What to do with an old iPad

I have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it. Not only do they control it, they decide when it's time for me to buy new hardware and force me to landfill this one.

Why do I need to "jailbreak" my own hardware? Why do we put up with this madness? There should be allowance for accessing my own hardware, especially 13 year old hardware abandoned by the vendor and locked for the user.

And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.

If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.

http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/

The good thing is that you can do all this jailbreaking with free software from Linux, apparently. Of course it's endless browsing shadier and shadier / scammy websites before finding something that looks somewhat less shady. The world of iOS jailnreaking is very strange.

The bad thing is that sideloading requires an Apple account. I don't have one. Creating an Apple account from the device is not possible anymore. Creating an apple account from the apple website seems complicated. It wants a phone number which I'm not willing to give. I tried these services that provide burner public phone numbers to get the verification code it wants but have yet to find one that works. When i manage to get a verification code, it tells me that this is not possible at this time, please try from an Apple device. I don't have another one. I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this.

I'd like to make this device useful. Up to recently I could use it to display music scores in PDF, I even wrote a web app for it to annotate them, but the screen is a bit broken and this makes the touchscreen very erratic to the point of being unusable.

I'd be happy to make it useful for something else but on the other end, I have other things more interesting to do than to deal with Apple's bullshit.

Too bad.

When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare.

I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just curious why it wasn't mentioned in the blog post? My original question was going to be if your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the world that cares about using 130GB extra during a random month. Even in Belgium I think the caps were around twice that ten years ago

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

I suspect this will be an issue for most old devices. Especially old Apple devices (though there's hope for the newer ones now that the EU requires them to allow other browsers), but for all devices ultimately.

My old iPad lasts weeks on its battery if I don't use it, I can only imagine it actually sleeps and would not answer network requests in this state.

Air 3 I've got on ebay-like site holds pretty well but the same model that my partner got from official dealer had always issues with touch recognition.

    ```
    accept-ranges: bytes
    age: 5397
    alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
    cache-control: max-age=14400
    cf-cache-status: HIT
    content-length: 3013598
    content-type: application/octet-stream
    date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:14:32 GMT
    last-modified: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:44:35 GMT
    server: cloudflare
    vary: accept-encoding

    ```

I want a Mac with a touchscreen and a pencil. So not sure if it's easier to retrofit MacOS on an iPad or retrofit a touch screen on a Mac.

I know this question is adjacently relevant, but I wonder if someone has some experience in it and are willing to share :)

As far as I know the closest thing you can do with an iPad running macOS is some form of Remote Desktop / VNC. The QEMU attempts on jailbroken iPads are unusable, and impractical. Certainly no one has done it natively (outside of Apple of course)

Congrats for the successes :-)

what can i do with it? i'm willing to disassemble it but i have no idea where to start on what's wrong; all i know is itd be a waste if i just threw this in a trash.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

Does your ISP have a problem when your computer/phone/etc does a cloud backup? Or when you torrent? Because both of those will max out your upload bandwidth much more than hosting a static website.

I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.

- Very few sites need to cope with more than a handful of hits per second. A regular DSL connection and desktop PC can host the vast majority of them; you don't need clouds if you don't want them. (Even under variable load: if you need 80% of the systems more than 40% of the time, scaling down is probably not worth the cloud premium)

- If a site can't handle HN, that's a software limitation. Compare Wordpress' insanely slow page generation to simple blog software that generates pages in 5 milliseconds, or even to hosting the blog as static HTML files. I'd not be surprised if you can serve Wikipedia's page text from like one Raspberry Pi 5 per country. Not that you'd want to do that for reliability and redundancy reasons, plus you have the constant stream of edits to process and templates to (re-)render. Media and blob hosting is also a separate beast. Thankfully, most sites are not in the top ten world's most popular websites and you get away with a lot

First hand experience tells me local ISP's don't care, and/or don't know to care. they don't even serve piracy notices here (I believe most of latin america is like this) so they definitely won't be bothering with something like this

Apple needs to step TF out of the way. They sold this hardware, they got their money. Move aside and let people use what they bought.

Reading this guy's tale just made me appreciate how awesome it is to be sitting here posting on my Dell T5400 from 2008 running Win7Pro. It still runs even though there are 3 blown caps and 3 swollen caps on the mobo, and one RAM slot crapped out several years ago so I lost access to 8 GB of RAM in my 32 GB system. One of the PCie slots is also bad but so far the one with my 1070 GPU works fine driving two monitors. The only real problem is with the hard drive. Every so often I get a hardware error on the Win7Pro installation (I dual-boot Win10 Pro on this machine) and that sends me into a multiple hour reboot fest where I have to run Startup Repair several times, go Command Line in and fix MBR errors, and scannow to fix whatever else is borked.

At one point I spent a week on Win10 Pro (I hate that OS) because after hours of trying to force Win7 Pro to boot normally it looked hopeless. After a week of that I made the huge mistake of clicking the "install updates now" button on Win10 Pro and it proceeded to grab several years worth of updates and install them, rebooting multiple times in the process. It may have finished except that one of those updates left me with a hardware bluescreen related to a driver for the 1070 and I was not able to get that fixed.

