Yes, we definitely need something like this for the iDevices - it's outrageous that an old but capable device like iPad Air (1st generation) has to become e-Waste simply because Apple has decided not to support it any longer and won't allow other Operating Systems to run on it. Mac's already have the OpenCore Legacy Patcher - https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher - that allow you to run newer macOS versions on older and even unsupported Macs.
Not sure this would solve much as new iOS would be far too slow for these devices.
Better they allowed installing linux on old devices. But even then it wouldn't move a needle - it's such a niche case.
Maybe some would end up in extremely poor countries, but even there people can afford $30-50 for a brand new computer and Apple rather get those old devices recycled properly.
I just bought an iPad Air 1on Mercari for $25 in mint condition. Handles EPUBs and PDFs like a champ. Battery drains when wifi is turned on. Webkit is horribly out of date, but the kernel says its from 2021? I think webkit was frozen in 2018.
That makes sense, that iPad had 5 years of major OS updates (2013-2018), which included the browser, but Apple provides security updates and critical bug fixes for at least 2 years after major updates end. That model stopped at iOS 12, first released in 2018, which received security updates for an especially long time, 2023.
In that era, Safari added new features, including adding support for web standards, in the major update and in a .1 update about 6 months later, Safari 12.1 came out in March 2019.
It wouldn’t be that big a problem if 3rd party app developers would stop dropping support for older operating systems. This is the thing that truly kills the devices.
Go to the App Store on an iPhone 7 and every app will refuse to install because it requires the latest and greatest OS even though they used to work just fine on the old OS. They deliberately drop support even when they don’t have to. Total shitty behavior.
I gotta throw away my phone because you, Mr. Developer, can’t be bothered to keep the old code around for backward compatibility.
As far as I know, it's not really on the app developers, after a while Apple requires them to switch to a newer "target" build if they want to push out an update. Currently, the minimum target iOS version if you're submitting an app to the app store is iOS 18.
And additionally, even if there once was a compatible version, Apple only lets end users download it if they have previously purchased/downloaded the app.
You’re conflating target version with minimum supported version.
There aren’t requirements to update the minimum. They’re independent. There might be limitations on what APIs are still available though in Xcode if they’re removed after a deprecation period however.
You can use the latest SDK, and if you don’t use any new APIs, your app will continue to deploy to whatever minimum you have set.
If you want to use the new APIs, you can put their use behind availability checks.
It’s just that at some point, as a dev, you want to stop testing on older devices and you want to stop branching your code for OS versions that are a minuscule fraction of the active user base. The ROI changes quickly.
iOS 15 is like what, 4 years old? it's ridiculously short. (yeah, I know a device running ios 15 was also supported before being updated to that version, but it's still short)
I think a lot of people in this thread are mistaking SDK version and minimum supported version.
The App store requires you to link with a minimum SDK version, but the minimum supported version is set independently by the developer in Xcode. The latest version of Xcode + the latest SDK can still support devices running iOS 15. Developers are deliberately choosing to drop such support. Or maybe they just don't know how, as evidenced in this thread.
1. you must use current Xcode to submit to the App Store
2. Current Xcode only supports a short list of the most recent iOS SDKs as targets
3. Therefore you can’t make a build with an older Xcode to submit, and you can’t make a build that supports say, iOS 15, with current Xcode.
The video highlights a complete hack which can for now be used to make builds that target older SDKs, but Apple could change their systems to break that at any time, and in fact the latest iOSs don’t use these device support files that he shows are the key to the hack. So while you can do this now for old iOS, when 26 is too outdated for Apple to want you to target, this hack won’t work to bring it back.
This video was very informative on how Apple deliberately blocks developers’ ability to update an app without removing support for older iOS and an unsupported undocumented workaround the creator has noticed which at least momentarily works to work around it:
That’s not how that works. Broadly speaking, you compile your app against a selected SDK version. Want to use newer features? You have to use a newer SDK. The SDKs themselves support selected ranges of OSes and don’t go back all the way to the beginning.
If you’re writing an app that targets the newest hardware features, say because you’re making a camera app that uses the latest updates, it’s not going to run on iOS 5. You can’t hold that against app authors, or even against Apple, really. There’s not a lot of return on investment for sinking thousands of dev hours into supporting ancient phones that almost no one uses, and which by definition are more likely to be used by people who won’t spend a dime on apps or services.
It's also worth noting that app stores tend to have a range of SDK versions that they will accept for new uploads. (For iOS apps on the Apple App Store, the minimum is currently the SDK for iOS 18[0], and in April 2026, that will change to a minimum of the SDK for iOS 26[1]).
In some cases (such as with Google Play), app stores will even unpublish apps that were built with old versions of the SDK.
In other words, if you want to update your app at all, you have to stick to the rules that they provide regarding SDK versions.
I'm not talking about the SDK version, I'm talking about the minimum supported OS version, which is selected by the developer in Xcode. While App Store requires a minimum SDK version, your app using that SDK version is free to target iOS versions all the way back to some limit that Xcode sets, which is currently 15.
I understood what you were saying. I was continuing on from your point that the different SDK versions only support a limited range of devices, by noting that by updating the SDK, the range of devices that your app will work on will be, at a minimum, the minimum supported device for that SDK.
It's Apple more than developers. Even if an app has an older supported version, you cannot install it outright on older iDevices. You have to "purchase" it first (even if it's free) using old iTunes version or a newer iDevice with the same account, and only then, when you "own" the app, the old iDevice will prompt you to install the older version, if it's supported.
It's actually a requirement by app store connect to use a modern sdk for uploading binaries, and modern sdk versions will often raise the minimum supported ios version, so this is not always the developer's fault. See for example https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/?id=0...
Even if this was overcome (checkra1n) or they provided for bootloader unlocks to run an unsigned firmware, you would still then need to reverse engineer all the drivers. It’s why you don’t see stuff like the original iphone SE’s running different OS.
It would be difficult, but it would at least be possible. See projects like Asahi Linux where they did the work to reverse engineer the drivers for ARM-based Macs.
Asahi started to be developed a couple of months after the first of what would turn out to be the very popular M-chip Macbooks was launched. Those Macbooks are still in people's hands in very large numbers.
Compare that to the number of 1st gen iPads or older iPhones and the demand might not be to the same level to justify the endless reverse engineering effort.
The solution is for the companies to have to open up the device once it's officially not supported.
Or, legally require vendors of general compute devices to provide a common SW-layer with respective documentation, to allow utilization of underlying hardware (not explicitly within the shipped OS, it can also be a separate maintained platform disconnecting the device from the shipped ecosystem).
This would prevent e-waste and put this old hardware to better use. A community OS could then be built on top of this common SW-layer and be maintained for a wider range of devices.
I would e.g. LOVE a "Browser on everything" OS which just provides a Browser OS for outdated hardware, but the only way this could work on scale would be if the device-vendor would be mandated to provide and document the lower layer...
