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Comment by fmsf | Hacker News Reader

iPad mini 1 are selling on ebay for 80£, I wonder if there isn't anyone exploring the business opportunity here for corporate software, were instead of buying 300£ iPads to show the schedule of a meeting room, you can just code against an old version of IOS and supply your software with hardware at a high discount. edit: had 30£ before, but was a bid not a buy now

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Anyone doing this would be opening themselves up to a world of liability, and probably a lot of customers who would say no. I know my work is dumping older ipads even though all our integrated software for meetings etc works fine just because it could be exploited and isn't receiving updates. Even the possibility of that isn't worth it to a lot of places. It doesn't matter if it's connected to a "closed" network, it still has radio(s) on.

And since so many places are so slow to upgrade, this is a known attack surface. Once you exploit that old-ass iOS, you have a compromised machine with radios sniffing inside your environment.

I'd bet only a fraction of the cost of a system like you describe is tied up in the hardware. There's the cost of installing the hardware (running power, networking), managing it (device software updates), paying for a recurring subscription to the service.

Not to mention the risk of having old hardware on your network that doesn't get software updates anymore.

And anyways once a company is looking at something like this most will happily justify it balanced against something like "lost productivity".

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