Keep as backup phone? Recycle? Security camera? TV control?
Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#2Donate. There are a lot of organizations that collect secondhand phones for people in need, including the homeless, refugees, people escaping domestic abuse, and the like.
Wipe thoroughly first, of course.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#3Depending on how old, sell them on eBay. They have okay resell value, you get money and keep a phone out of a landfill.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#4I've jailbroken a couple and given a few more away to family that otherwise wouldn't have paid to upgrade.
Would love to run little servers and other dumb stuff on them, but I never have. Always felt like it'd be fun to run a server/Python process on my older phones.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#5I always look for that one friend who still has a really bad/old smartphone and give it to them for free.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#6I have several phones doing sterling duty as paperweights and look forward to suggestions. One disappointment of our market system has been the failure to produce new apps designed to run on older hardware.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#7Give it to someone from the Third World, chances are, it'll change their love more than you would imagine.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#8I would like to use mine as a "pay as you go backup". But I don't know a service that would let me do that without any monthly fee.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#9I gave them to my parents. I also still have an old iPhone 5 that I bring to the rock climbing gym and use on the WiFi because I won’t be as upset if it plummets to its death from my (zipper) pocket or gets crushed somehow.
With the ability to receive phone calls on linked devices over WiFi, the old phones are still useful where the risk to the device is unusually high.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
#10They mostly collect dust as backup phones. But it feels better as insurance than selling them away for a couple hundred bucks a pop.
Maybe I'll put the Hue app on one so I have spare remote controls for lights.
It would be nice if I could use an old iPhone as a hub for HomeKit, but I think it only supports iPads.