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What to do with an old iPad

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Re: What to do with an old iPad

#11

Post by lucb1e »

nugzbunny wrote: post #8

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi. When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare. I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just…

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the world that cares about using 130GB extra during a random month. Even in Belgium I think the caps were around twice that ten years ago

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#12

Post by owenmakes »

imglorp wrote: post #2

This makes me so angry. I have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it. Not only do they control it, they decide when it's time for me to buy new hardware and force me to landfill this one. Why do I need to "jailbreak" my own hardware? Why…

I'm with you here. I think Apple should let you install whatever OS you want in the device after the support cycle ended. But that's not gonna happen any time soon. Until then, we jailbreak.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#13

Post by jraph »

nijuashi wrote: post #10
imglorp wrote: post #2

This makes me so angry. I have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it. Not only do they control it, they decide when it's time for me to buy new hardware and force me to landfill this one. Why do I need to "jailbreak" my own hardware? Why…

Apple offers recycling service, so that’s an option.

Recycling is strictly worse than reuse, and that's even assuming apple does good recycling.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#14

Post by somat »

imglorp wrote: post #9
somat wrote: post #3

Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this" And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare…

Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.

I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it.

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#15

Post by owenmakes »

jraph wrote: post #7
clumsysmurf wrote: post #4

Wouldn't "spicy pillow" be the main problem with old iPads? My iPad Air 4th gen doesn't have an option to limit charging to 80% etc.

Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged.

I keep mine unplugged and it gets surprising good battery life, and I think it kinda improved with the downgrade. On normal use I would get like 8-10 hrs screen on time. No spicy pillow yet, though I did have that issue with my old iPod.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#16

Post by jraph »

somat wrote: post #14
imglorp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.

I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it. https://arcan-fe.com/about/

Unfortunately, as far as old iPads are concerned, one of the major issues with old iPads is the old safari version. And so old web standards. I've this potentially nice projects to mirror screens from the web browser, but they won't run on old iPads for this reason. Shipping programs to the old iPad will suffer the same issues: only programs specifically written for these old Safari versions will work.

I suspect this will be an issue for most old devices. Especially old Apple devices (though there's hope for the newer ones now that the EU requires them to allow other browsers), but for all devices ultimately.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#17

Post by jraph »

owenmakes wrote: post #15
jraph wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged.

I keep mine unplugged and it gets surprising good battery life, and I think it kinda improved with the downgrade. On normal use I would get like 8-10 hrs screen on time. No spicy pillow yet, though I did have that issue with my old iPod.

Do you know long it can last unplugged answering requests with insomnia?

My old iPad lasts weeks on its battery if I don't use it, I can only imagine it actually sleeps and would not answer network requests in this state.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#18

Post by pndy »

jraph wrote: post #7
clumsysmurf wrote: post #4

Wouldn't "spicy pillow" be the main problem with old iPads? My iPad Air 4th gen doesn't have an option to limit charging to 80% etc.

Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged.

Then you're lucky. I had iPad 2 and Air 1. Older one is completely dead for 5 years now and doesn't react to plugged cable at all, while newer charges whole day and keeps battery for 4-5 hours.

Air 3 I've got on ebay-like site holds pretty well but the same model that my partner got from official dealer had always issues with touch recognition.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#19

Post by jraph »

pndy wrote: post #18
jraph wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged.

Then you're lucky. I had iPad 2 and Air 1. Older one is completely dead for 5 years now and doesn't react to plugged cable at all, while newer charges whole day and keeps battery for 4-5 hours. Air 3 I've got on ebay-like site holds pretty well but the same model that my partner got from official dealer had always issues with touch recognition.

The battery might have been changed once, not sure about this.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#20

Post by trillic »

lucb1e wrote: post #11
nugzbunny wrote: post #8

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi. When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare. I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just…

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic). The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the wor…

cloudflare is caching the image:

    ```
    accept-ranges: bytes
    age: 5397
    alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
    cache-control: max-age=14400
    cf-cache-status: HIT
    content-length: 3013598
    content-type: application/octet-stream
    date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:14:32 GMT
    last-modified: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:44:35 GMT
    server: cloudflare
    vary: accept-encoding

    ```
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