Someone would have to make the economic case for such a regulation as well, i.e. demonstrate the benefit for society and reduction of e-waste if such a law is in place. But the chances for this are razor-thin, especially in today's public/political climate.
The key difference here is iOS becomes a complete brick once the device no longer is supported in the store. We had a gen 1 and 2 iPad and both were just used for Kindle and web surfing but once they pulled safari and apple store they were paperweights.
A ten-year-old iPad isn’t going to do anything remotely modern, but it’s still just fine for reading books, assuming you have some way to get them onto it. If I were to cobble together a small homepage (weather, reminders, what have you) on an internal server and deliver with unencrypted http, it would do that too.
sadly apple silicon and Tahoe may have delivered a knockout punch to the future of oclp. the dortania team has said apple silicon support is more or less out of the question at this point. with Tahoe ushering in the first large batch of deprecated intel machines with the t2 chip, it’s tbd if dortania will be able to ship something to get them to Tahoe. sad days and may soon mean we’re having the same convo about older Mac’s as we are about old iPhones and iPads.
True. But there's also the plus side - Intel Macs allowed us to run multiple OSes and that was a very desirable feature that was part of its attraction. With ARM Macs, this attraction is truly gone (even if Apple fans taut its ability to run a crippled Linux). So, many will no longer buy any ARM Macs at all. That's Apple's loss. As soon as the battery of my old iPad also conks out, I plan to buy an Android tablet with an unlocked bootloader - I am never buying a locked device that infringes on my rights, ever.
Yep, that's the major problem with Apple hardware nowadays.
It is very good in term of quality (at least if you don't need too much RAM of storage) but for the price you are entirely at the mercy of Apple for long term support. And recent Apple behavior has shown that they drop support on cue, regardless of the actual capacity of the device. I think they have actually become way more aggressive in that regard to boost sales, because the reality is that recent progress isn't really relevant to most people. Without forced deprecation, many would use their device almost indefinitely.
It cannot be a good deal to buy an expensive device that is guaranteed complete deprecation in a 7 year window (and very likely to suffer some major annoyance at the 5 years mark).
If you buy an equally expensive Android device (or Windows PC), because the model is different, you'll fare much better. And the reality is that at equal characteristics/performance the Android/PC version is generally quite cheaper.
Apple aficionados will rave about the build quality and ecosystem but I think they are irrelevant (most of the ecosystem advantages are to be found in the alternate world) and the devices feel more premium than they are actually qualitative (in fact they are very fragile in many ways).
They are surfing the Apple Silicon wave but as their efficiency lead is shrinking it will lose relevance/power.
I don't understand that. 98% of devices over 15 years old have either died of old age or are completely obsolete. Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.
They did the same for the iPad Pro. My kid is using the hand-me-down of my mother (so from grandmother to granddaughter). I put a case on it to protect against bumps, protect screen (has a couple of burn-in marks but it is still very usable) and put tape on top of the camera (the mics likely still work). I also put it on my IoT VLAN. She uses it for YouTube Kids and Disney+, mainly, but schooldays it is limited to 15 min a day and weekend days (fri and sat) to 1 hr. After that, she needs to ask for more time. Usually we don't give that, although in vacations we are lenient. The device still works very well, although the battery (still same as in 2017 or so when it was bought new) is a lil' bit hammered. Now here's the thing: is this device not overkill for the tasks I mentioned? I think so, yes. A kid her age (almost 8) would be happy with whatever, it could be 480p and they're cool with it, as long as the software is still secure (and don't give me the BS of 'don't give them a tablet'; it is locked down and my first shared PC was in like 1989 when I was about her age). And sadly, Apple doesn't want to provide software updates for this device anymore. Microsoft not either, btw, as they deprecated Windows 10 and Windows 11 requires TPMv2 (though Windows is more about PCs and laptops, I'm not sure if there's any effect on Surface hardware). I believe companies can do better, but if they don't want to, they should unlock the bootloader and give the user free reign on the device. You quit support, you unlock the hardware, or else you're violating the local law. That'd be my preference.
Absolutely, me as well. I think the key here is that Apple is selling a platform that is used for a multitude of purposes, often including running software from third party developers. If you’re selling a platform device in large numbers you should have the choice codified by law of either continuing software support to some degree or releasing an unlock kit for it. You should not have the option of effectively abandoning and bricking it, if that’s the route you must go the buyer should get the option of a full purchase price refund at that point in time.
It's the larger point. A device with a 64-bit SoC, higher-than-HD display, battery, gigabytes of RAM and storage being consigned to landfill is bonkers.
>It's the larger point. A device with a 64-bit SoC, higher-than-HD display, battery, gigabytes of RAM and storage being consigned to landfill is bonkers.
That's not a high bar to clear. Who's realistically going to use a laptop/desktop with a Core 2 Duo (2006), for instance?
You're going to think my answer is bizarre, but those kind of underpowered devices would be ideal for office work or non-IT businesses in general. They need computers to do the same things as they needed 15 or 20 years ago. Writing documents, spreadsheets, taking inventory, sending and receiving e-mail.
No, your idea is perfectly rational. Somebody I know consulted me on what kind of computers to buy for their new small business that would only be used for browsing, email, word processing. I found them a store that sold used Dell and HP workstations. They got 3 Dell machines (CPU + Monitor + Keyboard + Mouse), all Intel Core i5 with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD with Windows 7 Pro, for $75 / each. We spent an additional $25 to purchase a cheap 128 GB SSD and installed Linux (LMDE), Firefox, LibreOffice and GNU Cash on it. (Preserved Windows Dual boot option, just in case they needed Windows for something). This was 2+ years ago and the owner was so happy that I reduced his IT hardware budget by a quarter. I recently purchased a used HP 25" monitor from Craigslist, for $60, in excellent condition and still having a year warranty on it, whose retail price was around $500 on launch. There is so much e-waste being produced ...
It's the same as with cars - companies want brand new because then you get a full warranty and theoretically you don't need to worry about it. So that $400 you saved would be spent in IT support for your old failing hardware.
But the thing is.....old PCs are really not that unreliable. If they survived the last 5-10 years then they are probably still chugging along just fine and for a small business there is literally nothing wrong with using them.
> Writing documents, spreadsheets, taking inventory, sending and receiving e-mail.
Well... Outlook is already a web app, the rest of the Office suite will follow rather sooner than later, and inventory - it's either web apps or SAP, both memory hogs.
But not all businesses need to use the latest versions of Microsoft Office. They might not even need to use Microsoft Office at all. iPads come with a stock e-mail application, as well as word processing and spreadsheets etc. And if you're using old PCs, you can use old versions of Office. Or WordPad and an e-mail client. They are light-weight.
You are thinking of big businesses, where as I was talking about Micro and Small businesses (in India). They don't even use Outlook today. For them email means Gmail, and even its use is declining as most business communication in India is done over WhatsApp!
>>Who's realistically going to use a laptop/desktop with a Core 2 Duo (2006), for instance?
