I remember being in an IRC regularly 10-12 years ago where there was a community that was semi-active about a project to port android to the iPhone created by David Wang (planetbeing). There were a few builds going around at the time which I tried out. This video had gone somewhat viral at the time which is what sparked my interest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJj0kHQgC9w. It seems like that project eventually became "Project Sandcastle" and the whole topic has seen some kind of recent resurgence from the looks of it.
It was ugly for the longest time but ahead on several features. I remember the iPhone not having copy and paste for what felt like ages. A lot of the good stuff was on Cydia.
Odd how the tables have turned. Copy-paste is ubiquitous on iOS nowadays, but pretty absent on Android. On Android, I haven't come across a single application that supports copying an image. It's infuriating.
Flutter doesn't even support pasting images at all (so things like messaging apps can't support pasting images). I get an impression that Google/Android want copy-paste to disappear. My favourite conspiracy theory on this is that it's so people will have to use the "share" sheet, which shares links with tracking/analytics (rather than pasting a raw image which cannot be tracked).
I suspect you're being downvoted because there are people who are too young/don't remember that there were a number of games available for the iPod from big gaming companies. Yes, the clickwheel iPod.
The 17-year-old iPod Video cranking out tunes on my desk right now has a really good version of Tetris on it, and one of the best ports of Ms. Pac-Man ever. Once you get used to navigating the maze with the wheel, it's a great game.
In the video he browses to an old website (http://galiaxy.net/), and it displays a design website from Alisa. Is "Alisa" the same as Alyssa Rosenzweig from Asahi? That would be an interesting coincidence :)
I'm so excited. I want to use an old Ipad that has a failing battery as a home automation screen.
Poor iOS APIs mean developers can't create good kiosk apps to do simple things like control system settings, lock screen and so many more things that I resorted to an Android tablet.
This is finally going to make it possible and turn junk into gold.
A web app that is added to the home screen will do what you want. Create a simple web app (or use someone else's) then in safari click the share button and "Add To Homescreen". Boom, you have a full screen app experience with no App Store. It's not a kiosk as you can press the home button to exit but if it's for your own use that should be fine.
> This is finally going to make it possible and turn junk into gold.
I am also hopeful, but last week when I checked the compatibility matrix, my 3rd generation A5 iPad was "wayyy" too old and not supported. Only A7 chips or newer, iirc.
Why does this have to be so hard? Just open your shit up, Apple. The majority of people will still use your walled garden. The rest of us will buy your hardware if you release drivers, etc.
As long as they don't maliciously comply, that would start a renaissance period, in my opinion. Suddenly, they'd be the good guys, instead of the worst offenders.
Everyone who wants to use the pure apple system can, everyone who wants to tinker can. Perfect world.
It is not perfect in the sense once the fence is off those who just want to be in walled garden and pay big money for it is not.
There is no perfect world for all. There could be a perfect world for each one. That is a difference. And yours may not be mine.
Just ask someone to compete with apple and get to the same level. Not killing one perfect world for many (most likely not really reader here it seemed) without creating a better tomorrow.
If you just think of tinker, before you know it china will take over say … or Russia … and we will have cheap but et-phone-home before you have a choice. Btw apple is dead. Cry your beloved apple then? No.
Ps. Just in case of doubt I hack my iphone and iPads if I can to do other things. It is my old device that is ignored … but not for all.
We already have this on Macbooks/Macs. macOS has SIP (System Integrity Protection) for example which you (Developers) can turn off to get full access. The average person does not even know this setting exists.
So the solution is quite simple.
I'm afraid Apple will frustrate the process though; Like, if you turn off "SIP" on iOS, they will disable Apple Pay, everything related to DRM videos (including Netflix, etc), DRM music (including Spotify, etc.), all App Store purchases, and so on.
Even though android is more open, it's not exactly in much better shape. It's nearly impossible to do anything useful with mainline Linux on most Android devices because the SoC vendors don't upstream anything since their entire financial model is sell new chip every 6 months.
The problem is that they're both way behind the state of the art.
