Hacker News Reader

Comment by firefoxd | Hacker News Reader

It's 2020, the ipad is 10 years old. It was a revolutionary product. Some people stood in line for hours to be the first to own it. Well that reminds me, i do own one!

Get it out of the closet and ah, the battery is depleted. Who expects it to hold charge after... 8 years? I don't have a cable either. I have lightning though, even usb-c. But nope, it's the old 30 pin charger. Order it online.

Still works! Except, I haven't successfully managed to download a single app. It hangs forever. Same thing for itunes.

View on HN

I dug out my old Palm Visor Platinum (released in 2000) a few months ago. Works perfectly. I was even able to find a large collection of apps and transfer to it using the handspring sync program which runs ok in compatibility mode on Win10.

It uses AAA cells so battery is never a problem. I really wish we could go back to standard replaceable batteries for phones and laptops :(

Amazing what we can do if we don't artificially hobble our own engineering prowess.

There never were "standard replaceable batteries" for either phones, or laptops.

Replaceable? Yes. Standard? Big, big huge no.

Define standard. Standard as in rechargeable Ni-MH battery size AA or AAA which were widespread available at that time? Then yes, Motorola, Alcatel (I believe Siemens had one too) could be operated on those batteries.

Fair enough. Very very very few devices, however.

Many laptop power packs from before the thinness craze set in are nothing more but a couple 18650 cells and a BMS. Even the new ones are the same thing, but with pouch cells - you may or may not have to deal with smaller replacements and BMSes that permanently brick themselves when you remove the cell voltage.

I recently got a Palm m125, brand new in box, from eBay, for tinkering purposes.

The biggest hassle was setting up sync with the desktop, because that requires their app and drivers. But even that was ultimately a solvable problem on Win10.

But the old Palm apps install and work just fine, if you can find them. A more annoying problem is that a lot of them were shareware, and authors have long since moved on. But even with what's free, it's a handy little device; I can't think of many other AAA-powered gadgets that are capable of compiling C apps for themselves!

As far as battery life goes, I'll just quote one Amazon review from 2001:

> Another negative feature with this specific model is the poor battery life. The m125 requires 2 AAA batteries (included), however they only last aprox. 2.5 weeks under normal use (compared to the 1-2 months of the m105 and most other PDA's).

Sigh.

Thats some pretty horrific shit considering I have dot com era machines lying around still running fine

I have a 1991 Macintosh with some expansion cards that I use for making music. It still works perfectly.

I should see if we can still start my dad's old 1984 Acorn Electron and then play the original Elite.

My original PSP is not as impressive. But when I found it a couple of months ago I really enjoyed flOw and NFS: Underground Rivals from 2008 or so.

I remember the OG iPad had a pathetic amount of RAM, so that might be your issue;

I use my iPad3 (2012) for Netflix and light browsing and it works great. The battery even holds plenty of charge.

The App Store and Apple Music work fine.

The YouTube app stopped working because the app demands an update that Google didn’t make available for that generation of iPad. Watching YT via Safari still works.

My only complaint is that adblockers don’t work because that generation of iPad doesn’t have a 64bit CPU.

IT has gone for the worse and I feel like what SV has turned into is partly to blame.

I still have my original iPad Mini. It's the only device that has installed and can play the games I made when I worked for an app company back in 2011-2012 that went out of business. Once it dies I'll be a sad panda :(.

This is one of the reasons I no longer buy iDevices. Last time I tried to get my iPad 2 working it was stuck on the activation screen. I shouldn't need to "activate" hardware I own, I should be able to use it however I want.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com