iFixit, the company known for publishing tear-down guides and repairability ratings as well as selling official spare parts and components for various electronics brands, has added Microsoft's Xbox consoles to its growing range of official spares. The repair advocacy company today announced in a blog post that Xbox Series X and Series S spares will now be available through iFixit, replete with DIY repair guides for all the spares sold on the online shop. As is typical of iFixit, the goal—aside from the obvious profit motives—is to promote right to repair and DIY repair in order to keep electronics in service for longer, reducing the amount of e-waste that ends up on the trash heap.

The official iFixit Xbox partnership will include both the disc and digital-only versions of the Series consoles, and the parts list is quite extensive, including everything from big-ticket items, like the motherboard assembly and built-in power supply to less obvious things, like the rubber feet and Wi-Fi modules. Xbox controller spares are also available in the Microsoft Repair Hub, and the list of controller spares looks comprehensive, too. Curiously, iFixit will offer both Microsoft's official Series X/S replacement joysticks and Gulikit TMR Electromagnetic joystick modules, which are a drift-resistant upgrade to the stock joysticks.

Earlier teardowns of 13-inch Apple M3 MacBook Air models revealed a pleasing storage performance upgrade. Popular American e-commerce watchdog, iFixit, has joined in on the fun—CEO Kyle Wiens has confirmed that the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air 256 GB base model also houses two 128 GB flash storage chips. A provisional repairability score of 5 out of 10 has been awarded—this verdict could change once iFixit staffers finish up in-depth investigations into Apple's latest thirteen and fifteen inch ultraslim notebooks. A revised figure might appear online once the site publishes its full how-to-guides.

iFixit's video teardown demonstrates that not much has changed when comparing the new models to Apple's M2 MacBook Air family of products. Tinkerers will face the usual obstacles, mainly dreaded pentalobe screw designs. The team discovered plastic pull-tabs during the removal of M3 MacBook Air batteries—a pleasing alternative to older (headache inducing) adhesive-fastened methods of securing power cells in place. The iFixit team had to deal with many fiddly screws and brackets during excavation efforts—they noted that Apple's interior design does not include any labelling, and the screws are not numbered. Framework's Laptop 16 was cited as a shining example of doing things correctly.

iFixit has finally posted photos of the Apple Vision Pro's inner bits, following on from the release of a video teardown (uploaded last week)—the American e-commerce and how-to website spent plenty of hours exploring the expensive mixed reality headset's "creepy" features, before breaking seals and deconstructing the device's highly complex interior. The iFixit teardown team have often complained about Apple computer products being notoriously difficult to deal with—the Vision Pro is no exception, but they eventually managed to isolate the headset's logic board. The onboard M2 octa-core chipset is identified as a APL1109/339S01081E part, while its assistant R1 sensor co-processor sports an APL1W08/339S01186 identifier. Micron has supplied 8 GB of LPDDR5 SDRAM memory (MT62F1G64D8WT-031 XT), and Kioxia has Apple covered with its K5A4RC2097 256 GB NAND flash.

Tech experts have spent time poring over iFixit's latest set of snaps, as laid out in their teardown guide—one such enthusiast, Yining Karl Li, posted an intriguing Apple Vision Pro Logic Board observation to social media: "There's this interesting shot of the main logic board (in Step 1). The R1 chip (in the red box) has interesting lines all over it dividing the surface into sub-boxes. Is the R1 chip using a chiplet design?" A small debate erupted from this quick inspection—one commenter believes that the co-processor is not all that fancy: "(it is) likely sporting low-latency fan-out memory," citing the presence of very faint horizontal and vertical lines. As pointed out by Wccftech, Li also presented a chiplet design example (for comparison purposes)—a close-up shot of Intel's Ponte Vecchio Xe-HPC GPU. The lines are a lot more pronounced on Team Blue's chip design.

Many of you are most likely familiar with iFixit's various toolkits, even if you don't happen to own one, as they've become quite famous all around the world as affordable, yet good quality tools. Now Corsair has decided to jump into the toolkit marketspace with its PC DIY Precision Toolkit, which is very similar to iFixit's Mako Driver Kit. Both kits come with a flexible extension rod, but where Corsair bests iFixit is when it comes to the actual driver handle, as it has a much better grip and the top cap appears to be made of aluminium rather than plastic. The box is also very similar, as both kits are kept closed with magnets and both have a magnetic insert in the lid which will hold your screws in place while you disassemble whatever it is you're trying to fix or upgrade.