I was literally still using a Core2Duo Macbook Pro as a kitchen laptop just for looking up recipes and watching youtube videos etc until last year. Worked absolutely fine until Chrome decided that it's not going to update itself anymore and since I'm on an old version of chrome I can't use google sync. That's what killed it for me - the hardware itself was still perfectly functional.
> Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.
Used by a tiny percentage only because Apple has made it as difficult as possible to not upgrade, which is especially egregious precisely because their devices are long-lasting.
(This comment brought to you via a perfectly functioning iPhone 8 running the latest possible iOS that supports it.)
> I don't understand that. 98% of devices over 15 years old have either died of old age or are completely obsolete. Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.
HN is biased towards the sort of people who keep computers from 2009 to play with and wish they could get more use out of their 12 year old iPad Air. That's great, but it's simply not a thing for most people so i don't see how it significantly reduce ewaste.
If mobile devices would routinely last twenty years, which they very well could, that would reduce a lot of e-waste. Software getting more demanding is also a function of hardware churn.
> If mobile devices would routinely last twenty years, which they very well could, that would reduce a lot of e-waste.
Unfortunately, battery technology doesn't - and even if we had long lasting batteries, we'd also need fall-resistant screens. And no matter what, even if you have a device held together by screws and allowing easy repair instead of messing around with glue and click-tabs... screens still are really expensive, making it often enough more worthwhile to take the opportunity and upgrade the whole device rather than to repair the screen.
Not in most phones. You always have to mess with glue and unless you take extreme care and caution to remove _all_ pieces of it you will end up with compromised water-tightness, not to mention risking the screen cracking or being exposed to air (ruining OLEDs).
> my main desktop monitor
We were talking about phones. Phones get dropped, scratched by keys, ... the list why phone LCDs/OLEDs can get broken is loooong.
You clearly haven't met a lot of your average PC or phone user then. Most people don't care about getting the newest and best thing. If a thing still works, they'll use it until it doesn't anymore, however long that is. You have no idea the kinds of PCs I saw people using when I worked as a technician. People just don't have an interest in getting new tech unless they're forced to, because they largely aren't interested in tech. They're interested in document processing, watching videos, listening to music and dealing with their pictures. And they don't care how old the device is they're doing it on.
In addition, they don't want to spend money on it. They'd rather spend money on things they actually care about. Festivals, clubs, vacations, a new TV, a car, restaurants, whatever. Your average non-tech person is happy if they don't have to spend anything on gadgets for 10 years.
My mum was still happily on some 8 year old iphone, I'm not even sure which one that was, and then got really annoyed that she had to upgrade just because her banking apps stopped updating and wouldn't log in anymore. It's just pure and complete e-waste.
The iOS ecosystem graduated to status symbol for many, $66k average salary doesn’t really matter when society will just take whatever carrier trade in deal they can use to status up.
>You're living in a bubble to think people don't want to get more time out of their family's iOS devices.
No, at least for Apple devices, the overwhelming majority are replaced before they reach EOL. According to https://telemetrydeck.com/survey/apple/iPhone/models/, only around 25% of people are using iPhones that were released more than 3 years ago.
Maybe more people aren't running older hardware because it's too difficult, rather than because they don't want to. The basic idea is here is taht if a device can still hold a charge and the user is OK with limited features, they should be able to keep using it as long as they feel like it.
Citing large absolute numbers for rhetorical effect is dishonest because multiplying a huge number with any percentage will result in a shockingly large number. The original claim is that "people who keep computers from 2009 to play with and wish they could get more use out of their 12 year old iPad Air [...] it's simply not a thing for most people", which is true even, if there are millions in absolute terms.
The PC ecosystem is the exception to the rule. 20 year lifetimes are typical, but in the smartphone world 10 years is treated as an impossibility. It is all disposable by design
I'm not sure about today's conventions, but it used to be that every component inside a car had a minimum standard of 10-year-life. The Toyota Landcruiser famously had a minimum 25-year-life for each and every single component. I have worked closely with some older Toyota engineers in Japan. It is possible but not conventional.
I think this kind of comment represents a little bit of denial about e-waste.
You call it “old but capable” but it’s really more close to just “old.”
We really want tech to be less disposable but the problem is that tech is still progressing fast.
Automobiles have barely changed in the past few decades as a fundamental concept and in general capability and road-worthiness and that’s why you see a lot of 20-30 year old examples on the road.
But imagine that buying a 2000 Volkswagen Jetta meant a car that had a 20 horsepower engine that gets 20mpg. That’s what old tech devices are often like. Sure, you can use it as a glorified gas-guzzling golf cart, but not many people need that and they’d rather just get a golf cart if they do.
A 2013 iPad Air is not going to be a very usable experience as the device was originally intended even if you get suitably lean software on it.
This is a dual core device with 1GB of RAM. At this point it can barely browse the web in an acceptably performant way. We can lament our inefficient web apps and fuss and moan but if grandma can’t get her slippers from Amazon without waiting half a century for the page to load it’s not a useful device anymore.
Sure, you can use it as a server or something, or maybe some kind of smart display, it would work fine. But let’s go back to the golf cart analogy: presumably the original XX million units that were sold can’t all be web servers or smart home screens. The quantity of people who originally bought them for the original mainstream purpose have moved on to something newer and aren’t looking for a niche secondary use case. You have to be a very specific person to try to fit that square peg into a round hole.
I have been a user of the OpenCore Legacy patcher. I bought a 2012 Mac mini, excited that I could use it as a Mac server with the latest OS. The experience was sluggish at best even with a brand new SSD installed and RAM maxed out. I also had random kernel panics that I couldn’t resolve. So I ditched the Mac server idea and installed Linux. I went with that for a while but it turned out to have insufficient single core performance for my applications. The architecture also couldn’t accept more RAM even if I found higher capacity sticks, the technology was completely at the limits. I ended up selling it and built a server with much newer (but still mostly used) parts instead.
The calculus for reuse gets even worse if you start thinking about performance per watt and energy efficiency. There are some devices especially in the desktop category where you get to 15 years old and you have a real legitimate “I’ll save more energy and cost on my power bill” argument.
E.g., Let’s say I own an AMD FX 9590 (2013) with its 220W TDP, I can replace that with an Intel N355 15W embedded class chip and it’ll be faster by a double digit percentage with the same number of threads. I know this is an extreme example but it’s still a demonstrator in the amount the technology has changed.
This would be like if my 2013 Toyota got 2mpg.
I think we need to be more pragmatic and accept these devices for what they are: a temporarily owned thing, almost like a lease. They aren’t all that different than buying some fast food that comes in disposable packaging, the difference is the time scale. Once you’ve eaten it, you’ve consumed it, and it’s over. There’s maybe a bit of material you can recover at the end, let’s call it 10%. And we have to grapple with that reality rather than pretending we can fully change it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to argue against right to repair. Yes, they should have things like replaceable components and a requirement to become more open as they age. They should be designed to be as usable as possible when they become older. At the same time, we should be pragmatic and accept that the most likely scenario is that a device like a 2013 iPad Air will still only see 5-10% of buyers reusing the device in this way rather than sending it to the bin even in the most ideal scenarios. Of course, that number is a lot better than some smaller number like 1-5%, with many iPads being thrown out as soon as the battery swells.
