8 ms·

What to do with an old iPad

192 points by owenmakes 1y ago

Coming back with my own blog (hosted on iPad 2) after asking here the same question

imglorp 1y ago
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.
- nijuashi 1y ago
  Apple offers recycling service, so that’s an option.
  - jraph 1y ago
    Recycling is strictly worse than reuse, and that's even assuming apple does good recycling.
- owenmakes 1y ago
  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.
  - MBCook 1y ago
    And what OS would that even be? I’m not aware of any others.
    - Retr0id 1y ago
      There's no reason Linux couldn't run on M1 iPads, aside from the fact the bootloader isn't unlockable like on macbooks.
    - wpm 1y ago
      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.
    - numpad0 1y ago
      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.
  - esafak 1y ago
    Apple should open their tablets after they stop supporting them.
- curvaturearth 1y ago
  The hardware could absolutely be made useful too. For example Apple could have a decent low bloat long term support OS that can be deployed on a device. Maybe it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but who cares, at least it would be usable. They won't do this though because it makes them no money.
- sbinnee 1y ago
  I am in the same boat. I have two ipads, one is probably ipad mini 2 if I remember it correctly and another one is the first ipad pro. Ipad pro is still usable but not fully functional because I cannot upgrade the os and many apps dropped support for old os. Ipad mini on the other hand is totally unusable. I even think it’s in a better shape than the pro one. It feels snappy when navigating. But I cannot use it in any meaningful way.
somat 1y ago
Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this" 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/ http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/
- imglorp 1y ago
  Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.
  - somat 1y ago
    I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it. https://arcan-fe.com/about/ https://arcan-fe.com/about/
    - jraph 1y ago
      Unfortunately, as far as old iPads are concerned, one of the major issues with old iPads is the old safari version. And so old web standards. I've this potentially nice projects to mirror screens from the web browser, but they won't run on old iPads for this reason. Shipping programs to the old iPad will suffer the same issues: only programs specifically written for these old Safari versions will work. 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.
clumsysmurf 1y ago
Wouldn't "spicy pillow" be the main problem with old iPads? My iPad Air 4th gen doesn't have an option to limit charging to 80% etc.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jraph 1y ago
  Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged.
  - owenmakes 1y ago
    I keep mine unplugged and it gets surprising good battery life, and I think it kinda improved with the downgrade. On normal use I would get like 8-10 hrs screen on time. No spicy pillow yet, though I did have that issue with my old iPod.
    - jraph 1y ago
      Do you know long it can last unplugged answering requests with insomnia? 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.
      - owenmakes 1y ago
        No idea honestly, but the main reason the battery lasts so long is that it turns the WiFi off, which is why I had to install Insomnia. It was doing fine so far, with 60% battery, but decided to plug it in since it's getting many requests now
        jraph 1y ago
        OK, thanks! Congrats for the successes :-)
jraph 1y ago
I'm also in this situation where I have same kind of old iPad, which was lying in a drawer at my parents. It's running iOS 9.3.6, for which only a semi-tethered jailbreak exists. IIUC, this means that you can jailbreak it by side loading an app to the iPad. 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.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  > I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this. 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.
nugzbunny 1y ago
So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi. 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).
- lucb1e 1y ago
  > 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
  - trillic 1y ago
    cloudflare is caching the image: ``` 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 ```
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - pdntspa 1y ago
    wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure
mettamage 1y ago
So question: is it possible to put MacOS on an M1 iPad? 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 :)
- vinnymac 1y ago
  There are plenty of successful mods and even paid products capable of making a MacBook include a functional touchscreen. 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)
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    People have ran macOS userspace on iPhone
    - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
      Wait really? Can you link me please?
      - saagarjha 1y ago
        https://twitter.com/khanhduytran0/status/1954724636727587237 https://twitter.com/khanhduytran0/status/1954724636727587237
        vinnymac 1y ago
        And yet it must be Jailbroken, and is not an iPad.
        saagarjha 1y ago
cratermoon 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko
swyx 1y ago
this might be a good thread to ask this as i cant get a straight answer from apple forums - i have a relatively recent iPad that was bricked after i updated to iPadOS 26 dev beta and then didnt like it and downgraded - now it simply wont turn on. its out of warranty so apple doesnt care/doesnt help - but i know the hardware is just fine. 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.
- tymscar 1y ago
  DFU restore it
quotemstr 1y ago
I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at peak use while charging without drawing down the battery.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  This bug happens to the ipads we have set up as AV controls in conference rooms at work from time to time as well. I think I first noticed it 2 years ago and assumed it was an issue with the hub it was connected to.
- nickthegreek 1y ago
  I use several for home assistant dashboards and haven’t run into this issue. Possibly an undersized power brick?
- hn92726819 1y ago
  Kind of a nasty solution, but if you have a smart plug, you could plug the iPad into it and have HAS toggle power for an hour a day (or whatever time). That way it's as if you unplugged the iPad yourself for a period.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    How does unplugging the charger for an hour improve the situation? Does it reset the charging logic back into "high charge" mode or something? Would not even need a smart plug for that, just a simple mechanical timer would do it.
    - hn92726819 1y ago