The two toolkits also differ in terms of the kind of bits you get, with Corsair providing some extremely fine tool sizes, especially for Philips and pentalobe compared to iFixit, although iFixit has smaller Torx sizes in their kit. Corsair also offers more socket bits than iFixit, but loses some other bits like the SIM ejection bit and a magnetic pick-up bit. Overall Corsair provides 65 bits vs 64 for iFixit, so it really comes down to which bits make the most sense for you. Corsair also charges US$5 less for their kit compared to iFixit, with an MSRP of US$34.99.

iFixit has released their teardown and evaluation video covering Apple's brand new M2 MacBook Air model. This 15-inch screen variant was announced at WWDC 2023 and was released to retail soon after. The test unit has an A2941 model number and looks not too far removed from the 13-inch equivalent externally and internally, but the fifteen-incher is 22% heavier. Initial impressions are good thanks to more screen real estate, increased pixel density, large trackpad, a six-speaker sound system and smart battery tech. Things turn sour almost immediately upon starting disassembly—iFixit described their experience of disconnecting the internal battery as "miserable," and added that it was even more of a challenge to extract the laptop's logic board due to the force-canceling speakers/woofers getting in the way.

The team had to contend with plenty of connector brackets, ports, pentalobe + miscellaneous screws types and covers adding to their collective headache. The 66.5 WH-rated battery only becomes accessible at the tail end of a truly frustrating teardown process, although the reviewer notes that it was very easy to remove the cell assembly—only having to deal with "neato" pull tabs and clip-securing posts. These positives aspects are almost entirely negated by overcomplicated preceding steps. iFixit awarded a repairability score of 3 (out of 10) to the Apple M2 MacBook Air 15-inch model, and concluded that this premium laptop is "a heavy unrepairable beast (hidden) under (its) skin deep beauty."

Microsoft has started to sell a limited selection of replacement parts for Surface devices in the United States, Canada, and France—more regions will be added in the future. The company's online store now presents listings for replacement displays, batteries, SSDs and several other internal pieces. Brave customers can now perform repairs on their out-of-warranty Surface models, which saves on a trip to local shop or a costly return back to base. Tim McGuiggan, Microsoft's vice president of device services and product engineering stated: "We are excited to offer replacement components to technically inclined consumers for out-of-warranty self repair. When purchasing a replacement component, you will receive the part and relevant collateral components (such as screws if applicable)."

The various offerings of spare parts for Surface tablets, laptops, and all-in-one systems heavily favors Microsoft's fairly new 9-series. For example, the Surface Pro 9 is well catered for with an impressive selection of kickstands, displays, batteries, ports, protective covers, speakers, networking components, and cameras. Owners of the older Surface Pro 7 (2019) are limited to a single kickstand. A continued partnership with iFixit also provides a means to sell official tools for repair purposes and installation of replacement parts. It should be noted that some of the items listed on the Microsoft Store are very expensive—a Surface Studio 2 Plus replacement screen will knock you back $1749.99. The fanciest Surface Pro 9 screen is $362.99, while its spare batteries are $237.99 for an Intel variant, and $249.99 for Arm models.

Logitech International announced today that it is partnering with iFixit, a global repair community that sells replacement parts and provides toolkits and repair guides for consumer electronics devices. Logitech is working with iFixit to facilitate the availability of spare parts, support beyond-warranty repair on select products, and develop relevant repair guides to support this repair.

Global electronic and electrical waste (e-waste) is projected to grow to over 75 million metric tons by 2030 according to The Global E-Waste Monitor 2020 Report. Design and repairability will need to go hand-in-hand in order to reduce the amount of e-waste the world generates. The growing e-waste challenge is fueled by higher consumption rates, short life cycles, and few repair options. Logitech is working to address this challenge by elevating its repair capabilities to increase the life-span of Logitech devices, Design for Sustainability (DfS) and drive more circular business models. Essential to Logitech's product development process, DfS plays an important role in informing design decisions, including those around repairability, refurbishment, and recycling.