A bit of OT, but I have four iPhone 5/5s/SE (the SE is peak design and form factor, fight me) lying around that I use strictly as offline devices for things like saving data from my heart rate monitor, controlling my action camera, doing voice/field recordings through the 3.5mm connector – stuff I'd prefer never to leave my device (or data that should be open to user control but requires an invasive app to work, I have very few apps on my daily driver).
These devices are are small, snappy and powerful enough in 2025.
I am going farther offtopic, too. I have removed the radio on Samsung Galaxy IV device† and they still work. I don't know if that is possible for iphones, just throwing it here.
† I don't have the skills to reverse the process, though :)
I joined Apple at the start of my career when iOS 6 and Snow Leopard were the active projects. I had to learn all of this. I’ve since forgot but this post was a wonderful bit of proprietary OS jargon and trivia nostalgia for me.
26 (Tahoe) has had a lot of teething problems on ALL platforms, and lacks the typical quality and polish of Apple releases. I couldn't believe how many obvious bugs there were on first use across Macbook and iPhone.
Seconding this simply for data purposes. iOS 26 was the worst release I've ever dealt with coming from an iPhone 4S user to present. Goddamn there were so many obvious bugs and flaws. The .1 release fixed some of them but my keyboard still randomly shifts to the left by a few pixels every time it opens.
Take me back to the days where things were governed by UX and not revenue.
Well, I wanted to revert and wanted a new phone, so bought an iPhone 16 instead of a 17, which comes with iOS 18 installed. iCloud data synced in fine, and the 17 is a very small upgrade anyway, even a downgrade in some ways.
I just hope Apple will fast track a UX update... but they probably won't, due to sunk cost fallacy, and the market and design trends will follow them.
This happens every time, a redesign comes out and people hate it. Same when iOS flat design came out. I dug into the archives, because HN has been around for a while now so we can do that, yay!
(hand picking / editing comments freely because I can)
> I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.
> I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process.
> Look at his iMessage screen comparison [1]: yes, the old screen looks a bit geocities, but you can actually read text very well; the new screen is almost unreadable. The prime aim of iMessage is to make people read text, not to look cool.
> Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks this is going to kill usability. The reason old people can figure their way around <=iOS6 is that everything that can be tapped looks like a button. A more "mature" audience isn't what apple's good at appealing to.
> I'm volunteering at a center that teaches senior citizens various computer skills. One of the courses we teach is on how to use their iPhones. I'm dreading the moment that iOS7 is released: all of these people are going to have to start right back at the beginning in their understanding.
I feel like there should be ”abandonware” legislation for both software and hardware. Like, if you’ve written code or built hardware (or both) and you’ve sold that to consumers, and you end up dropping support for that thing but the company still exists, you should be legally obligated to provide code and schematics to people that have verifiably purchased it.
The code or schematics doesn’t even have to be freely licensed and distribution could still be restricted, patents still apply and what not, but programmers could develop their own ”patch sets” on top of the proprietary code that can only be used by people who already have the code, extending the lifetime and adding features.
Obviously it’s not perfect but I think it’s a pretty reasonable compromise between companies IP interests and the rights of consumers and fighting e-waste, because the way this is set up today is in my opinion quite absurd. There’s no natural law forcing us to accept planned obsolescence.
I have an iPad Air that I love, made in 2014, last iOS is 12.5. I’d love a slightly more current browser, but the rest of the software is working fine. I spend 6-7 hours using it each day.
And this is a great example of planned obsolescence because Apple does not allow any other browser with its own rendering engine on ios - all browsers on ios are forced to use ios provided browser engine, and thus when they stop updating it, all browsers, even the non-Apple when become "outdated" to. All apps that also use WebViews also become "outdated". (Note that Safari is "bundled" as part of ios and thus stops receiving updates when ios updates stops).
Fascinating. Could this method be used to boot iPhone OS 1.0 (or at least 1.1.1) on an iPhone 2G with 16GB NAND maybe?
The oldest iPhone OS that natively boots on my particular one is 1.1.4, 1.1.1 (which is the highest version number where you can trivially escape the OOBE via the emergency dialer) fails to initialise the FTL (flash translation layer), probably because the chip is sufficiently different from that used in the older phones.
It would bring me great joy to be able to relive emergency dialer hacktivation again, but I have lost that particular iPhone 2G, and only have this 16GB one left.
Yes, we definitely need something like this for the iDevices - it's outrageous that an old but capable device like iPad Air (1st generation) has to become e-Waste simply because Apple has decided not to support it any longer and won't allow other Operating Systems to run on it. Mac's already have the OpenCore Legacy Patcher - https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher - that allow you to run newer macOS versions on older and even unsupported Macs.
Kinda related... I put together a filterable set of apps that are supported on older iOS devices. https://cjstewart88.github.io/vintage/
god i thought ios 12 was old lol
Not sure this would solve much as new iOS would be far too slow for these devices.
Better they allowed installing linux on old devices. But even then it wouldn't move a needle - it's such a niche case.
Maybe some would end up in extremely poor countries, but even there people can afford $30-50 for a brand new computer and Apple rather get those old devices recycled properly.
I just bought an iPad Air 1on Mercari for $25 in mint condition. Handles EPUBs and PDFs like a champ. Battery drains when wifi is turned on. Webkit is horribly out of date, but the kernel says its from 2021? I think webkit was frozen in 2018.
That makes sense, that iPad had 5 years of major OS updates (2013-2018), which included the browser, but Apple provides security updates and critical bug fixes for at least 2 years after major updates end. That model stopped at iOS 12, first released in 2018, which received security updates for an especially long time, 2023.
In that era, Safari added new features, including adding support for web standards, in the major update and in a .1 update about 6 months later, Safari 12.1 came out in March 2019.
It wouldn’t be that big a problem if 3rd party app developers would stop dropping support for older operating systems. This is the thing that truly kills the devices.
Go to the App Store on an iPhone 7 and every app will refuse to install because it requires the latest and greatest OS even though they used to work just fine on the old OS. They deliberately drop support even when they don’t have to. Total shitty behavior.
I gotta throw away my phone because you, Mr. Developer, can’t be bothered to keep the old code around for backward compatibility.
As far as I know, it's not really on the app developers, after a while Apple requires them to switch to a newer "target" build if they want to push out an update. Currently, the minimum target iOS version if you're submitting an app to the app store is iOS 18.
And additionally, even if there once was a compatible version, Apple only lets end users download it if they have previously purchased/downloaded the app.
In my opinion, this is almost fully Apple's fault
You’re conflating target version with minimum supported version.
