuals plus the parts and tooling to actually complete the job, whether it’s a phone, a laptop, or something as mundane as a small appliance. In this interview, Liz Chamberlain (Director of Sustainability) frames repair as a capability problem: if you own hardware, you should be able to maintain it, diagnose it, and restore it instead of treating it as sealed, disposable gear. https://www.ifixit.com/products/fixhub-power-series-portable-soldering-station
The hardware centerpiece is FixHub, a USB-C Power Delivery smart soldering iron system built around a 100W iron and a dual-port portable power station. The pack is rated 55Wh and is positioned as an “off-bench” setup: fast heat-up, sustained work time (quoted as up to 8 hours continuous), and the ability to run two irons with shared power limits when both ports are used. Temperature control is part of the point here, with a working range roughly 100°C to 420°C, plus safety behaviors like auto-standby and tip/heat indication via an illuminated ring.
What makes the demo feel real is that it’s not just “solder goes on”: it’s also rework. Chamberlain shows a beginner-friendly workflow, including desoldering an LED installed backwards, using copper braid (wick) to pull solder off pads—exactly the kind of mistake that turns “learning to solder” into “learning to debug assembly.” iFixit’s upcoming learn-to-solder kit leans into that by putting the instructions directly onto the PCB, while the commercial bundle pricing lands around $80 for the iron, about $250 for the iron plus battery station, and roughly $300 for a fuller kit with consumables and hand tools.
On the policy and product-design side, the conversation lands where iFixit often applies pressure: right-to-repair legislation and manufacturer choices that determine whether repair is routine or painful. They’re active in both EU and US advocacy, and the example that keeps coming up is batteries—moving away from aggressive adhesive, fragile pull-tabs, and solvent-based removal toward designs that are truly user-replaceable. It’s consistent with the FixHub philosophy too: screws, teardown guidance, and even 3D-printable case files so the tool itself is not a black box.
Finally, there’s the information layer: iFixit’s guides are split between in-house technical writers (often with engineering backgrounds) and a community-edited wiki model, which makes the content both broad and self-correcting. That same corpus has become training fodder for AI crawlers, so iFixit responded with its own mobile app and FixBot, an AI repair assistant that uses their manuals to ask diagnostic questions, route you to the right guide, and support voice or camera-based “show me what’s broken” workflows while still nudging users toward the photos and steps. The interview was filmed at CES Las Vegas 2026, where repairability, tool ecosystems, and AI-assisted troubleshooting are starting to converge in a very practical way today.
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