MORE
iFixit is a free, open source community where people teach each other how to fix everything from an iPhone to a toaster.
Image by Mike Royer.
Kyle Wiens is so good at fixing things that he makes a living at it. He has a pop-up service that repairs any of your old broken stuff.
He’s on a mission to take us back to a time when there was a TV or vacuum cleaner repair shop in every neighborhood, and we fixed everything from socks to cars by ourselves. Somewhere around the 1980s, that started to change.
“The VCR was the moment where we went from every product that you bought, you could fix it yourself or you could hire a professional, and all of a sudden the VCRs were complex, cheap plastic parts,” he says. “And that was the beginning of this trend to where now, everything is disposable.