There aren’t requirements to update the minimum. They’re independent. There might be limitations on what APIs are still available though in Xcode if they’re removed after a deprecation period however.
You can use the latest SDK, and if you don’t use any new APIs, your app will continue to deploy to whatever minimum you have set.
If you want to use the new APIs, you can put their use behind availability checks.
It’s just that at some point, as a dev, you want to stop testing on older devices and you want to stop branching your code for OS versions that are a minuscule fraction of the active user base. The ROI changes quickly.
Xcode occasionally bumps the minimum will compile for without complaint.
Yes, but even with the current latest SDK and latest Xcode, iOS 15 can be set as the minimum supported version.
iOS 15 is like what, 4 years old? it's ridiculously short. (yeah, I know a device running ios 15 was also supported before being updated to that version, but it's still short)
We target older than that and it’s miserable.
Which, importantly means you can support devices back to the iPhone 6S that is a decade old at this point.
I think a lot of people in this thread are mistaking SDK version and minimum supported version.
The App store requires you to link with a minimum SDK version, but the minimum supported version is set independently by the developer in Xcode. The latest version of Xcode + the latest SDK can still support devices running iOS 15. Developers are deliberately choosing to drop such support. Or maybe they just don't know how, as evidenced in this thread.
I'm on iOS 15 and still regularly get updates for a handful of apps. How are they doing it?
Your app must run on iOS 18 but you can drop features to get it to support as old of an iOS as you want.
That’s not true, watch the video here to see why not: https://youtu.be/WXqVV8_GORE
TL;DW
1. you must use current Xcode to submit to the App Store
2. Current Xcode only supports a short list of the most recent iOS SDKs as targets
3. Therefore you can’t make a build with an older Xcode to submit, and you can’t make a build that supports say, iOS 15, with current Xcode.
The video highlights a complete hack which can for now be used to make builds that target older SDKs, but Apple could change their systems to break that at any time, and in fact the latest iOSs don’t use these device support files that he shows are the key to the hack. So while you can do this now for old iOS, when 26 is too outdated for Apple to want you to target, this hack won’t work to bring it back.
No you can
https://developer.apple.com/support/xcode/ the iOS 26 SDK can target iOS 15 or later
Sorry. I meant iOS 14, then
This video was very informative on how Apple deliberately blocks developers’ ability to update an app without removing support for older iOS and an unsupported undocumented workaround the creator has noticed which at least momentarily works to work around it:
https://youtu.be/WXqVV8_GORE
That’s not how that works. Broadly speaking, you compile your app against a selected SDK version. Want to use newer features? You have to use a newer SDK. The SDKs themselves support selected ranges of OSes and don’t go back all the way to the beginning.
If you’re writing an app that targets the newest hardware features, say because you’re making a camera app that uses the latest updates, it’s not going to run on iOS 5. You can’t hold that against app authors, or even against Apple, really. There’s not a lot of return on investment for sinking thousands of dev hours into supporting ancient phones that almost no one uses, and which by definition are more likely to be used by people who won’t spend a dime on apps or services.
It's also worth noting that app stores tend to have a range of SDK versions that they will accept for new uploads. (For iOS apps on the Apple App Store, the minimum is currently the SDK for iOS 18[0], and in April 2026, that will change to a minimum of the SDK for iOS 26[1]).
In some cases (such as with Google Play), app stores will even unpublish apps that were built with old versions of the SDK.
In other words, if you want to update your app at all, you have to stick to the rules that they provide regarding SDK versions.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/?id=0...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/submitting/
I'm not talking about the SDK version, I'm talking about the minimum supported OS version, which is selected by the developer in Xcode. While App Store requires a minimum SDK version, your app using that SDK version is free to target iOS versions all the way back to some limit that Xcode sets, which is currently 15.
I understood what you were saying. I was continuing on from your point that the different SDK versions only support a limited range of devices, by noting that by updating the SDK, the range of devices that your app will work on will be, at a minimum, the minimum supported device for that SDK.
I'm sorry for being unclear.
It's Apple more than developers. Even if an app has an older supported version, you cannot install it outright on older iDevices. You have to "purchase" it first (even if it's free) using old iTunes version or a newer iDevice with the same account, and only then, when you "own" the app, the old iDevice will prompt you to install the older version, if it's supported.
It's actually a requirement by app store connect to use a modern sdk for uploading binaries, and modern sdk versions will often raise the minimum supported ios version, so this is not always the developer's fault. See for example https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/?id=0...
> you, Mr. Developer
Yes, it is I, Mr Developer, that decided that every year the minimum XCode version / SDK Version must be raised
RE ".... won't allow other Operating Systems to run on it...."
How does apple do this ?
By requiring signed firmware and holding the signing keys.
Even if this was overcome (checkra1n) or they provided for bootloader unlocks to run an unsigned firmware, you would still then need to reverse engineer all the drivers. It’s why you don’t see stuff like the original iphone SE’s running different OS.
It would be difficult, but it would at least be possible. See projects like Asahi Linux where they did the work to reverse engineer the drivers for ARM-based Macs.
Asahi started to be developed a couple of months after the first of what would turn out to be the very popular M-chip Macbooks was launched. Those Macbooks are still in people's hands in very large numbers.
Compare that to the number of 1st gen iPads or older iPhones and the demand might not be to the same level to justify the endless reverse engineering effort.
The solution is for the companies to have to open up the device once it's officially not supported.
Or, legally require vendors of general compute devices to provide a common SW-layer with respective documentation, to allow utilization of underlying hardware (not explicitly within the shipped OS, it can also be a separate maintained platform disconnecting the device from the shipped ecosystem).
This would prevent e-waste and put this old hardware to better use. A community OS could then be built on top of this common SW-layer and be maintained for a wider range of devices.
I would e.g. LOVE a "Browser on everything" OS which just provides a Browser OS for outdated hardware, but the only way this could work on scale would be if the device-vendor would be mandated to provide and document the lower layer...
Someone would have to make the economic case for such a regulation as well, i.e. demonstrate the benefit for society and reduction of e-waste if such a law is in place. But the chances for this are razor-thin, especially in today's public/political climate.
The key difference here is iOS becomes a complete brick once the device no longer is supported in the store. We had a gen 1 and 2 iPad and both were just used for Kindle and web surfing but once they pulled safari and apple store they were paperweights.
You need to be on the most recent available minor update.
If the App Store still doesn't work, you can always jailbreak and install apps on your own
Older iPhones/iPads don't have the same longevity as a MacBook, but an iPhone/Ipad sold today could, hardware wise.
A ten-year-old iPad isn’t going to do anything remotely modern, but it’s still just fine for reading books, assuming you have some way to get them onto it. If I were to cobble together a small homepage (weather, reminders, what have you) on an internal server and deliver with unencrypted http, it would do that too.
And I'm sure a lot of that work could be reused for the A-series SoCs.
There is already code to support phone/tablets in asahi/m1n1 bootloader (for use with an exploited bootrom).
