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Ask HN: What to Do with Old iPads?

30 points owenmakes | 3 comments | 26 Aug 25 12:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.476s | source

I have a bunch of old ipads which have become almost useless being stuck on iOS 9.3

I've been looking for solutions to this and it seems the only possible option is to jailbreak and downgrade iOS to a more usable version.

Any ideas?

1. Vuska ◴[26 Aug 25 14:34 UTC] No.45027124[source]▶
The iPad 2 can be downgraded to iOS 6.1.3 or 8.4.1. Both offer better performance than iOS 9 and have untethered jailbreaks. Once downgraded and jailbroken you can sideload hours and hours worth of games. A lot from that era are IAP-free.

I use an iPhone 5 downgraded to iOS 6 (tethered) as an iPod. I love how I can unplug my headphones from my work Mac, plug directly into the phone (no adapter required!) and it effectively mutes Slack without actually muting it. Syncing with the latest version of iTunes still works, albeit slowly.

I also use an iPad 4 (tethered to iOS 6) as an ebook. iBooks works great and I love the pseudomorphic design.

See also: https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit

replies(2): >>45033265 #>>45038548 #
2. owenmakes ◴[26 Aug 25 22:43 UTC] No.45033265[source]▶
Got it downgraded, and it is a much better experience. It is actually useful, though I have yet to play around and see which apps I can load on this
3. kingkongjaffa ◴[27 Aug 25 12:08 UTC] No.45038548[source]▶
I know what you mean, but a pseudomorph seems to be a geology term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomorph

What you meant was:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

Skeuomorphic means designing digital interfaces to resemble physical-world objects to make them more intuitive and familiar to users. Like how iBooks was made to look like an actual bookcase.