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What to do with an old iPad

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Re: What to do with an old iPad

#21

Post by owenmakes »

jraph wrote: post #17
owenmakes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No idea honestly, but the main reason the battery lasts so long is that it turns the WiFi off, which is why I had to install Insomnia. It was doing fine so far, with 60% battery, but decided to plug it in since it's getting many requests now

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#22

Post by mettamage »

So question: is it possible to put MacOS on an M1 iPad?

I want a Mac with a touchscreen and a pencil. So not sure if it's easier to retrofit MacOS on an iPad or retrofit a touch screen on a Mac.

I know this question is adjacently relevant, but I wonder if someone has some experience in it and are willing to share :)

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#23

Post by vinnymac »

mettamage wrote: post #22

So question: is it possible to put MacOS on an M1 iPad? I want a Mac with a touchscreen and a pencil. So not sure if it's easier to retrofit MacOS on an iPad or retrofit a touch screen on a Mac. I know this question is adjacently relevant, but I wonder if someone has some experience in it and are willing to share :)

There are plenty of successful mods and even paid products capable of making a MacBook include a functional touchscreen.

As far as I know the closest thing you can do with an iPad running macOS is some form of Remote Desktop / VNC. The QEMU attempts on jailbroken iPads are unusable, and impractical. Certainly no one has done it natively (outside of Apple of course)

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#24

Post by acquacow »

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.

I'm still using an OG Gen1 64GB iPad for movies/etc when traveling. The battery does just fine and easily survives watching a full movie or two.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#25

Post by jraph »

owenmakes wrote: post #21
jraph wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No idea honestly, but the main reason the battery lasts so long is that it turns the WiFi off, which is why I had to install Insomnia. It was doing fine so far, with 60% battery, but decided to plug it in since it's getting many requests now

OK, thanks!

Congrats for the successes :-)

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#26

Post by [deleted] »

trillic wrote: post #20
lucb1e wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ```

[deleted]

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#28

Post by swyx »

this might be a good thread to ask this as i cant get a straight answer from apple forums - i have a relatively recent iPad that was bricked after i updated to iPadOS 26 dev beta and then didnt like it and downgraded - now it simply wont turn on. its out of warranty so apple doesnt care/doesnt help - but i know the hardware is just fine.

what can i do with it? i'm willing to disassemble it but i have no idea where to start on what's wrong; all i know is itd be a waste if i just threw this in a trash.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#29

Post by pdntspa »

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…

wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#30

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

Check out waypipe[1] if you haven't.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

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