An Android port to iPhone hardware does actually exist (for iPhone 7): https://projectsandcastle.org/
Obviously not everything works, but someone did try.
sadly apple silicon and Tahoe may have delivered a knockout punch to the future of oclp. the dortania team has said apple silicon support is more or less out of the question at this point. with Tahoe ushering in the first large batch of deprecated intel machines with the t2 chip, it’s tbd if dortania will be able to ship something to get them to Tahoe. sad days and may soon mean we’re having the same convo about older Mac’s as we are about old iPhones and iPads.
True. But there's also the plus side - Intel Macs allowed us to run multiple OSes and that was a very desirable feature that was part of its attraction. With ARM Macs, this attraction is truly gone (even if Apple fans taut its ability to run a crippled Linux). So, many will no longer buy any ARM Macs at all. That's Apple's loss. As soon as the battery of my old iPad also conks out, I plan to buy an Android tablet with an unlocked bootloader - I am never buying a locked device that infringes on my rights, ever.
Yep, that's the major problem with Apple hardware nowadays. It is very good in term of quality (at least if you don't need too much RAM of storage) but for the price you are entirely at the mercy of Apple for long term support. And recent Apple behavior has shown that they drop support on cue, regardless of the actual capacity of the device. I think they have actually become way more aggressive in that regard to boost sales, because the reality is that recent progress isn't really relevant to most people. Without forced deprecation, many would use their device almost indefinitely.
It cannot be a good deal to buy an expensive device that is guaranteed complete deprecation in a 7 year window (and very likely to suffer some major annoyance at the 5 years mark).
If you buy an equally expensive Android device (or Windows PC), because the model is different, you'll fare much better. And the reality is that at equal characteristics/performance the Android/PC version is generally quite cheaper.
Apple aficionados will rave about the build quality and ecosystem but I think they are irrelevant (most of the ecosystem advantages are to be found in the alternate world) and the devices feel more premium than they are actually qualitative (in fact they are very fragile in many ways).
They are surfing the Apple Silicon wave but as their efficiency lead is shrinking it will lose relevance/power.
I don't understand that. 98% of devices over 15 years old have either died of old age or are completely obsolete. Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.
They did the same for the iPad Pro. My kid is using the hand-me-down of my mother (so from grandmother to granddaughter). I put a case on it to protect against bumps, protect screen (has a couple of burn-in marks but it is still very usable) and put tape on top of the camera (the mics likely still work). I also put it on my IoT VLAN. She uses it for YouTube Kids and Disney+, mainly, but schooldays it is limited to 15 min a day and weekend days (fri and sat) to 1 hr. After that, she needs to ask for more time. Usually we don't give that, although in vacations we are lenient. The device still works very well, although the battery (still same as in 2017 or so when it was bought new) is a lil' bit hammered. Now here's the thing: is this device not overkill for the tasks I mentioned? I think so, yes. A kid her age (almost 8) would be happy with whatever, it could be 480p and they're cool with it, as long as the software is still secure (and don't give me the BS of 'don't give them a tablet'; it is locked down and my first shared PC was in like 1989 when I was about her age). And sadly, Apple doesn't want to provide software updates for this device anymore. Microsoft not either, btw, as they deprecated Windows 10 and Windows 11 requires TPMv2 (though Windows is more about PCs and laptops, I'm not sure if there's any effect on Surface hardware). I believe companies can do better, but if they don't want to, they should unlock the bootloader and give the user free reign on the device. You quit support, you unlock the hardware, or else you're violating the local law. That'd be my preference.
Id vote for that law.
Absolutely, me as well. I think the key here is that Apple is selling a platform that is used for a multitude of purposes, often including running software from third party developers. If you’re selling a platform device in large numbers you should have the choice codified by law of either continuing software support to some degree or releasing an unlock kit for it. You should not have the option of effectively abandoning and bricking it, if that’s the route you must go the buyer should get the option of a full purchase price refund at that point in time.
It's the larger point. A device with a 64-bit SoC, higher-than-HD display, battery, gigabytes of RAM and storage being consigned to landfill is bonkers.
>It's the larger point. A device with a 64-bit SoC, higher-than-HD display, battery, gigabytes of RAM and storage being consigned to landfill is bonkers.
That's not a high bar to clear. Who's realistically going to use a laptop/desktop with a Core 2 Duo (2006), for instance?
You're going to think my answer is bizarre, but those kind of underpowered devices would be ideal for office work or non-IT businesses in general. They need computers to do the same things as they needed 15 or 20 years ago. Writing documents, spreadsheets, taking inventory, sending and receiving e-mail.
No, your idea is perfectly rational. Somebody I know consulted me on what kind of computers to buy for their new small business that would only be used for browsing, email, word processing. I found them a store that sold used Dell and HP workstations. They got 3 Dell machines (CPU + Monitor + Keyboard + Mouse), all Intel Core i5 with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD with Windows 7 Pro, for $75 / each. We spent an additional $25 to purchase a cheap 128 GB SSD and installed Linux (LMDE), Firefox, LibreOffice and GNU Cash on it. (Preserved Windows Dual boot option, just in case they needed Windows for something). This was 2+ years ago and the owner was so happy that I reduced his IT hardware budget by a quarter. I recently purchased a used HP 25" monitor from Craigslist, for $60, in excellent condition and still having a year warranty on it, whose retail price was around $500 on launch. There is so much e-waste being produced ...
It's the same as with cars - companies want brand new because then you get a full warranty and theoretically you don't need to worry about it. So that $400 you saved would be spent in IT support for your old failing hardware.
But the thing is.....old PCs are really not that unreliable. If they survived the last 5-10 years then they are probably still chugging along just fine and for a small business there is literally nothing wrong with using them.
Well except the software.
OP said they got a bunch of computers, wiped them and installed Linux and LibreOffice on them - in which case the software is not a problem.
What about the software?
> Writing documents, spreadsheets, taking inventory, sending and receiving e-mail.
Well... Outlook is already a web app, the rest of the Office suite will follow rather sooner than later, and inventory - it's either web apps or SAP, both memory hogs.
But not all businesses need to use the latest versions of Microsoft Office. They might not even need to use Microsoft Office at all. iPads come with a stock e-mail application, as well as word processing and spreadsheets etc. And if you're using old PCs, you can use old versions of Office. Or WordPad and an e-mail client. They are light-weight.
You are thinking of big businesses, where as I was talking about Micro and Small businesses (in India). They don't even use Outlook today. For them email means Gmail, and even its use is declining as most business communication in India is done over WhatsApp!
With lightweight , efficient , non bloated software it is entirely possible ? Start with a efficient OS
>>Who's realistically going to use a laptop/desktop with a Core 2 Duo (2006), for instance?
I was literally still using a Core2Duo Macbook Pro as a kitchen laptop just for looking up recipes and watching youtube videos etc until last year. Worked absolutely fine until Chrome decided that it's not going to update itself anymore and since I'm on an old version of chrome I can't use google sync. That's what killed it for me - the hardware itself was still perfectly functional.
