My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

>We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.

I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?

My iPad 3 is only unusable because anything beyond iOS 9 isn't installable, most of the like 5 Apps I did have installed on it didn't survive a "backup", and obvs nobody's going out of their way to support ancient platforms.

Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.

As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0

For me, iPads (base model, non-Air/Pro) and iPhones seem to exist on opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. Never had an iPad last over 2-3 years without feeling sluggish and ready for an upgrade. Never had an iPhone since the 4 that felt sluggish when Apple stopped supporting it (5+ years).

My iPad is a 2018 iPad Pro and it still works great. It’s my most used computer by far. AFAIK, it’s still supported by Apple.

My phone is an iPhone 13 (2021) and I’ll probably upgrade in the next 24 months to get a better camera.

That's a great counterexample, since built-in video playback capability is awful. It's one of the few I still have installed if memory serves. It think I also have "The Room" and a few Google apps. Hardware-wise I always thought it was pretty solid, the software and general utility not so much, but I look at newer versions hat have come out since 2013 and don't really see how they're fundamentally any more capable than mediocre content consumption devices, and while that does do something for me, I would have hard time rationalizing the purchase of another one in the future.

2018 is still fairly new.

I own a laptop from 2011 and it runs the latest fedora perfectly and is not limited at all performance wise as long as you don't try to run AAA games.

To be fair, your iPad 3 is an iPad 2 with a retina screen; I remember buying an iPad 3 and it was glacially slow even at launch on the original iOS.

I would imagine the best use of this device post eReader is a photo stand given the gorgeous screen... or something else that wouldn't need any interaction (it will be too slow to want to have touch interactions with).

I use an iPad 2 as a IPcam monitor. The battery doesn't last long, but I'm able to grab it off the charger and take it around the house if I'm watching something going on. It doesn't support my new AI smart cams, but it still functions.

I was able to regain access to a lot of ipsw app backups from old Time Machine drives, in case you are wanting apps that are easy to use on your device. Any files from your backups will work, since they'll have your Apple ID in them.

Can you not install apps from the Purchased section in the App Store? I was able to download the new version of an app on my iOS 18 iPhone, then reload the App Store on iOS 9 and download from the "Purchased" section, assuming the app existed back in the iOS 9 days or had a version targeting this old OS.

Only in a few circumstances is it so slow that it's not interactive, otherwise it's actually perfectly fine. I could never really find a compelling use for the thing beyond media ingestion and browsing anyway, which is exactly what I'd do with a new one, and why I couldn't picture myself buying a new one.