Valve will soon offer official replacement parts for its Index VR headset (and possibly other Index products like controllers and base stations) via DIY repair site iFixit.
Valve announced today that it plans to offer official replacement parts for “Valve Index VR products” via DIY repair site iFixit. The info was shared quietly alongside the same announcement regarding replacement parts for Valve’s new Steam Deck handheld PC.
IFixit is a DIY repair community which hosts free repair guides and also sells repair tools and replacement parts. The company frequently does teardowns of new tech to understand how repairable it might be; though they haven’t done a teardown of Index yet they recently put Quest 2 under the knife and have done the same for a handful of major VR headsets over the years. (If you’re curious, there’s another teardown of Index that you can find here).
It isn’t yet clear exactly what kind of Index replacement parts the company plans to offer through iFixit; Valve says it is “still hammering out the details, and will be sharing more info on this soon.” Granted, the announcement specifically says that the partnership will involve replacement parts for “Valve Index VR products,” which makes it sound like we could see parts for not only the headset, but potentially for the Index controllers and SteamVR Base Stations too.
HTC made a similar deal with iFixit last year, and we were surprised at the breadth of replacement parts the company had on offer—with a catalogue ranging from replacement foam and power adapters to sensor arrays and individual screws. As part of that arrangement, iFixit also offered up detailed disassembly and repair guides for HTC headsets and controllers, and we’d love to see Index get the same treatment.
The move by Valve appears to be the company making a long-term commitment to Index, giving even out-of-warranty VR devices a chance at a second life if something breaks that could be fixed or replaced by those intrepid enough to crack open their headset or controllers.
That’s great news considering that Index is now over two-and-a-half years old and continues to sell (with little hint from Valve about a followup to the headset).