After much frustration and the spewing of several one-time use profanity clusters I decided to try to boot into Win7 Pro again and it worked normally.

One day this machine will bork itself and I will have to accept that I can no longer operate in my beloved Win7 and have to fire up this new pc that has been sitting idle for four years now. That day is not today though.

1) I am surprised there is no mention of trading it back to apple? 2) I am sure putting a decent “churn” schedule for apple devices is already been done right? Top of my head I can imagine coming up with one where for of the major product line apple offers (mbp, iPad, iPhone) we can look at the typical depreciation curve and find optimal “get in” points and “get out” points right? How hard could it be. I agreed there is a friction and activation energy needed to going down to the Apple Store and trading it in but you could get a new device every 1-2 years and keep largely churning the same out of money plus a slightly more to top up (call it premium to avoid the anger /pain inflicted by not doing it.)

What am I missing here ?

Selling it secund hand could be an alternative, but then the value is usually ridiculously low for older iPads, so the question is a pretty common one.

https://terminalbytes.com/iphone-8-solar-powered-vision-ocr-...

83,418 OCR requests processed over more than a year of operation

Up to 1,000+ requests on busy days

If you forget about the million other ways to try and solve this issue. It’s an amazing repurposed piece of tech.

- 20k peak unique visitors

- 162k peak requests

- 56 GB peak data but most of that data was cached by Cloudflare

BTW I anyone is curious, IIRC managed to jailbreak iOS 9.3.5 just from linux without any apple interaction (no cloud account), but since for some reasons phoenixpwn expired

469 points by homarp on Nov 21, 2020 | 282 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883

Depending on the version of iPad, you may be able to get UTM SE on it, which will let you run a virtualized operating system on it.

https://getutm.app/

- There appear to be some jailbreaks too

- iSH would let you install and run local linux packages

502

Browser Working

Cloudflare Working

odb.ar Host Error

I had a shitty pentium or mmx, with fuck all ram, my dad however had a DUAL PROC P3 monster just a network hop away.

I could SSH in and run GIMP on his machine and run https://logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/removal in a quarter of the time.

But that time has passed now. Perhaps web APIs are the best way to do that kinda offload.

I'd also suggest lowering the brightness slightly, can make a huge difference to battery drain

I do hope the site comes back as it has a convenient old ipad jailbreaking summary and i do have this ipad 1 gathering dust somewhere...

Install Linux on it. If that is not possible, shave its head and put it in the pillory for public humiliation.

I did buy a new pc several years ago when the T5400 started to have problems on reboot and I found a couple of bad caps. I figured it was only a matter of time. Oddly enough that still seems to be true.

I hope that jailbreaks continue to be discovered for these. Perhaps quantum computing will "free" the rest.

Although technologically completely unrelated, rich browser applications also fill this niche, and even share warts like the lack of standardized UX behaviors or having issues with dealing with (subtle) difference between "client environment" implementations (different browsers or X11 "servers").

Effectively the web browser became the universal "graphical terminal" in the same way as (in the past) serial TTYs were the universal "textual terminal". Thus X11's "killer app" just slowly became irrelevant.

I'm currently on free cloudflare plan, and I don't think it shows rps. And it doesn't show stats more than 30 days back

Would not even need a smart plug for that, just a simple mechanical timer would do it.

This is actually (strictly) true. You can use cloudflared on any system which can communicate with your host. This is useful in more realistic deployments as it means you can install cloudflared in a VM/container and then have it relay your services hosted in other VMs/containers/devices. It isn't helpful here as "I hosted my website on an iPad (but I now have to have this other real computer plugged in all the time so that iPad works)" is not as zesty :)

Look at your agreement with your ISP. They typically segment the market into consumer/business plans where running a server requires a business plan versus a consumer plan.

While this is possible, it isn't as straight forward as just running macOS via kvm or whatever. You'll be tinkering in order to register an account from the VM.

I have an old original iPad wall mounted showing an AppDaemon dashboard from my HomeAssistant. I wish the old Safari could handle a standard dashboard but alas. I even had to add a specific certificate to enable Safari to access and show things such as HTTPS feeds from my cameras.

Looking at the comments, there doesn't appear to be anyone who has solved this issue :(

I just suggested a smart plug because the original commenter said it was for HomeAssistant, which is really good at scripting stuff like this (if smart plug detects wattage below X, assume ipad is bugged and cut power and return it after n duration, for example). A mechanical timer might also work.

Also, I just bought 11 smart plugs so everything is starting to look like a nail :)

There’s a lot of stuff you can’t do, but it runs VLC and I can connect to iTunes and move files.

The Retina display is still gorgeous and it can connect to my AirPods (although _they_ really don’t like it)

I watch TV-series on it while on the treadmill in my gym. I’ve considered getting a new one, but it just seems like a lot of money for something that isn’t broken.

https://github.com/T-vK/ESP32-BLE-Keyboard

Do you know of any other that can act as Bluetooth classic keyboard?

Edit: this could be fruitful

https://community.platformio.org/t/using-esp32-as-a-bluetoot...