If the day to day experience of the device is still bad I'm not going to be carrying one on me. It gets relegated to yet another thing I can tinker with on the weekend, just like my pinebook pro.
It depends on the perspective. If you're concerned about security fixes and people being able to submit patches for the broken shit drivers manufacturers provide, then we still need the source and relevant schematics.
Of course if all you care about is "it boots" then having a binary blob lying around and doing god knows what with your entire computing is a "viable" option.
Not so long ago hardware vendors sold hardware and provided all schematics along... because that's what hardware manufacturers are for?! Nowadays they're more like a service provider trying to lock you into weird things and it's certainly not for the benefit of us users and maintainers. I think the issue was explained at length in this blog post called "Ok lenovo we need to talk":
I don't know anything about these. But would opening up iPhone make it easier for authoritarian governments like China to install backdoors on your iPhone?
From a theoretical point of view, relying on security through obscurity is a bad thing. From a practical point of view, having obscured everything did not prevent people from finding many security vulnerabilities over the years.
Now, Apple devices are all manufactured in China so the relevant security services probably have access to all the schematics they need. Oh wait they don't need any shenanigans Apple is fully cooperating with chinese government and that's why they're so present on the chinese market, woops.
Slightly off-topic from the question, but if you're looking for authoritarian governments you don't need to look so far away from home, see also CoIntelPro/Snowden/etc (assuming you're from the USA). I agree authoritarianism and social control are a scale and we could do worse than Global North countries like France or USA, but we still have a pretty bad record of human rights overall and that should not be dismissed.
As someone who owns an OG iPad 1, the benefit of potentially being able to run Linux on it is I already have an old iPad but I don't have a rooted Android tablet. Currently, due to Apple refusing to support it with software updates, and providing no other means for me to update it myself, the iPad is kind of useless.
I am so stoked on these recent developments. I have piles of useless iPhones and I know people that have huge stashes. I can't wait to waste months trying to get the lidar working on something. It really disgusts me that old phones are bricked. Getting a high powered SBC with an actual 5G modem alone is amazing.
While only semi-related, this reminds me a lot of iPodLinux, a project from around 2006/2007. I'm on the younger side, and this project was my first real introduction to the possibilities of computing. It let my grayscale iPod Classic play videos and Doom, which at the time, was mindblowing to me and my middle school classmates. In the process I was fortunate enough to actually learn a thing or two about Linux and computers in general.
While they're not always the most practical, they can definitely encourage the hacker ethos in people who wonder what their devices can do that Apple might hide outside their walled garden.
Same! iPodLinux was my introduction to Embedded Systems, and that's now my actual job :-)
I was only a teenager at the time as well, yet read the whole forum as a moderator. It was always fascinating to learn what new hacks people had made to let the iPod do everything it's capable of!
It's so nice to see Linux becoming available for the iPhone and iPad too.
Now the iPod is discontinued, I wish Apple would release its intellectual property (schematics, board views), so I can repair the old ones. The screen's a bit glitchy on my 1st gen, and I'm not sure how to fix it.
Oh man, the iPodLinux project was the first thing I ever compiled. It took me so long to figure out how to do it, as I was typing Unix commands in Windows and it wasn't working. Best time ever as a smelly teenager pretending to hack stuff.
iPodLinux (and the semi-related iPodWizard and iPodWiki projects) were some of the best years of my childhood. I loved all the time I spent customizing my iPod and helping others do the same.
Others have already spoken about this amazing achievement so I’m not going to repeat it, but I will say that the flashing cursor animation in the nav bar is horribly distracting whilst reading, if author reads this, please consider removing it.
Running a chunk of Android userspace on top of the Darwin kernel feels like a better idea if you want Android on an iPhone. You'll have to shim Android APIs to iOS ones and implement an ELF loader/linker for apps that use native libraries, but that's it. Should also be portable across all (jailbreakable) devices.
I think you underestimate this quite a bit. Even running android things on desktop linux would be a feat since the android kernel has several significant android-specific additions such as binder IPC. And even the user-space android API surface is vast
Uh, ELF is the least of your concerns. I imagine there are native libraries making Linux syscalls.