      I don't know if it will. I actually have never even heard of this bug before, but I would assume that it gets fixed somehow and I imagine it involves unplugging it and plugging it in again. 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 :)
tambourine_man 1y ago
I have an old project with an Esp32 Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad 2. I only later found out that the iPad 2 does not support Bluetooth LE, which is what the Esp32 uses. If anyone knows a good solution please let me know.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  ESP32 has bluetooth classic.
  - tambourine_man 1y ago
    I was using this library at the time. https://github.com/T-vK/ESP32-BLE-Keyboard 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-bluetooth-classic-keyboard-i-need-a-code/48365 https://community.platformio.org/t/using-esp32-as-a-bluetoot...
shaoqing 1y ago
[dead]
doodlebugging 1y ago
I've been considering getting a new(er) iPad or iMac. I think it might have a better interface with my iPhone than my current pc. I hate to think about product lifespan, obsoleting, etc since I already have lots of devices that aged out. 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.
- incone123 1y ago
  Unless you enjoy rebooting, why not run Windows 7 in a VM on newer hardware?
  - doodlebugging 1y ago
    Hmmmm. I had not considered this. I guess I am in a rut with more than one project going all the time so I never took the time to look for other options. 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.
pmarreck 1y ago
I wish Apple would just unlock these things once they stop supporting them. It's such a waste of hardware otherwise.
- fsflover 1y ago
  Less people would buy new iPads, so Apple won't do this unless forced by law and the right to repair movement.
  - amelius 1y ago
    It's probably more because some IT people at Apple take pride in locking things down. After that, it takes Apple real effort to actually support your use-case.
    - fsflover 1y ago
      So you think that "taking pride" is more important than profit at Apple? I seriously doubt that.
- jmpman 1y ago
  I would love to run Linux on my old iPad hardware. The newest iPad Pro running Linux would probably be faster than my current laptop.
  - pmarreck 1y ago
    Right? That's exactly the waste I'm referring to. I hope that jailbreaks continue to be discovered for these. Perhaps quantum computing will "free" the rest.
- dzhiurgis 1y ago
  It's unlocked once it goes thru shredder and is made into new iPad. I wish more people were had common sense and were pro-growth.
indigodiddy 1y ago
[flagged]
quietthrow 1y ago
Genuine question: 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 ?
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  You can only trade it back for (time limited ?) store credits. I assume there's also additional limitations requiring you to move the device under your account for instance. 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.
- owenmakes 1y ago
  Well, you're assuming there are Apple stores in Argentina (there aren't any). So any trade in would require flying to the US (or nearest Apple store).
social_quotient 1y ago
I’m reminded of this story https://terminalbytes.com/iphone-8-solar-powered-vision-ocr-server/ 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.
- owenmakes 1y ago
  Woah, this way cooler than what I did
rzr 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250906222008/http://odb.ar/blog/2025/09/05/hosting-my-blog-on-an-iPad-2.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250906222008/http://odb.ar/blo... 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
fsflover 1y ago
Linux on iPad (ipadlinux.org) 469 points by homarp on Nov 21, 2020 | 282 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883
j45 1y ago
- Surprised UTM wasn't mentioned here. 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/ https://getutm.app/ - There appear to be some jailbreaks too - iSH would let you install and run local linux packages
calini 1y ago
502: Bad Gateway - Host Error. Hilarious
- nottorp 1y ago
  Clearly the iPad ran out of battery! 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...
  - owenmakes 1y ago
    It's back up! iPad was still working correctly, but the connection to the VPS had dropped. I suspect network issue.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      [Begin whine] Not that anyone is likely to read this 6 day old thread any more, but I fished my "collectible" iPad 1 out of where it was rotting... ... and the battery is bulging. To the point of deforming the aluminium casing. Time to run and drop it at recycling instead of jailbreaking it :( [End whine]
mattmaroon 1y ago
I get a bad gateway error and can’t load the site and Cloudflare tells me it’s a host error (they are doing their job just fine, the first two bullet points assure me) so hopefully hosting a website isn’t what to do with it.
- zb3 1y ago
  I remember Cloudflare's job was to cache the page back in the day.. is it still the case?
  - piinbinary 1y ago
    It depends on how the site is configured in Cloudflare. I'm pretty sure I had to change the default settings to make it keep my site up even if my server goes down (and even then I'm not sure I did it right)
    - kevincox 1y ago
      The default settings don't cache HTML. (Maybe even if the server says to cache it. I seem to need to add special rules to make it respect the standard cache headers)
- owenmakes 1y ago
  The tunnel disconnected somehow. No idea what happened, cause the iPad was still running the server correctly, maybe network issue.
amelius 1y ago
> What to do with an old iPad Install Linux on it. If that is not possible, shave its head and put it in the pillory for public humiliation.
edoceo 1y ago
I use an old IPad as a desktop status panel. Shows me timers, today's agenda, countdown to meetings and some to-do notes. A little focus/productivity tool.
theodric 1y ago
Gen1? Ideally on the original firmware? Display it as an artifact. Gen2 or later? E-waste.
sweetjuly 1y ago
> The most common provider is cloudflare, but you need to install cloudflared on the machine you’re using to host 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 :)
seriocomic 1y ago
Funny how some things you were thinking about before you log-on for the morning suddenly become front-and-centre for you. 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 :(
wodenokoto 1y ago
I have an iPad going strong-ish for over a decade now. 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.
mediumsmart 1y ago
Bad gateway - I am probably in the wrong country on the wrong internet at the wrong time.
Vaslo 1y ago
It’s down again btw.
- owenmakes 1y ago
  Yeah, had to move back to my apartment, haven't gotten around to doing the setup here
Jotalea 1y ago
the site seems to be down; and after reading some comments, apparently it's because you were hosting the site in the iPad itself. looks like it stopped working, so I won't be able to read your post.

