I have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it. Not only do they control it, they decide when it's time for me to buy new hardware and force me to landfill this one.
Why do I need to "jailbreak" my own hardware? Why do we put up with this madness? There should be allowance for accessing my own hardware, especially 13 year old hardware abandoned by the vendor and locked for the user.
Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this"
And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.
If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.
I'm also in this situation where I have same kind of old iPad, which was lying in a drawer at my parents. It's running iOS 9.3.6, for which only a semi-tethered jailbreak exists. IIUC, this means that you can jailbreak it by side loading an app to the iPad.
The good thing is that you can do all this jailbreaking with free software from Linux, apparently. Of course it's endless browsing shadier and shadier / scammy websites before finding something that looks somewhat less shady. The world of iOS jailnreaking is very strange.
The bad thing is that sideloading requires an Apple account. I don't have one. Creating an Apple account from the device is not possible anymore. Creating an apple account from the apple website seems complicated. It wants a phone number which I'm not willing to give. I tried these services that provide burner public phone numbers to get the verification code it wants but have yet to find one that works. When i manage to get a verification code, it tells me that this is not possible at this time, please try from an Apple device. I don't have another one. I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this.
I'd like to make this device useful. Up to recently I could use it to display music scores in PDF, I even wrote a web app for it to annotate them, but the screen is a bit broken and this makes the touchscreen very erratic to the point of being unusable.
I'd be happy to make it useful for something else but on the other end, I have other things more interesting to do than to deal with Apple's bullshit.
> I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this.
While this is possible, it isn't as straight forward as just running macOS via kvm or whatever. You'll be tinkering in order to register an account from the VM.
So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi.
When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean
So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare.
I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just curious why it wasn't mentioned in the blog post? My original question was going to be if your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).
this might be a good thread to ask this as i cant get a straight answer from apple forums - i have a relatively recent iPad that was bricked after i updated to iPadOS 26 dev beta and then didnt like it and downgraded - now it simply wont turn on. its out of warranty so apple doesnt care/doesnt help - but i know the hardware is just fine.
what can i do with it? i'm willing to disassemble it but i have no idea where to start on what's wrong; all i know is itd be a waste if i just threw this in a trash.
I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at peak use while charging without drawing down the battery.
I have an old project with an Esp32 Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad 2. I only later found out that the iPad 2 does not support Bluetooth LE, which is what the Esp32 uses. If anyone knows a good solution please let me know.
I've been considering getting a new(er) iPad or iMac. I think it might have a better interface with my iPhone than my current pc. I hate to think about product lifespan, obsoleting, etc since I already have lots of devices that aged out.
Reading this guy's tale just made me appreciate how awesome it is to be sitting here posting on my Dell T5400 from 2008 running Win7Pro. It still runs even though there are 3 blown caps and 3 swollen caps on the mobo, and one RAM slot crapped out several years ago so I lost access to 8 GB of RAM in my 32 GB system. One of the PCie slots is also bad but so far the one with my 1070 GPU works fine driving two monitors. The only real problem is with the hard drive. Every so often I get a hardware error on the Win7Pro installation (I dual-boot Win10 Pro on this machine) and that sends me into a multiple hour reboot fest where I have to run Startup Repair several times, go Command Line in and fix MBR errors, and scannow to fix whatever else is borked.
At one point I spent a week on Win10 Pro (I hate that OS) because after hours of trying to force Win7 Pro to boot normally it looked hopeless. After a week of that I made the huge mistake of clicking the "install updates now" button on Win10 Pro and it proceeded to grab several years worth of updates and install them, rebooting multiple times in the process. It may have finished except that one of those updates left me with a hardware bluescreen related to a driver for the 1070 and I was not able to get that fixed.
After much frustration and the spewing of several one-time use profanity clusters I decided to try to boot into Win7 Pro again and it worked normally.
One day this machine will bork itself and I will have to accept that I can no longer operate in my beloved Win7 and have to fire up this new pc that has been sitting idle for four years now. That day is not today though.
1) I am surprised there is no mention of trading it back to apple?
2) I am sure putting a decent “churn” schedule for apple devices is already been done right? Top of my head I can imagine coming up with one where for of the major product line apple offers (mbp, iPad, iPhone) we can look at the typical depreciation curve and find optimal “get in” points and “get out” points right? How hard could it be. I agreed there is a friction and activation energy needed to going down to the Apple Store and trading it in but you could get a new device every 1-2 years and keep largely churning the same out of money plus a slightly more to top up (call it premium to avoid the anger /pain inflicted by not doing it.)
BTW I anyone is curious, IIRC managed to jailbreak iOS 9.3.5 just from linux without any apple interaction (no cloud account), but since for some reasons phoenixpwn expired
I get a bad gateway error and can’t load the site and Cloudflare tells me it’s a host error (they are doing their job just fine, the first two bullet points assure me) so hopefully hosting a website isn’t what to do with it.
I use an old IPad as a desktop status panel. Shows me timers, today's agenda, countdown to meetings and some to-do notes. A little focus/productivity tool.