I’ve been toying with ideas about similar approaches to get alternative/updated OS’s on iDevices — use stock kernel for all its device drivers for the proprietary HW, then put a VM on top running Linux or whatever. Sadly I don’t think I’ll have the time for such an ambitious project.
>How could we benefit from having Linux on old iDevices?
On old devices that do not get updates your internet will stop working because of old browser, missing SSL certificates or old libraries. With Linux you might get an updated browser and you could use the device to browse things and you can do whatever your mind can imagine like maybe write a simple bash/python script to automate something.
I just retired an iPhone5 that we were using as a "house controller", streaming Pandora, home automation app, etc. I retired it not because the software stopped working but because the battery won't last more than 30 minutes off the charger, and I had an iPhone8 sitting around doing nothing.
IMO an iPhone with linux is going to be less of "do whatever your mind can imagine" and more of "spend countless time trying to hack random stuff into this unsupported platform".
Overall, I think it is cool achievement, but (to me), it feels more along the lines of solution looking for a problem than an actual truly useful thing.
So this is not for you or people like you, could be a solution for poor people, all my computing devices were old second hand stuff ntill I had a good job to afford some new average PC. Android devices also suffer from this issue, some where some stuff gets outdated and many webpages or apps will not longer work for you because of security reasons forcing you to get a new device.
>IMO an iPhone with linux is going to be less of "do whatever your mind can imagine" and more of "spend countless time trying to hack random stuff into this unsupported platform".
That does not generalize, sure you can't imagine what you could use a device like that and the freedom but others can. On my Linux desktop I have a one line script that will speak the time to me every 15 minutes (I need it) or I have a script that when I press a button it will OCR the screen and read it to me. Sure 99% of people will buy an app that might do a similar thing or just give up BUT people like me just think "would be cool if this would work and we do it".
And don't try to accuse me that it took me 12 hours to make a button to OCR my screen or other bullshit accusations, you can spend 5 minutes googling what package does a screen grab, what package does OCR from image, then you combine the 2 packages and done , 5 minutes and I had hours saved and sometimes made impossible stuff possible .
Plenty of end of life uses work just fine living off of a charger. For instance, setting up an old iPad or iPhone as a home hub (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207057) requires the device stay plugged in already. I can imagine plenty of cases where an old phone could be a suitable substitute or even an upgrade over a Raspberry Pi (Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Spotify hookup for an old home stereo, etc.).
A somewhat newish iPhone would be more powerful than the raspberry pi. And I have got good use out of the pi for hosting game servers for small numbers of users. You can also get old apple devices way cheaper than new equivalent single board computers.
And the iPhone has a built-in touch screen, wifi, bluetooth, two cameras, internal storage, a GPU, a bunch of sensors, a giant battery, physical buttons, speakers, microphone, a giant market for third-party peripherals, cases, chargers, mounts, etc...AND it's way easier to get your hands on an iPhone (especially an old one) than a Raspberry Pi today.
Sure, getting everything to work in a Linux port wouldn't be easy, but it does clearly show the value of such a thing.
I wonder about the implications of running them in an "always-on" configuration. Would it be possible to remove the battery and run them entirely on AC power? If you could do that, you might be able to have some pretty nice low-power home servers.
If you just want a server, you can use an android phone already. Either pick one that works with postmarketOS, or termux could work fine (I don't know the overhead of that though). No point in using an iPhone here.
Assuming they're ok with being kept on 24/7, they could become IoT terminals. A 10 years old phone should still have enough horsepower if it contained the bare minimum to load just one program that speaks to the home network, or a mpd remote to play music in the given room, communicate through VoIP with other terminals, etc.
They could be used also in a lab to show data coming from instrumentation, as secondary display for servers etc. Plenty of uses; the only limitation being represented by the roadblocks (binary blobs, lack of documentation, closed drivers etc.) corporations put in place to prevent any further use of those devices that goes beyond what they have planned.
I removed the battery cell from a Samsung battery and powered the battery IC with the nominal DC cell voltage from a power supply.
