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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

It may make you laugh, but when I was homeless, someone gave me an outdated iPad thinking that would help me out. It was essentially useless.

A lot of people who have old phones have them because they can't afford anything newer. The pressure to constantly update to newer hardware is a hardship for poor people. It de facto is one of the ways they get excluded from modern life.

I am also real freaking tired of Google apps being a suite on my cheap phone that constantly updates and threatens that you may break other apps if you disable this one. It makes it very challenging to add any apps to my phone. And my wants and needs are not huge. But Google is eating a large share of the storage space and eats into my time for clearing the cache, etc, to keep the phone functional.

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I'm not the OP but I'm guessing it makes him laugh because you can still run things on Windows that were written in the early 1990s. I have personally worked on an application in 2016 that was written in 1989 and still ran. It depended on mainframe code that was written in the 1980s and possibly some from the 1970s.

(Yes, it would have to be Windows NT to run I think)

Read Raymond Chen's fantastic blog for how much MS have worked to keep backwards compatibility going.

And then we come to backward compatibility and mainframes:

"The IBM Z family maintains full backward compatibility. In effect, current systems are the direct, lineal descendants of System/360, announced in 1964, and the System/370 from the 1970s. Many applications written for these systems can still run unmodified on the newest IBM Z system over five decades later.[3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z

It would be interesting to see someone try to see what the oldest unmodified app they could run on a Z series was.

That's interesting; I still use a Nexus 7 (2012) as my main mobile device. It's occasionally frustratingly slow, but I haven't found almost anything that wouldn't actually run on it. Is the iOS ecosystem worse in that regard, or was the iPad even older?

I agree with the Google Apps thing, though; my employer gave me a new but cheap phone with just 4GB of internal storage, and I'm always having to cleanup so I can install anything new. And an SD card barely helps, lots of stuff simply can't be moved.

I don't remember how old the iPad was and I no longer have it. But it was old enough that support had been discontinued for its os and I was having trouble finding ways around that. Perhaps someone more technical could have found a solution. I did ask around, but to no avail.

Thanks. Experiences like yours are why I'm always wary of the pushes to make access to services exclusively online. They're usually an attempt to cut budgets by throwing the people who need it more under the bus.

A lot of libraries don't have the latest software. Internet access is often limited to 2 or 3 hours per day on public computers. Public computers frequently do not allow for even temporarily saving images or other files to the desktop, which seriously limits what you can do in them.

I love the internet. It makes my life vastly more workable. But it makes me crazy that there is so little effort to keep the bar for entry low in terms of money and technical savvy.

Why does my cheap phone need so many apps that I don't use, that cannot be disabled and that promptly update again after I delete all the data off of them, forcing me to delete the same data repeatedly? Is this really necessary? Come on.

Some tips, just in case they help. When disabling apps, you can generally ignore the warning that other apps may break. Do not disable Google play services, though. Also, go into the account settings and make sure sync is turned off for everything, you can sync manually when needed. Finally, disable auto-update in the play store. Google apps update frequently but will generally continue to work for quite a while if you refuse those updates.

I had no idea I could turn off auto update in the app store. I couldn't find a way to do it on my phone, so I thought it could not be done. That alone should make this more manageable.

Thank you.

My mom gave me an old iPad that’s limited to running iOS 9.something. Even though GarageBand existed back then, it refuses to install from the App Store. It took a decent bit of hacking, including an older version of iTunes and mitmproxy, just to get an older version installed that would still run on it.

There’s an easier way (had the same issue with Spotify and iPhone 4): use the same iCloud account from the “old” device to login on a newer device. There, download the app you want to use on the older device. Once it’s installed, go back to the older device and go to the App Store to “purchased apps”. This will now include the app you just downloaded on the newer device. Click “download”. The App Store will recognize that this app won’t run on your crappy old iOS version, but since you purchased it, it will offer you to download the latest version that still works on your device... insane, I know, but less involved than a mitm-proxy...

That’s the first approach I found to be recommended, but nope, didn’t work in this case for some reason. The app appeared as one I had indeed installed previously (on my newer device) but still refused, saying a newer version of iOS was required. I wonder if it may have been because I had never downloaded the older version of GarageBand, only the latest one.

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