192 points by owenmakes 1y ago

Coming back with my own blog (hosted on iPad 2) after asking here the same question

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.

nijuashi 1y ago
Apple offers recycling service, so that’s an option.
- jraph 1y ago
  Recycling is strictly worse than reuse, and that's even assuming apple does good recycling.
owenmakes 1y ago
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.
- MBCook 1y ago
  And what OS would that even be? I’m not aware of any others.
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    There's no reason Linux couldn't run on M1 iPads, aside from the fact the bootloader isn't unlockable like on macbooks.
  - wpm 1y ago
    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.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    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.
- esafak 1y ago
  Apple should open their tablets after they stop supporting them.
curvaturearth 1y ago
The hardware could absolutely be made useful too. For example Apple could have a decent low bloat long term support OS that can be deployed on a device. Maybe it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but who cares, at least it would be usable. They won't do this though because it makes them no money.
sbinnee 1y ago
I am in the same boat. I have two ipads, one is probably ipad mini 2 if I remember it correctly and another one is the first ipad pro. Ipad pro is still usable but not fully functional because I cannot upgrade the os and many apps dropped support for old os. Ipad mini on the other hand is totally unusable. I even think it’s in a better shape than the pro one. It feels snappy when navigating. But I cannot use it in any meaningful way.

somat 1y ago

Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this" 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/ http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/

imglorp 1y ago
Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.
- somat 1y ago
  I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it. https://arcan-fe.com/about/ https://arcan-fe.com/about/
  - jraph 1y ago
    Unfortunately, as far as old iPads are concerned, one of the major issues with old iPads is the old safari version. And so old web standards. I've this potentially nice projects to mirror screens from the web browser, but they won't run on old iPads for this reason. Shipping programs to the old iPad will suffer the same issues: only programs specifically written for these old Safari versions will work. 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.