The phone then indefinitely showed a full battery.
This might also work with an iphone
I've thought of using older Pixel phones for something like this. One annoying downside is that the Pixel devices do not tend to have an easy way to enable hdmi out.
And as a bonus they come with GPS, compasses, accelerometers, and of course network connectivity, out of the box (if you can figure out how to access them, anyway).
Its good for devices that stopped receiving iOS security updates, or for doing weird things that you can't do with iOS, like using your iPhone as a USB keyboard for your desktop using Linux's USB gadget support.
> Would I be able to repurpose a device to do something useful I can’t do with iOS?
How about doing anything at all? I have an iPad 2 and an iPad mini sitting around that aren't useful at all. Just sitting there, collecting dust because I don't have the heart to chuck them.
This, and the overall build-quality of the devices makes it hard to just discard them.
Even their batteries are still mostly good.
I’d love to repurpose them, have several here aswell lying around.
I don't know, but iDevices are more ubiquitous than other phones. It's much easier to source 100 of iPhone 6 than to collect same number of, Nexus ... whatever.
We still have an original iPad at an older relative. It's perfect for Solitaire.
It also used to be usable to load a weather page but turns out Safari doesn't know the certificate authority since it's such an old version. I guess such an old Safari is a walking security risk too.
Realistically? Hackers who use new phones/pads are gonna repurpose them for some idle fiddling with the TV at home. That’s the extent of this “reducing e-waste” goal.
It's painful that for whatever reason these projects always tend to get built around old devices rather than more recent models, basically shooting themselves in the foot.
Hard to garner excitement from more general crowds running something on an iPhone 5 than it would be 10/11/12 etc. Less people to become interested in contributing.
> for whatever reason these projects always tend to get built around old devices rather than more recent models
It’s because the new devices haven’t been cracked open enough to work on yet. Tough to port Linux to a device with a locked bootloader. On the Android phone side even if the bootloader is unlocked it takes a lot of time and effort to write or port drivers.
Yeah same story for linux on Androids. They are at better state, but Ubuntu Touch website is still promoting Nexus 5 as their "official" device, among other similarly old phones. The top spec I can find is Oneplus 6T but it lacks many things, especislly HDMI. Can we deduce that these developers dont make enough money (from these projects)?
Am I the only one not understanding what’s the point of all these efforts to try to run Linux on completely closed with no documentation devices (like iPhones and even mace for that matter). Seems like a lot of effort, for a crappy solution that maybe 0.0001% is going to use before realizing it is crap. Even only effort to keep up with the yearly hw updates that apple does and the complete disregard for backward compatibility and writing hw documentation makes these effort just a technocrat exercise (very cool for sure), but I can’t see anything more than that
Isn't that one of the "true" mantras of hacking ("hacker news") ?
Doing hard things just for the sake of it
> A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.
It excites skilled hackers, which is good for the health of the overall community. Every platform has some poorly documented nooks and crannies and doesn't want to be fully opened up. This is practicing those skills in the most hostile environment.
Plus, it gives us backup plans, if Intel and AMD are hit by meteors.
And maybe they'll keep a couple iPads out of the landfills.
I see these as more art and a statement about Linux’s ubiquitousness rather than anything especially meaningful. There’s probably not a lot of people who want to run Doom on a lamp, but people did that anyway.
The point is that people in their free time, can break into systems that cost millions in design to keep those people out.
For me, the homebrew community is the reason why I have a career in technology in the first place. Breaking into things you're not supposed to is fun, and teaches a lot of practical knowledge.
I understand your gripe but think of it like this: manufactures like apple make locked down devices which are now able to be unlocked. This reduces e-waste while showing manufactures that we want more freedom and will do as we please with OUR hardware.
This doesn’t meaningfully reduce e-Waste. The average iPhone user is conditioned to trade in their phone with already decent recycling programs being their destination.
IMO, the main (only?) reduction of e-waste comes from reselling the old phones on the secondary market. Re-use is much more effective than recycling. Until the bitter end.