> The most common provider is cloudflare, but you need to install cloudflared on the machine you’re using to host
This is actually (strictly) true. You can use cloudflared on any system which can communicate with your host. This is useful in more realistic deployments as it means you can install cloudflared in a VM/container and then have it relay your services hosted in other VMs/containers/devices. It isn't helpful here as "I hosted my website on an iPad (but I now have to have this other real computer plugged in all the time so that iPad works)" is not as zesty :)
34 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadI have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it. Not only do they control it, they decide when it's time for me to buy new hardware and force me to landfill this one.
Why do I need to "jailbreak" my own hardware? Why do we put up with this madness? There should be allowance for accessing my own hardware, especially 13 year old hardware abandoned by the vendor and locked for the user.
And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.
If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.
http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/
The good thing is that you can do all this jailbreaking with free software from Linux, apparently. Of course it's endless browsing shadier and shadier / scammy websites before finding something that looks somewhat less shady. The world of iOS jailnreaking is very strange.
The bad thing is that sideloading requires an Apple account. I don't have one. Creating an Apple account from the device is not possible anymore. Creating an apple account from the apple website seems complicated. It wants a phone number which I'm not willing to give. I tried these services that provide burner public phone numbers to get the verification code it wants but have yet to find one that works. When i manage to get a verification code, it tells me that this is not possible at this time, please try from an Apple device. I don't have another one. I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this.
I'd like to make this device useful. Up to recently I could use it to display music scores in PDF, I even wrote a web app for it to annotate them, but the screen is a bit broken and this makes the touchscreen very erratic to the point of being unusable.
I'd be happy to make it useful for something else but on the other end, I have other things more interesting to do than to deal with Apple's bullshit.
Too bad.
While this is possible, it isn't as straight forward as just running macOS via kvm or whatever. You'll be tinkering in order to register an account from the VM.
When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean
So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare.
I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just curious why it wasn't mentioned in the blog post? My original question was going to be if your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).
I want a Mac with a touchscreen and a pencil. So not sure if it's easier to retrofit MacOS on an iPad or retrofit a touch screen on a Mac.
I know this question is adjacently relevant, but I wonder if someone has some experience in it and are willing to share :)
what can i do with it? i'm willing to disassemble it but i have no idea where to start on what's wrong; all i know is itd be a waste if i just threw this in a trash.
Reading this guy's tale just made me appreciate how awesome it is to be sitting here posting on my Dell T5400 from 2008 running Win7Pro. It still runs even though there are 3 blown caps and 3 swollen caps on the mobo, and one RAM slot crapped out several years ago so I lost access to 8 GB of RAM in my 32 GB system. One of the PCie slots is also bad but so far the one with my 1070 GPU works fine driving two monitors. The only real problem is with the hard drive. Every so often I get a hardware error on the Win7Pro installation (I dual-boot Win10 Pro on this machine) and that sends me into a multiple hour reboot fest where I have to run Startup Repair several times, go Command Line in and fix MBR errors, and scannow to fix whatever else is borked.
At one point I spent a week on Win10 Pro (I hate that OS) because after hours of trying to force Win7 Pro to boot normally it looked hopeless. After a week of that I made the huge mistake of clicking the "install updates now" button on Win10 Pro and it proceeded to grab several years worth of updates and install them, rebooting multiple times in the process. It may have finished except that one of those updates left me with a hardware bluescreen related to a driver for the 1070 and I was not able to get that fixed.
After much frustration and the spewing of several one-time use profanity clusters I decided to try to boot into Win7 Pro again and it worked normally.
One day this machine will bork itself and I will have to accept that I can no longer operate in my beloved Win7 and have to fire up this new pc that has been sitting idle for four years now. That day is not today though.
1) I am surprised there is no mention of trading it back to apple? 2) I am sure putting a decent “churn” schedule for apple devices is already been done right? Top of my head I can imagine coming up with one where for of the major product line apple offers (mbp, iPad, iPhone) we can look at the typical depreciation curve and find optimal “get in” points and “get out” points right? How hard could it be. I agreed there is a friction and activation energy needed to going down to the Apple Store and trading it in but you could get a new device every 1-2 years and keep largely churning the same out of money plus a slightly more to top up (call it premium to avoid the anger /pain inflicted by not doing it.)
What am I missing here ?
https://terminalbytes.com/iphone-8-solar-powered-vision-ocr-...
83,418 OCR requests processed over more than a year of operation
Up to 1,000+ requests on busy days
If you forget about the million other ways to try and solve this issue. It’s an amazing repurposed piece of tech.
BTW I anyone is curious, IIRC managed to jailbreak iOS 9.3.5 just from linux without any apple interaction (no cloud account), but since for some reasons phoenixpwn expired
469 points by homarp on Nov 21, 2020 | 282 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883
Depending on the version of iPad, you may be able to get UTM SE on it, which will let you run a virtualized operating system on it.
https://getutm.app/
- There appear to be some jailbreaks too
- iSH would let you install and run local linux packages
Install Linux on it. If that is not possible, shave its head and put it in the pillory for public humiliation.
This is actually (strictly) true. You can use cloudflared on any system which can communicate with your host. This is useful in more realistic deployments as it means you can install cloudflared in a VM/container and then have it relay your services hosted in other VMs/containers/devices. It isn't helpful here as "I hosted my website on an iPad (but I now have to have this other real computer plugged in all the time so that iPad works)" is not as zesty :)