I have taken old phones, towers and laptops to the local thrift store. They might be good for a child to use/play on?
Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
41–50 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#42eBay if:
It is still relatives new and still worth a lot.
If I have the feeling that someone else might find it useful.
Recycling: If it had sensitive data on it and cleaning it up is not worth it at all like small and old hard drives or old and slow USB stick.
Gifting:
If I have the feeling that it would help. Like a laptop which is old but not too old for normal daily use. I will clean it, fix it and search for someone to gift it.
I do try to do something with those things fast as it only makes it less useful longer I wait.
It also annoys you when it is inconvenient like when you move and find all of the old stuff. Or you lost that space for ages and then you throw it out anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#43I give them away on trashnothing.com
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#44By coincidence I just asked myself the same question and made it my holidays project. I installed El Capitan on my mid-2014 MBP (it does support Big Sur but it was unbearably slow & laggy and battery runtime was not good), and it seems a 2010 mac mini should be capable to run El Capitan too.
Why El Capitan? Because the most current Chrome requires El Capitan (Mavericks does not work). Actually I use ungoogled-chromium. While it might seem super dangerous to connect to the internet because of security, I took some measures:
On my Router (Fritzbox, but any other quality router will do):
- Isolate that device to "Guest" WiFi so it can only connect to the internet, not other devices in my LAN (works by Mac Address Filtering)
- Do not allow unknown MAC Addresses to connect to WiFi at all for all my home network
- Only allow outgoing ports 80/443 TCP and 53 UDP on the Mac, refuse all incoming connections (its NAT anyway but just to be sure)
- Disable UPnP for that device
When using the device:
- Never use ANY login/private data on that device (see exceptions below)
- Never enter any private data, so no social media, email, iCloud etc. just plain surfing
- I strictly only use AirDrop from my modern Mac or a readonly SDcard to copy files ONTO it (Movies, Music, Ebooks, Podcasts), never download or copy the other way around.
- The only Applications I installed are ungoogled-chromium (plus ublock origin) and VLC
I use it to watch (offline) movies, music podcasts and sometimes Netflix. Additionally I connect my E-Piano with a piano learning website to it over USB (Benefit is I can use GarageBand instrument library with it). For those two websites the passwords are strictly unique. When not in use, I always do a full shutdown (no sleep).
I know that a super-dedicated and driven hacker might - with lots of work - use the device as attack vector, but I mostly think this is a highly unlikely event. Especially since it is way easier to compromise servers with log4shell right now :)
Edit: Btw it is super easy to downgrade, just hold CMD+Option+Shift+R on powerup, and the internet recovery will install the macOS version the device shipped with. Then go to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683 and download the full OS as a simple .pkg file on another machine, copy to SDcard and start installation.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#45Sell it back to Apple, or recycle it through them. They're best placed to recycle it as they know all the components and materials. Anyone else recycling it will probably just ship it to another country to go into landfill.
Their propaganda^W PR fluff about the weight of gold recycled from iPhones has a line that triggered my bullshit alarm: "2204 lbs of gold" [1]. This has been regurgitated by news media[2] as "more than 2204 lbs of gold" without them doing any more fact-checking.
1000 kg is 2204.62262[...] lbs. For them to put the exact number "2204" smells like someone told them "about 1000kg of gold" and whoever wrote that report just converted that to "2204 lbs". And since it's a rounding down, they can claim "More than 2204 lbs". Apple not knowing how significant figures work and giving out a number that was probably a guess to be an exact figure? That's why the alarm I mentioned above got triggered.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-ton-of-gold-recycling_n... has a link to Apple's PDF: http://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_... where you can search for "2204".
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#46By coincidence I just asked myself the same question and made it my holidays project. I installed El Capitan on my mid-2014 MBP (it does support Big Sur but it was unbearably slow & laggy and battery runtime was not good), and it seems a 2010 mac mini should be capable to run El Capitan too. Why El Capitan? Because the most current Chrome requires El Capitan (Mavericks does not work). Actually I use ungoogled-chromiu…
> Why El Capitan? Because the most current Chrome requires El Capitan (Mavericks does not work).
https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
Runs beautifully on Mavericks.
Install it via my preference pane and you'll even get automatic updates: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy/discussions/25
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#47By coincidence I just asked myself the same question and made it my holidays project. I installed El Capitan on my mid-2014 MBP (it does support Big Sur but it was unbearably slow & laggy and battery runtime was not good), and it seems a 2010 mac mini should be capable to run El Capitan too. Why El Capitan? Because the most current Chrome requires El Capitan (Mavericks does not work). Actually I use ungoogled-chromiu…
> Why El Capitan? Because the most current Chrome requires El Capitan (Mavericks does not work). https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy Runs beautifully on Mavericks. Install it via my preference pane and you'll even get automatic updates: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy/discussions/25
Nice, didn't know that. Then if I were to do it again, I would use Yosemite, because AirDrop only still works with newer Macs starting from Yosemite upwards. However El Capitan runs fine, everything is smooth and battery is up to 6h (I had the battery replace in 2018 and upgraded 1.5years later to a newer MBP).
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#48By coincidence I just asked myself the same question and made it my holidays project. I installed El Capitan on my mid-2014 MBP (it does support Big Sur but it was unbearably slow & laggy and battery runtime was not good), and it seems a 2010 mac mini should be capable to run El Capitan too. Why El Capitan? Because the most current Chrome requires El Capitan (Mavericks does not work). Actually I use ungoogled-chromiu…
I run Monterey on my 2014 MBP and it runs super fast so not sure of your issue. I installed Catalina on the 2010 Mini which also works well but I've moved on from Catalina which is why this system is EOL for me.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#49I put it in the trash and forget about it. Recycling is too hard and probably will cost more to end up in the same landfill, nobody really need yet another aging piece of hardware, and I don't need money especially if I need to spend time trying to find buyers.
I wouldn't mind giving it, but it's not something people do much here, and I'd rather pay taxes to organize rather than pay some religious charity who would help people only if they give their soul in exchange.
I have thrown very little hardware the last 10 years, because I buy long term, have small desires, don't buy MACs or anything that has to follow some sort of replacement fashion (but that's why my stuff wouldnt have much resell value anyway), or it's hard drive, and I dont dare throwing away hard drives here in China hehehe. I have a full 4x2TB and 4x10TB set of NAS hardrives that I had to keep in store when I moved to 4x18TB (Ultrastar Video cards, I change when they break, and do throw them away: I'm at my 3rd top-end NVidia, since 2010. Switching from cheap craps to very expensive video cards is probably the biggest source of savings I've ever done hardware-wise. Instead of having a litany of time wasting problems, immediate obsolescence and replacement every year or so, I can just drive the card until it short-circuit and never have to compromise. They do short-circuit at regular interval, interestingly.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?
#50I have a whole shelf of broken laptops, obsolete monitors, junked hard drives, etc, that will probably still be there when I die and my heirs have to clean out my house.
Same, though every year I'm able to part with some of the truly dead pieces of equipment at the recycling center. Those old hard drives pile up, though. But now I've got half a dozen broken laptops—which have awesome screens that I wish I could use.
I had about 30 dead hard drives so I eventually got round to drilling half a dozen 0.5" holes in each then tossing. I think that got me over my paranoia phase dating back to the 1990s.