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What to do with an old iPad

(odb.ar)
190 points owenmakes | 4 comments | 05 Sep 25 17:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.015s | source

Coming back with my own blog (hosted on iPad 2) after asking here the same question
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imglorp ◴[06 Sep 25 22:14 UTC] No.45153372[source]▶
This makes me so angry.

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.

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owenmakes ◴[06 Sep 25 22:45 UTC] No.45153602[source]▶
I'm with you here. I think Apple should let you install whatever OS you want in the device after the support cycle ended. But that's not gonna happen any time soon. Until then, we jailbreak.
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1. MBCook ◴[07 Sep 25 00:27 UTC] No.45154161[source]▶
And what OS would that even be? I’m not aware of any others.
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2. Retr0id ◴[07 Sep 25 00:32 UTC] No.45154191[source]▶
There's no reason Linux couldn't run on M1 iPads, aside from the fact the bootloader isn't unlockable like on macbooks.
3. wpm ◴[07 Sep 25 02:29 UTC] No.45154852[source]▶
No OS exists because everyone knows it couldn't be installed in the current status quo. Why would anyone do the work of porting $OS to old iPads if they knew it was fruitless? How could they even do it?

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.

4. numpad0 ◴[07 Sep 25 07:25 UTC] No.45156129[source]▶
There aren't because non-x86 computers are really poorly standardized. Most x86 PCs probably are capable of natively booting MS-DOS for an IBM 5170 PC/AT but iPhone 17,1 and iPhone 17,2 run completely different images. Efforts like PostmarketOS have no chances of success when literally everything is model subtype specific.