Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think I'd use those words to describe locked down hardware. You'd be stuck with a 5+ year old browser that you can't upgrade because Apple bans other browsers from running on iOS, you wouldn't be able to install modern apps because the App Store stopped distributing packages that are compatible with your phone and Apple won't let you install apps any other way, and you can't install a modern OS of your choosing to address either of the first two issues. You're also stuck with old or non-existent drivers for any hardware you might want to use.

Meanwhile, I have 12+ year old Macs that still work great, have up-to-date browsers, can install any app, and can run the same modern software that my 6 month old machine can.

iPhones make sense from a reduce and reuse (as an egg timer) standpoint. Apple can clearly build products that can stand the test of time and still be genuinely reusable, but those products aren't iPhones.

> you wouldn't be able to install modern apps because the App Store stopped distributing packages that are compatible with your phone

As of at least 2 years ago, I was able to dust off an old first gen iPad from 2010 that last got updated in 2012, reset it and log on and download the “last compatible version” of apps like Netflix, Crackle, Hulu, Plex, and Google Drive.

> You'd be stuck with a 5+ year old browser that you can't upgrade because Apple bans other browsers from running on iOS

You never tried browsing modern websites on older iOS devices have you?

> You never tried browsing modern websites on older iOS devices have you?

Is it good or bad? Please enlighten us.

Well, on my iPad mini 1st gen the web is unusably slow.

Yeah even if there were modern browsers for earlier iPads and iPhones, they wouldn’t be pleasant to use because modern mountains-of-JavaScript websites are too much for the ARM CPUs in those devices to handle. The average Core 2 Duo PC handily outstrips early tablets and smartphones in terms of raw power, which is why they can manage the modern web better — in comparison browsing the web on e.g. an early iPad is like doing the same on a PC from the era of Pentium 3’s and 4’s and PPC G3s and G4s.

Safari crashed regularly on an iPad 1st gen by 2012 with iOS 5.

> You never tried browsing modern websites on older iOS devices have you?

I have, it's how I learned that WebP images still weren't safe to use because Safari didn't support them until ~2020. Encountered a lot of pages that were just blank white documents, assuming it's because they failed to render the markup or whatever frontend frameworks they used weren't compatible.

I'm basing my post off of my experiences of trying to reuse old iPads.

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