That's a second life, and a valid thing - but I'm specifically talking about people wanting to use (e.g) an iPhone 6S (which will be discontinued soon).
Apple's hit something like 20% of their materials being from recycled products. This is a significant number and is much better than these things sitting around taking up space.
I respect that you are an utilitarian, so I understand your point. But you shall also respect others' non-utilitarian hacker-ianisms, and let them hack whatever device they want to, including "non-useful" iDevices.
The alternative is all those old devices becoming garbage I mean recycled so they said. And then you go on buying a Pi or some cripled computing machine to run your home automation.
Although it's always good news to have Linux on more device, in the case of Apple I find it a bit problematic.
That means you encourage Apple getting a huge cut on device sale.
Or further justify the high prices of second-hand device because now you can 'give them a second-life' (to counter Apple's in-house planned obsolescence program).
It's not just about freedom. Apple's walled-garden means you need in every company some "Apple guy" that owns an iPhone, iPad, etc to test Safari quirks.
It really feels like an under-handed racket.
There will be millions of no-longer-supported Apple units out there, it makes sense to give them a second life with Linux rather than throwing them in a landfill.
And linux on it would not run Apple apps, it would run Firefox or Chromium.
I think they are just saying if you buy an Apple device to install Linux on it, you are still supporting Apple (including their walled garden approach). Not to mention Apple is constantly fighting against these sorts of hacks so you'll always be playing mouse in their cat-and-mouse game
I completely agree with this line of thinking. That would almost makes me against this kind of projects. However, thinking about the consequences completely flips the coin for me:
- without these projects, Apple will still continue doing whatever they are doing
- I don't expect many people to actually buy a new iThing because of these projects. Maybe they'd buy second hand iThings on which Linux is guaranteed to work. So Apple is not making new money with this
- Yes, they may save some devices from the landfill
- it might show Apple that yes, opening their devices a bit may actually increase their sales (but I would not count on it)
If I ever need a tablet and these projects work out without too many drawbacks, I'd actually probably consider getting a second hand iPad and install Linux on it. At this point I'd rather avoid both Android and iOS. I'd probably look into Pine64's (and other such manufacturers) devices first though.
I hope these projects will help save 2 old iPad 2 sleeping somewhere in my family. These otherwise perfectly capable devices are worthless now just because of one thing: the old version of Safari combined with the fact that Apple forbids browsers with alternative browser engines on these devices. That's so dumb.
And I'd probably prefer using existing devices than buying new ones if possible.
So loads of people have testified that using old Androids as long term computing devices just doesn't work cuz the machines can't deal with being on all the time.
I wonder if iPhones and the like are any different on this front. Would you be able to build up a little serve farm of these things?
That's kind of weird, since phones are generally on all the time when being actively used. I guess it depends on what active/sleep "modes" are available - ie can Linux on Apple run processes with the screen asleep or whatever. As long as it's plugged in, it should be workable, maybe.
But, in my mind, you wouldn't try to build a server farm out of 5+ year old iPads. Instead, you'd continue to use them as consumption devices. Read books, browse web, ie all the things most iPads are doing when new.
I believe what people have said is that the components can’t handle continuous use (instead of basically idling on user input). Even when being in use for the most part these machines just are rendering some textures onto the screen and the cpu is not doing much
> I believe what people have said is that the components can’t handle continuous use
That could be worked around by using the existing Linux featureset to manage hardware utilization. Especially if CPU/GPU use turns out to be the main issue (as opposed to, e.g. powering the display and radio components).
iPhones are famous for being supported A LOT longer than almost any other phone. There are manufacturers which abandon you after the 2nd year, and if you buy a model near the end of its sale period, that can mean as little as 13-14 months on a brand new phone.
Some iPhones have been, are, or will be supported for 6, 7, even 8 years - which is ridiculously good in comparison, and often the reasons for dropping a model are quite clear (only 1G of RAM, would swap/OOMkill like crazy, or lack of a 64-bit CPU).
You could debate some of these reasons, you could debate when none are provided, you could argue about why a certain model had so little RAM to begin with, and of course there have been poorly handled issues like batterygate or certain iOS versions being brutally slow on old models (though it's been years since it last happened).... but frankly, this is an odd choice of a hill to die on.
