Alisha C

Hi, I’m Alisha! I’m a long time fixer and serial tinkerer. I’m an Upstate New York native, but adore New England. I’m a long time summer camp kid and counselor, and even though those days are behind me I think about them often. I taught Nature and Archery to young girls and will bushwhack through a forest without a second thought. I’m a rabid proponent for Odyssey of the Mind, teaching people (kids especially) to think critically, and always find a way to sneak education into the things I do professionally.

I’m also a self proclaimed nerd. I adore fantasy and sci-if. Star Trek Deep Space 9 is in my top 5 shows of all time. I definitely watch more cartoons than the average adult.

Unabashedly Queer and Non-Binary. I use they/them pronouns.

I work by day as an IT something or other. Part Service Desk, part JAMF wizard to be and part general hardware fixer. I am especially knowledgeable about Apple products, but if it has a circuit board, I can probably figure something out. Beginning in June of 2022, I also write for iFixit as a Troubleshooting Researcher / Editor.

I started as a secondary education major (with a Biology focus) at SUNY Oneonta, but quickly realized working in institutional education was not for me. After some major changes and a school transfer I earned a BA in Russian from Binghamton University. I am VERY out of practice in my linguistic skills. But I own more Tolstoy and Dostoevsky than the average person, think Russian Winnie the Pooh is superior to the American version (but only narrowly), and have strong opinions about when and how the Soviet Union went sideways.

Despite being a life long PC user, my expertise is Apple products. I worked for Geek Squad for several years in a Mac centric town, where no Mac users were on staff. That became me. Additionally it was a pilot store for the Apple Authorized Service Provider program in Best Buy locations, where I quickly became the go to for Apple repairs. I still have nightmares about the number of batteries I replaced in 2018.

From there, I landed at my current job, which at the time was servicing MacBooks for a host of universities in our area.

After all this “Authorized” repair, I became increasingly disenfranchised with the way Apple conducts their repair business. I was never a fan to begin with, but seeing the process from the inside is downright infuriating. I often felt hamstrung by the resources Apple gave me, or frustrated by their unwillingness to share the things I had with the public.

After finding Jessa Jones and the iPad Rehab crew through the microsoldering intro here at iFixit, I started getting involved in the board repair community. Learning how to read schematics and piecing together how a board works is one of the most rewarding things I have done in recent memory. Now that I own a microscope, I don’t know how I ever got along without one. That and a good multimeter, changed my repair life.