clumsysmurf 1y ago

Wouldn't "spicy pillow" be the main problem with old iPads? My iPad Air 4th gen doesn't have an option to limit charging to 80% etc.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jraph 1y ago
Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged.
- owenmakes 1y ago
  I keep mine unplugged and it gets surprising good battery life, and I think it kinda improved with the downgrade. On normal use I would get like 8-10 hrs screen on time. No spicy pillow yet, though I did have that issue with my old iPod.
  - jraph 1y ago
    Do you know long it can last unplugged answering requests with insomnia? 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.
    - owenmakes 1y ago
      No idea honestly, but the main reason the battery lasts so long is that it turns the WiFi off, which is why I had to install Insomnia. It was doing fine so far, with 60% battery, but decided to plug it in since it's getting many requests now
      - jraph 1y ago
        OK, thanks! Congrats for the successes :-)

jraph 1y ago

I'm also in this situation where I have same kind of old iPad, which was lying in a drawer at my parents. It's running iOS 9.3.6, for which only a semi-tethered jailbreak exists. IIUC, this means that you can jailbreak it by side loading an app to the iPad. 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.

heavyset_go 1y ago
> I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this. 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.

nugzbunny 1y ago

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi. 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).

lucb1e 1y ago
> 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
- trillic 1y ago
  cloudflare is caching the image: ``` 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 ```
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- pdntspa 1y ago
  wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure

mettamage 1y ago

So question: is it possible to put MacOS on an M1 iPad? 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 :)

vinnymac 1y ago
There are plenty of successful mods and even paid products capable of making a MacBook include a functional touchscreen. 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)
- saagarjha 1y ago
  People have ran macOS userspace on iPhone
  - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    Wait really? Can you link me please?
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      https://twitter.com/khanhduytran0/status/1954724636727587237 https://twitter.com/khanhduytran0/status/1954724636727587237
      - vinnymac 1y ago
        And yet it must be Jailbroken, and is not an iPad.
        saagarjha 1y ago

cratermoon 1y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko

swyx 1y ago

this might be a good thread to ask this as i cant get a straight answer from apple forums - i have a relatively recent iPad that was bricked after i updated to iPadOS 26 dev beta and then didnt like it and downgraded - now it simply wont turn on. its out of warranty so apple doesnt care/doesnt help - but i know the hardware is just fine. 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.

tymscar 1y ago
DFU restore it

quotemstr 1y ago

I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at peak use while charging without drawing down the battery.

kjkjadksj 1y ago
This bug happens to the ipads we have set up as AV controls in conference rooms at work from time to time as well. I think I first noticed it 2 years ago and assumed it was an issue with the hub it was connected to.
nickthegreek 1y ago
I use several for home assistant dashboards and haven’t run into this issue. Possibly an undersized power brick?
hn92726819 1y ago
Kind of a nasty solution, but if you have a smart plug, you could plug the iPad into it and have HAS toggle power for an hour a day (or whatever time). That way it's as if you unplugged the iPad yourself for a period.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  How does unplugging the charger for an hour improve the situation? Does it reset the charging logic back into "high charge" mode or something? Would not even need a smart plug for that, just a simple mechanical timer would do it.
  - hn92726819 1y ago
    I don't know if it will. I actually have never even heard of this bug before, but I would assume that it gets fixed somehow and I imagine it involves unplugging it and plugging it in again. 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 :)

tambourine_man 1y ago

I have an old project with an Esp32 Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad 2. I only later found out that the iPad 2 does not support Bluetooth LE, which is what the Esp32 uses. If anyone knows a good solution please let me know.

mrheosuper 1y ago
ESP32 has bluetooth classic.
- tambourine_man 1y ago
  I was using this library at the time. https://github.com/T-vK/ESP32-BLE-Keyboard 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-bluetooth-classic-keyboard-i-need-a-code/48365 https://community.platformio.org/t/using-esp32-as-a-bluetoot...

shaoqing 1y ago

[dead]

doodlebugging 1y ago

I've been considering getting a new(er) iPad or iMac. I think it might have a better interface with my iPhone than my current pc. I hate to think about product lifespan, obsoleting, etc since I already have lots of devices that aged out. 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.

incone123 1y ago
Unless you enjoy rebooting, why not run Windows 7 in a VM on newer hardware?
- doodlebugging 1y ago
  Hmmmm. I had not considered this. I guess I am in a rut with more than one project going all the time so I never took the time to look for other options. 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.

pmarreck 1y ago

I wish Apple would just unlock these things once they stop supporting them. It's such a waste of hardware otherwise.