It is good some people still find use for it. However, it is a device that would be perfectly capable of being used to surf the web… but Apple stopped releasing updates for Safari and forbids alternative browser engines for iOS. The web is essentially broken on it, and I'm not even talking about the security issues that it probably has as a consequence..
I'd say it is exactly the example of a device that is today unusable for many things its hardware could handle just fine for no good reason, and therefore obsolete for many people.
Obsolete because of its closed nature. This obsolescence was planned. Maybe not intentionally to make you buy a new one, but still bad and the consequences are the same. Many people probably replaced their iPad 2 with a new tablet for exactly this reason. Or bought a new tablet even if they still use their iPad 2 for the uses cases the iPad 2 is not capable of handling anymore. Apple should be legally forced to enable third parties to support this hardware.
Next time you consider buying closed hardware (not just Apple, and Android tablets are certainly problematic too), think about the iPad 2. Closed => Waste.
To be clear, I find it pleasant to read your comments about still finding use for such devices and I was not specifically writing to you personally. That was a you for the random reader of my comment. Actually, you specifically are not even in the target of my comment, since you still use your old device.
> to counter Apple's in-house planned obsolescence program
Apple does not do planned obsolescence. iPhone 6S is going to be be supported for 8 years total. (It's not going to receive feature updates anymore, as iOS 16 won't support it, but it also means that iOS 15 gets another year of support)
I'm hoping for two years since that's what the iPhone 5s got with iOS 12 after 13 dropped support for it, but it may just be a matter of policy for them to target 8 years since it was the 8 year mark when the final update for 12 went out last September.
This topic has become an amusing barometer for people who don't actually know anything about Apple products but love to knock on them.. there's plenty Apple does to get upset over, but this is always the one topic ignorant people bring up.
When the battery went bad on my 6s which was already several years old Apple replaced it for free. That's above and beyond the $30 program they started after their misshap handling the CPU throttling to prevent power loss on worn batteries.
It's hardly like updates are being released deliberately to worsen battery life. The more features that get added, the more CPU cycles are used therefore battery power is consumed more quickly. This should be a surprise to no one, little less a technical audience like HN. Even the battery throttling saga a couple years ago was largely with good intentions (in that it's better to run the phone a bit slower than it is for it to power off at random due to voltage drops).
Apple can be accused of an awful lot but their support story for older devices is better than any other phone or tablet manufacturer out there bar none.
The technical explanation was that CPU speed scaling spikes would exceed the old battery’s ability to supply power, causing the phone to reset. Apple’s decision was that a slower phone was a better user experience than a phone that randomly reset when you tried to do something that required a high CPU frequency.
The upshot of that is that, yes, your phone got slower as it aged due to a software update. The battery life certainly didn’t suffer (if anything it would have improved it slightly). But it’s a little bit more nuanced than “planned obselescence”.
And any way you look at it, it's clear that Apple wasn't just trying to cripple old phones in an attempt to sell the newer models. They were doing their best to prolong the life and/or maintain a decent experience for the phones that had become outdated.
That 'feature' is planned obsolescence. They're degrading your phone, without an easy way to fix it (user replaceable batteries). You will dislike the experience and be encouraged indirectly to buy a new one. Planned obsolescence.
When they originally brought out the feature, it supported the new phones but the OS update was also made available for older models that were outside of warranty since Apple continue to support their hardware years after release. Simply doing nothing and letting the batteries in the older models degrade further would cause them to reboot more and become unusable. Surely this would drive sales more? Isn’t supporting device that are out of warranty the opposite of planned obsolescence?
My wife and I both had iPhones when batterygate happened. Turns out her battery was degraded and mine was fine. She never did get her battery replaced, she was quite happy with the (reduced) performance she had. If it had been randomly rebooting it would have forced her to buy a new model. Instead she just waited until her next upgrade cycle and didn’t care, despite me telling her to get it replaced.
