For me that’s a great example. I personally know many old (even obsolete iPads) lying here and there collecting dust, as their software (and hardware) vendor decided they are all in for nature and ecology (sarcasm), so let millions of perfectly capable devices would be thrown away as a trash.
Eyeing some Android tablet for that, the one I can flash with Lineage OS and be happy with. Maybe Google’s Pixel C or even Nexus 7.
Meanwhile we continue using the iPad unlogginned till it stop working.
This sadly limits the options to less than let's say 10 devices. For now I am still using my 10 years old T440p because it's the last generation laptop that can both run coreboot and is still repairable (and it survived all the Ultrabooks I mentioned before. WTF?). But it's too old for Vulkan because there is no Haswell support. It was the perfect laptop until around 2020 when Vulkan was rolled out. Can forget games that ran before that now, because of mesa dropping support for it.
The framework will very likely be my next laptop if the current one dies, but only time will tell if the promise is worth the price.
Fairphone 2/3 are kinda useless as an ideology if there are no replacement parts available 12 months after the phone came out...so yeah, I got also two broken Fairphones I cannot repair for the moment because the bottom module isn't available anywhere.
I kinda refuse to buy a full phone just for spare parts because I can do that with literally every other cheap Chinese Android phone.
With the T440p there's no working new mint condition batteries available and only used ones that have less than 60% capacity when you buy them, so I am currently trying to design a battery case that can use 18650 cells directly without soldering. Takes a lot of time to iterate, and very hard to print with a cheap 3d printer.
I think I am way too stubborn for this world, given the amount of time I spend on fixing my old hardware.
This really infuriates me because we (iOS developers) were all forced to see how it was happening. If you want to stay in the game, you have to develop for the newest devices, In order to do so, you need to upgrade your Xcode. In order to do so, you have to periodically upgrade your mac. And this is more or less fine. But at the same time newer xcode drops support for older yet perfectly functioning devices.
What can you do? Keep older macs with older xcode versions and at least be able to develop solutions for your own devices. But this is not a solution, it doesn't solve anything really, and it wouldn't help much in your kitchen example.
Even if you don't care, you have to upgrade to the latest Xcode to build against the latest iOS version with the cascade of consequences you described so well.
Even better, I would very much like installing some Linux mobile distro on it.
It's limited but perfectly fine hardware with a good screen and impressive battery time. If only the software were any good.
Also:
- Yes, I know there's no sim card in it.
- no, I won't log in to iBooks, this is a freaking PDF viewer for me.
Every restart.
Linux mobile software is flawed by accident. iOS is flawed by decision and I can't rebuild and fix it.
My wife is Ukrainian and we do live in Ukraine. And hadn’t left, as our city is relatively safe from missile and drones attacks. But the winter was harsh and we had extreme blackouts last winter. We could have from days (at worst) to hours (at best) without any electricity and internet connection. I bought top of the line MacBook Pro 16 with M2, just to do my work, which involves heavy renders quite often. Also we have a generator and a huge battery pack that can power some critical devices up to a day.
Still, given all that, the iPad saved our winter, as we could download offline most of the various content and almost never its battery was depleted during those blackouts. This tablet ($30 on a used market) and a $4K laptop were two devices that held its battery basically without need to be recharged either from generator or the battery pack.
Now Apple and Google tell me I have to retire the tablet just because. Also, I have an obsolete 10” Intel Atom netbook somewhat 5 years older than this iPad (ca. 2007–2008), and it runs fresh Arch Linux with the latest Firefox. Its battery is dead, but I know I can replace the cells, when needed. It can run many of my tasks, has an HDMI port and 4 GB of RAM. And is perfectly usable in many cases. But the iPad that could run rounds across the netbook, if allowed to remove all the bloat and update what’s needed— well, you know. You better buy a new one to watch YouTube and your precious local content.
The YouTube iOS app stopped working a while ago, I suppose the backend API changed.
But YouTube still works via Safari on the iPad 4.
I generally keep JavaScript turned off in Safari on that old tablet; I think it's a RAM limitation but it could simply be that the JavaScript version is too old. Many sites just don't work. But with JavaScript enabled, YouTube still does fine.
We had two, and both batteries are dead. No longer charging at all.
Additionally, even before the batteries went, video playback was far from great at the end.
I used NewPipe for youtube videos and VLC for downloads. And while once playing, it worked fine enough, the UI interactions were frustrating because of lacking responsiveness, and the 7 inch thick bezelled form factor made it hard to watch anything without holding the device in front of you.
We've since switched to a couple of cheap 10" tablets and they provide a much nicer experience.
And it plays local H264 720p very well, usually. However, for us 480p is plenty most of the time.
It's really annoying though. The watch ticks, but it was built with features that the developer decides it can't support anymore after a few years. I found the Android version outside the google play store and I decompiled it to find the problem she described, which is a seemingly frivolous login feature (to WeChat login service! why?!? I think all Fossil watches in the past few years do this) to control the watch. I might make it a project to fix it one day.
I almost went down the path of buying a panel heater with an app - but, as a rule, no source (free to view, free to modify), no buy.
Talking about iPads, we have one, an iPad mini, that is just an alarm clock now. It's useless otherwise.
One of the things I like about Samsung tablets is that they have a "Battery saver" feature where you can restrict it from charging the battery past 85%, which is a generally good move if your tablet is going to be permanently plugged into power and used as some sort of fixed display.
I've had MANY brand name devices with lithium batteries bulge when left constantly plugged in at 100% battery for months and don't want to risk an explosion.
So I see ads (even videos!) instead of my simple html page, or on top of it. It's terrible!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MS6I0HQ/
This short USB power cable
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B092KF36T6/
This wall switch to tap USB power out of a wall switch box so there would be no visible dangling wires. This will only work if your apartment has neutral wires in the switch boxes. Older apartments often don't have them
