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

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447 points hemant6488 | 3 comments | 18 Jun 25 15:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.623s | source
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FlyingSnake ◴[18 Jun 25 19:42 UTC] No.44312746[source]▶
Wonderful story!

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

I have a similar story wherein I repurposed my ancient OG iPhone SE and gave it a new life.

https://samkhawase.com/blog/dumb-smartphone/

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tclancy ◴[18 Jun 25 20:23 UTC] No.44312995[source]▶
>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?

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brailsafe ◴[18 Jun 25 20:39 UTC] No.44313101[source]▶
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.

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1. tech234a ◴[18 Jun 25 21:08 UTC] No.44313294[source]▶
As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0
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2. brailsafe ◴[18 Jun 25 22:33 UTC] No.44313855[source]▶
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.
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3. leakycap ◴[19 Jun 25 19:48 UTC] No.44321925[source]▶
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.