The battery is a consumable part. For my (second hand) iPhone 11 Pro Max it’s a £69 charge to get a new battery. After multiple years of use and two owners this isn’t unreasonable, not that it needs it of course (yet). I’ll still get years more of use out of this phone, and multiple more OS upgrades, all while other manufacturers pump and dump the next version of their handsets. We should be forcing every manufacturer to support handsets for 5 years minimum to save on e-waste.
Its a circle of planned obsolescence. Battery gets old, so they degrade phone performance. There's no way for you to change that. They get sued, lose, and maliciously comply by making a switch that maybe causes your phone to reboot randomly. Its all formulated to think, 'I need to replace this'.
Phone manufacturers should be forced to unlock their phones, release drivers and provide user replaceable batteries. Then you can say Apple isn't trying to force you to upgrade.
I don’t follow this logic at all. If they had simply done nothing the phones would have rebooted randomly when the batteries degraded. Why go through the whole process at all if they wanted you to replace the phone? The random brownouts would be annoying enough to make you do that anyway.
There’s a reason this whole thing was dubbed “batterygate” - it was to do with one thing - the battery.
Hacker News in 2022 is a strange place, it's hard to engage with people who already have their opinion of Apple decided before they've heard how they've messed up this time. The notch was particularly funny, watching everyone's incredulous reaction while people immediately went to damage control with the "but it's still 16:10!!!" addendum.
This goes to everyone: Give up. All of these companies suck, the only thing their money buys them is better marketing. It's not worth your time being their PR lackey for them.
I was intrigued by that as well, so I did some digging and turned up the transcript of the “Microsoft Fiscal Year 2019 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call”: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2019/earn... . If you search through that for “Hacker News” you’ll find Satya saying:
In fact this morning I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress. In some sense that at least basically said that we’re neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even elite developers as represented in that community.
No, its clear they are trying to be tricky with their planned obsolecense. They lost a lawsuit about it. They were found guilty of doing exactly that.
If they made the batteries easily user replaceable, then you'd have a point. But they don't, and you couldn't disable that function so it falls under planned obsolescence.
You keep parroting the term “planned obsolescence” over and over again in every comment but I do not think you understand what it actually means. Planned obsolescence is when the device becomes useless after a given amount of time. So to use the battery example, arguably a phone that ends up misbehaving or shutting down unexpectedly due to a failing battery without any mitigations is “useless” — it ceases to function as a useful phone or emergency device if that happens.
That’s not a trait specific to iPhones though — the same thing will happen on most battery-powered devices these days. It’s just that someone decided to pick a fight with Apple about it, hence a lawsuit was born. There’s nothing remarkable about this case otherwise — it could have just as easily been any other phone manufacturer.
In this example, the mitigation Apple chose (and admittedly very badly communicated at the time) was to reduce the frequency with which these shutdowns happen by dropping peak performance a bit and reducing the peak power draw as a result. That action actually prolonged the device’s “usefulness” for its intended purpose as a phone and emergency device, even if it negatively affected auxiliary functions.
In any case, if the phone slows down a bit, you might think “okay, it may be time to replace the phone soon” and you like to use this as your excuse for it being planned obsolescence. What you’re conveniently ignoring is that if the phone shuts down at random, you are probably going to think “well, damn, I need to replace the phone _now_” because a non-technical person will not likely to draw the conclusion that the battery was at fault, they’re much more likely to believe there’s a much deeper and unfixable fault.
Finally, while the batteries indeed are not user-replaceable, they are still replaceable. Any Apple Store will do it for you (many even on a walk-in basis) and it’s not even expensive to have done. Many other third-party shops and service centres also have the capability to do the same.
Apple was intentionally and silently slowing down aging iDevices to make it seem like they had just become obsolete under the higher requirements of newer software, rather than just having dying batteries. While the person you're responding to is mischaracterizing what happened to some extent and implying that it is still happening (they may still be throttled to protect from sudden shutoffs, but everybody knows now), you're propagandizing about it.