I still use a C2D laptop running Linux for some things.
I was ripping CDs with a Core 2 Duo Macbook a couple weeks ago lol (running Linux)
Thinpkad owners/modders, probably.
Because your made up stat is false because you lump a real problem (died of old age) with a fake one (completely obsolete)
> Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.
Used by a tiny percentage only because Apple has made it as difficult as possible to not upgrade, which is especially egregious precisely because their devices are long-lasting.
(This comment brought to you via a perfectly functioning iPhone 8 running the latest possible iOS that supports it.)
> I don't understand that. 98% of devices over 15 years old have either died of old age or are completely obsolete. Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.
This comment gave me whiplash
I am typing this from my 2009 Win7 PC I use for older Windows games...
Huh?
RE "....I am typing this from my 2009 Win7 PC...."
Ssssshhhh ..... Microsoft does not want people to hear this .....
HN is biased towards the sort of people who keep computers from 2009 to play with and wish they could get more use out of their 12 year old iPad Air. That's great, but it's simply not a thing for most people so i don't see how it significantly reduce ewaste.
If mobile devices would routinely last twenty years, which they very well could, that would reduce a lot of e-waste. Software getting more demanding is also a function of hardware churn.
It’s sad that hardware outlasts software. You’d expect the opposite.
> If mobile devices would routinely last twenty years, which they very well could, that would reduce a lot of e-waste.
Unfortunately, battery technology doesn't - and even if we had long lasting batteries, we'd also need fall-resistant screens. And no matter what, even if you have a device held together by screws and allowing easy repair instead of messing around with glue and click-tabs... screens still are really expensive, making it often enough more worthwhile to take the opportunity and upgrade the whole device rather than to repair the screen.
Batteries are easily replacable. LCD can last a long time, my main desktop monitor is 18 years old at this point. OLED less so, admittedly.
> Batteries are easily replacable.
Not in most phones. You always have to mess with glue and unless you take extreme care and caution to remove _all_ pieces of it you will end up with compromised water-tightness, not to mention risking the screen cracking or being exposed to air (ruining OLEDs).
> my main desktop monitor
We were talking about phones. Phones get dropped, scratched by keys, ... the list why phone LCDs/OLEDs can get broken is loooong.
How did it vote in this election?
You clearly haven't met a lot of your average PC or phone user then. Most people don't care about getting the newest and best thing. If a thing still works, they'll use it until it doesn't anymore, however long that is. You have no idea the kinds of PCs I saw people using when I worked as a technician. People just don't have an interest in getting new tech unless they're forced to, because they largely aren't interested in tech. They're interested in document processing, watching videos, listening to music and dealing with their pictures. And they don't care how old the device is they're doing it on.
In addition, they don't want to spend money on it. They'd rather spend money on things they actually care about. Festivals, clubs, vacations, a new TV, a car, restaurants, whatever. Your average non-tech person is happy if they don't have to spend anything on gadgets for 10 years.
My mum was still happily on some 8 year old iphone, I'm not even sure which one that was, and then got really annoyed that she had to upgrade just because her banking apps stopped updating and wouldn't log in anymore. It's just pure and complete e-waste.
The average salary in the USA is still $66k. You're living in a bubble to think people don't want to get more time out of their family's iOS devices.
The iOS ecosystem graduated to status symbol for many, $66k average salary doesn’t really matter when society will just take whatever carrier trade in deal they can use to status up.
Yeah, many people don't see "this phone costs $1099" but "I need to pay $60 a month".
Which is not how I spend my money -- I have always purchased unlocked phones when they are on sale -- but there are too few of us.
>You're living in a bubble to think people don't want to get more time out of their family's iOS devices.
No, at least for Apple devices, the overwhelming majority are replaced before they reach EOL. According to https://telemetrydeck.com/survey/apple/iPhone/models/, only around 25% of people are using iPhones that were released more than 3 years ago.
So only ~35 million people?
Maybe more people aren't running older hardware because it's too difficult, rather than because they don't want to. The basic idea is here is taht if a device can still hold a charge and the user is OK with limited features, they should be able to keep using it as long as they feel like it.
>So only ~35 million people?
Citing large absolute numbers for rhetorical effect is dishonest because multiplying a huge number with any percentage will result in a shockingly large number. The original claim is that "people who keep computers from 2009 to play with and wish they could get more use out of their 12 year old iPad Air [...] it's simply not a thing for most people", which is true even, if there are millions in absolute terms.
Ahh the good ole days.
The PC ecosystem is the exception to the rule. 20 year lifetimes are typical, but in the smartphone world 10 years is treated as an impossibility. It is all disposable by design
I'm not sure about today's conventions, but it used to be that every component inside a car had a minimum standard of 10-year-life. The Toyota Landcruiser famously had a minimum 25-year-life for each and every single component. I have worked closely with some older Toyota engineers in Japan. It is possible but not conventional.
I am running the latest LineageOS on my OnePlus 5, which is eight years old. I intend to be using it for some time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnePlus_5
I think this kind of comment represents a little bit of denial about e-waste.
You call it “old but capable” but it’s really more close to just “old.”
We really want tech to be less disposable but the problem is that tech is still progressing fast.
Automobiles have barely changed in the past few decades as a fundamental concept and in general capability and road-worthiness and that’s why you see a lot of 20-30 year old examples on the road.
But imagine that buying a 2000 Volkswagen Jetta meant a car that had a 20 horsepower engine that gets 20mpg. That’s what old tech devices are often like. Sure, you can use it as a glorified gas-guzzling golf cart, but not many people need that and they’d rather just get a golf cart if they do.
A 2013 iPad Air is not going to be a very usable experience as the device was originally intended even if you get suitably lean software on it.
This is a dual core device with 1GB of RAM. At this point it can barely browse the web in an acceptably performant way. We can lament our inefficient web apps and fuss and moan but if grandma can’t get her slippers from Amazon without waiting half a century for the page to load it’s not a useful device anymore.
Sure, you can use it as a server or something, or maybe some kind of smart display, it would work fine. But let’s go back to the golf cart analogy: presumably the original XX million units that were sold can’t all be web servers or smart home screens. The quantity of people who originally bought them for the original mainstream purpose have moved on to something newer and aren’t looking for a niche secondary use case. You have to be a very specific person to try to fit that square peg into a round hole.
I have been a user of the OpenCore Legacy patcher. I bought a 2012 Mac mini, excited that I could use it as a Mac server with the latest OS. The experience was sluggish at best even with a brand new SSD installed and RAM maxed out. I also had random kernel panics that I couldn’t resolve. So I ditched the Mac server idea and installed Linux. I went with that for a while but it turned out to have insufficient single core performance for my applications. The architecture also couldn’t accept more RAM even if I found higher capacity sticks, the technology was completely at the limits. I ended up selling it and built a server with much newer (but still mostly used) parts instead.