fsflover 1y ago
Less people would buy new iPads, so Apple won't do this unless forced by law and the right to repair movement.
- amelius 1y ago
  It's probably more because some IT people at Apple take pride in locking things down. After that, it takes Apple real effort to actually support your use-case.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    So you think that "taking pride" is more important than profit at Apple? I seriously doubt that.
jmpman 1y ago
I would love to run Linux on my old iPad hardware. The newest iPad Pro running Linux would probably be faster than my current laptop.
- pmarreck 1y ago
  Right? That's exactly the waste I'm referring to. I hope that jailbreaks continue to be discovered for these. Perhaps quantum computing will "free" the rest.
dzhiurgis 1y ago
It's unlocked once it goes thru shredder and is made into new iPad. I wish more people were had common sense and were pro-growth.

indigodiddy 1y ago

[flagged]

quietthrow 1y ago

Genuine question: 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 ?

makeitdouble 1y ago
You can only trade it back for (time limited ?) store credits. I assume there's also additional limitations requiring you to move the device under your account for instance. 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.
owenmakes 1y ago
Well, you're assuming there are Apple stores in Argentina (there aren't any). So any trade in would require flying to the US (or nearest Apple store).

social_quotient 1y ago

I’m reminded of this story https://terminalbytes.com/iphone-8-solar-powered-vision-ocr-server/ 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.

owenmakes 1y ago
Woah, this way cooler than what I did

rzr 1y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250906222008/http://odb.ar/blog/2025/09/05/hosting-my-blog-on-an-iPad-2.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250906222008/http://odb.ar/blo... 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

fsflover 1y ago

Linux on iPad (ipadlinux.org) 469 points by homarp on Nov 21, 2020 | 282 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883

j45 1y ago

- Surprised UTM wasn't mentioned here. 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/ https://getutm.app/ - There appear to be some jailbreaks too - iSH would let you install and run local linux packages

calini 1y ago

502: Bad Gateway - Host Error. Hilarious

nottorp 1y ago
Clearly the iPad ran out of battery! 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...
- owenmakes 1y ago
  It's back up! iPad was still working correctly, but the connection to the VPS had dropped. I suspect network issue.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    [Begin whine] Not that anyone is likely to read this 6 day old thread any more, but I fished my "collectible" iPad 1 out of where it was rotting... ... and the battery is bulging. To the point of deforming the aluminium casing. Time to run and drop it at recycling instead of jailbreaking it :( [End whine]

mattmaroon 1y ago

I get a bad gateway error and can’t load the site and Cloudflare tells me it’s a host error (they are doing their job just fine, the first two bullet points assure me) so hopefully hosting a website isn’t what to do with it.

zb3 1y ago
I remember Cloudflare's job was to cache the page back in the day.. is it still the case?
- piinbinary 1y ago
  It depends on how the site is configured in Cloudflare. I'm pretty sure I had to change the default settings to make it keep my site up even if my server goes down (and even then I'm not sure I did it right)
  - kevincox 1y ago
    The default settings don't cache HTML. (Maybe even if the server says to cache it. I seem to need to add special rules to make it respect the standard cache headers)
owenmakes 1y ago
The tunnel disconnected somehow. No idea what happened, cause the iPad was still running the server correctly, maybe network issue.

amelius 1y ago

> What to do with an old iPad Install Linux on it. If that is not possible, shave its head and put it in the pillory for public humiliation.

edoceo 1y ago

I use an old IPad as a desktop status panel. Shows me timers, today's agenda, countdown to meetings and some to-do notes. A little focus/productivity tool.

theodric 1y ago

Gen1? Ideally on the original firmware? Display it as an artifact. Gen2 or later? E-waste.

sweetjuly 1y ago

> The most common provider is cloudflare, but you need to install cloudflared on the machine you’re using to host 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 :)

seriocomic 1y ago

Funny how some things you were thinking about before you log-on for the morning suddenly become front-and-centre for you. 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 :(

wodenokoto 1y ago

I have an iPad going strong-ish for over a decade now. 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.

mediumsmart 1y ago

Bad gateway - I am probably in the wrong country on the wrong internet at the wrong time.

Vaslo 1y ago

It’s down again btw.

owenmakes 1y ago
Yeah, had to move back to my apartment, haven't gotten around to doing the setup here

Jotalea 1y ago

the site seems to be down; and after reading some comments, apparently it's because you were hosting the site in the iPad itself. looks like it stopped working, so I won't be able to read your post.