If they had the users' interests in heart at all, they could have thrown a modal that explained that the batteries were dying, and asked if the user wanted the phone to be throttled to avoid incidents of sudden power loss. If Apple had done this, they would have immediately lost sales and had complaints about expensive and inconvenient battery replacement, so they chose not to. This was the result of nothing but greed.
They weren’t slowing down ageing devices, only handsets that had degraded batteries. It’s an important distinction. The change that they made is now when your battery degrades you can choose to get peak performance at the risk of reboots.
If you could easily change the battery, there'd be no problem with this function. As it stands, the glued in battery is also planned obsolescence.
There's quite a bit of it, isn't there? If your battery doesn't die, the software will cripple your phone. If you choose not to let it, you'll exepreince random reboots.
Its all a big elaborate plan to make you upgrade.
They're smart folks at Apple. They'll try something even more sneaky next time.
I can easily change it. I simply pay them £69 and get it changed. Maybe I’ve found the loophole? Or maybe they’re really bad at planning obsolescence?
To me this is no different than when I pay for new parts for my car. Could I do it myself? Maybe, but I’ll happily pay someone who knows what they’re doing to do it properly. If a bush wears down is that planned obsolescence? Should I be outraged after 60,000 miles that I have to replace it?
I’m actually old enough to have owned phones with removable batteries. Guess how many times I changed a battery? 0. All the way from the 3210, t68i, P900, Note II and a bunch I’ve forgotten and I’ve never needed to change a battery. I’ve had maybe 4 Apple phones with non removable batteries and never needed to either.
That 69 dollars happened AFTER the lawsuit (a petty reaponse) and is yet further example of planned obsolescence! Pay 70 bucks, or put 70 bucks towards a new phone.
I’d probably agree with you were it not for the fact that the “planned obsolescence” happened 18 months after the release of the iPhone 6S, but they then went on to give it a further 5.5 years of software updates. Maybe someone at Apple didn’t get the message?
To be clear it's not that they 'downgraded' battery life, it's that it throttled power draw (and by extension performance) if the phone determined that the battery could no longer reliably power the device at peak draw.
Apple's failure to communicate this and give users the option to set power draw back to full (with an explanation of consequences) is exactly why they got sued and deserved to lose. It's up front and made clear in the battery settings menu, but it really should not have required a law suit to make that happen, they've nobody but themselves to blame for the perception that they were just being greedy and trying to coerce people into new phones by hobbling existing ones.
I will say on the user experience side I did appreciate that in the aftermath of this we were able to get a new battery in an affected iPhone 6S for free straight from the Apple store. Got some serious mileage out of that phone.
Yes, that has been established. I wasn't suggesting otherwise; to the contrary I think they deserved it. They made major changes to the performance characteristics of these devices without disclosing what they were doing or why.
Honestly if you want a bigger bone to pick with Apple regarding performance slaughter you should look at EOL iOS devices that capped out at iOS 9. The iPhone 4S was a great little handset until Apple destroyed it with iOS 9.
The only thing I could imagine Apple doing with regards to seeing Linux running on their mobile hardware is further engineer ways to prevent it.
I'm personally hoping Apple A5 devices are able to run Linux too as my iPad 2 is 11 years old, has a great battery and is in good condition but hasn't seen a software update in years.
- The back camera is probably better than your current webcam
- It can make a good pet or baby monitor (several apps that do this have extremely long support schedules because they know people will reuse old phones)
- If you’re going to dispose of it, return it to Apple for recycling rather than landfill
Use as an iPod, it's got a headphone jack which is rather nifty, also still works fine as a basic phone, you can have the battery replaced quite cheaply.
And what do I do with my new phone? Just leave it there while I use the older iPhone? No. Realistically you'll use the new phone. The old iPhone is still not going to be used. So what do we do with them now? We install Linux or we just trash it?
Sell it or repurpose it, just like anything that gets replaced (fridge, blender, car, etc..)?
Just because your old device doesn't support linux doesn't mean it's a brick. (Surely you were aware before you bought the device that it doesn't support linux).
It beats devices going into the landfill or being scrapped, this gives millions of machines a second lease on life. For people who for instance can't afford anything else.