The calculus for reuse gets even worse if you start thinking about performance per watt and energy efficiency. There are some devices especially in the desktop category where you get to 15 years old and you have a real legitimate “I’ll save more energy and cost on my power bill” argument.
E.g., Let’s say I own an AMD FX 9590 (2013) with its 220W TDP, I can replace that with an Intel N355 15W embedded class chip and it’ll be faster by a double digit percentage with the same number of threads. I know this is an extreme example but it’s still a demonstrator in the amount the technology has changed.
This would be like if my 2013 Toyota got 2mpg.
I think we need to be more pragmatic and accept these devices for what they are: a temporarily owned thing, almost like a lease. They aren’t all that different than buying some fast food that comes in disposable packaging, the difference is the time scale. Once you’ve eaten it, you’ve consumed it, and it’s over. There’s maybe a bit of material you can recover at the end, let’s call it 10%. And we have to grapple with that reality rather than pretending we can fully change it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to argue against right to repair. Yes, they should have things like replaceable components and a requirement to become more open as they age. They should be designed to be as usable as possible when they become older. At the same time, we should be pragmatic and accept that the most likely scenario is that a device like a 2013 iPad Air will still only see 5-10% of buyers reusing the device in this way rather than sending it to the bin even in the most ideal scenarios. Of course, that number is a lot better than some smaller number like 1-5%, with many iPads being thrown out as soon as the battery swells.
I second this.
A bit of OT, but I have four iPhone 5/5s/SE (the SE is peak design and form factor, fight me) lying around that I use strictly as offline devices for things like saving data from my heart rate monitor, controlling my action camera, doing voice/field recordings through the 3.5mm connector – stuff I'd prefer never to leave my device (or data that should be open to user control but requires an invasive app to work, I have very few apps on my daily driver).
These devices are are small, snappy and powerful enough in 2025.
I am going farther offtopic, too. I have removed the radio on Samsung Galaxy IV device† and they still work. I don't know if that is possible for iphones, just throwing it here.
† I don't have the skills to reverse the process, though :)
I joined Apple at the start of my career when iOS 6 and Snow Leopard were the active projects. I had to learn all of this. I’ve since forgot but this post was a wonderful bit of proprietary OS jargon and trivia nostalgia for me.
All of that is cool, but can this help get iOS 18 back on supported devices that have upgraded to 26? That'd be magical.
26 (Tahoe) has had a lot of teething problems on ALL platforms, and lacks the typical quality and polish of Apple releases. I couldn't believe how many obvious bugs there were on first use across Macbook and iPhone.
Seconding this simply for data purposes. iOS 26 was the worst release I've ever dealt with coming from an iPhone 4S user to present. Goddamn there were so many obvious bugs and flaws. The .1 release fixed some of them but my keyboard still randomly shifts to the left by a few pixels every time it opens.
Take me back to the days where things were governed by UX and not revenue.
Probably need a lawsuit in the EU before they allow downgrading OS. I would love to get my old phones to iOS 16 to jailbreak it.
Well, I wanted to revert and wanted a new phone, so bought an iPhone 16 instead of a 17, which comes with iOS 18 installed. iCloud data synced in fine, and the 17 is a very small upgrade anyway, even a downgrade in some ways.
Sadly not, those devices don’t have an exploit afaik
I wonder if liquid glass will push people to jailbreak 18 and 26.
I just hope Apple will fast track a UX update... but they probably won't, due to sunk cost fallacy, and the market and design trends will follow them.
This happens every time, a redesign comes out and people hate it. Same when iOS flat design came out. I dug into the archives, because HN has been around for a while now so we can do that, yay!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5869121
(hand picking / editing comments freely because I can)
> I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.
> I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process.
> Look at his iMessage screen comparison [1]: yes, the old screen looks a bit geocities, but you can actually read text very well; the new screen is almost unreadable. The prime aim of iMessage is to make people read text, not to look cool.
> [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgemmell/9023510971/
> Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks this is going to kill usability. The reason old people can figure their way around <=iOS6 is that everything that can be tapped looks like a button. A more "mature" audience isn't what apple's good at appealing to.
> I'm volunteering at a center that teaches senior citizens various computer skills. One of the courses we teach is on how to use their iPhones. I'm dreading the moment that iOS7 is released: all of these people are going to have to start right back at the beginning in their understanding.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5856398
---
I'm fairly sure I read the thread I'm quoting from at the time because all of these arguments are still fairly fresh in my head.
I feel like there should be ”abandonware” legislation for both software and hardware. Like, if you’ve written code or built hardware (or both) and you’ve sold that to consumers, and you end up dropping support for that thing but the company still exists, you should be legally obligated to provide code and schematics to people that have verifiably purchased it.
The code or schematics doesn’t even have to be freely licensed and distribution could still be restricted, patents still apply and what not, but programmers could develop their own ”patch sets” on top of the proprietary code that can only be used by people who already have the code, extending the lifetime and adding features.
Obviously it’s not perfect but I think it’s a pretty reasonable compromise between companies IP interests and the rights of consumers and fighting e-waste, because the way this is set up today is in my opinion quite absurd. There’s no natural law forcing us to accept planned obsolescence.
I have an iPad Air that I love, made in 2014, last iOS is 12.5. I’d love a slightly more current browser, but the rest of the software is working fine. I spend 6-7 hours using it each day.
Just a browser is all I want.
And this is a great example of planned obsolescence because Apple does not allow any other browser with its own rendering engine on ios - all browsers on ios are forced to use ios provided browser engine, and thus when they stop updating it, all browsers, even the non-Apple when become "outdated" to. All apps that also use WebViews also become "outdated". (Note that Safari is "bundled" as part of ios and thus stops receiving updates when ios updates stops).
Strangely enough they updated the kernel to one in 2021.
Any such unexpected updates they offer is often out of self-interest, often to patch and prevent some kind of jailbreak.
Interesting article. Minor correction:
It prepends "--bundle-id ".It's a shame there isn't something like Lineage OS for Apple mobile devices.
The blame is on Apple, that I hate as much as any other company that locks their bootloader.
Fascinating. Could this method be used to boot iPhone OS 1.0 (or at least 1.1.1) on an iPhone 2G with 16GB NAND maybe?
The oldest iPhone OS that natively boots on my particular one is 1.1.4, 1.1.1 (which is the highest version number where you can trivially escape the OOBE via the emergency dialer) fails to initialise the FTL (flash translation layer), probably because the chip is sufficiently different from that used in the older phones.
It would bring me great joy to be able to relive emergency dialer hacktivation again, but I have lost that particular iPhone 2G, and only have this 16GB one left.
Really the command to strip a “fat header” is called “lipo”…
lmao
Would be cool if companies are forced to open the devices that they aren't supporting anymore.
Writing this from an iPhone 8 (no sec updates anymore) and I am not feeling good about it…
The last update for iPhone 8 was iOS 16.7.12 on 15 Sep 2025
I have an old iPad Air 1. Can I upgrade to a newer OS from 12?
Good work this is.