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401 points Bluestein | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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squarefoot ◴[] No.44363502[source]
All phones eventually become obsolete, but their guts could be used in so many ways. I'd love for example if someone made an enclosure acting also as multi port docking station so that old phones with unlocked bootloader (Fairphone being one of them) could be reflashed with a different operating system then used as mini PCs, media players, IoT wall terminals with bigger screens or other uses. Seeing all that perfectly good electronics going into landfills because planned obsolescence says so just irritates me. Can we do that at least for unlocked ones? Framework did something similar for their laptop mainboards, minus the docking station.function as they already have more ports than a phone. Any chances that this could be doable with Fairphone hardware?
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piokoch ◴[] No.44366606[source]
This does not scale at all. For hobbyist with no kids, sure, spend your time turning old phone for some fancy doorbell, etc. But for normals? Who would maintain such equipment, who would be in charge of testing if the battery will not get overheated once the new device stays for longer time in place X? Who would maintain and support such devices. I don't want to service myself my media player.
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1. wkat4242 ◴[] No.44373647[source]
Sure but if old phones could be used like a really powerful raspberry pi (and they are really much more powerful, at least the high end) then the resale value would go up and more people would sell theirs to nerds rather than throwing it away. Still a net positive IMO