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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

It's really a shame. I have a bunch of fully-functional phones and tablets laying around that work fine, even with strong batteries, but became forcibly obsolete due to Apple (and others) 1. dropping software support and 2. deliberately sabotaging the devices against being repurposed with alternative software. This never happens with computers. I have a computer from the early 2000s still happily plugging away running useful things on Linux. It is a disgrace what consumers have allowed phone manufacturers to get away with support-wise.

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> 2. deliberately sabotaging the devices against being repurposed with alternative software.

This is why my old iPad 2 is sitting in a box somewhere. Old Android phones got wiped, bootloader unlocked, and the latest version of LineageOS, etc. they could handle. They mostly get used as readers, fancy remotes, or media players (older ones in airplane mode when not powered off fully for security reasons).

“This never happens with computers.”

Smartphones are computers.

Creating artificial product categories, taxonomy, is why we’re in this predicament.

Semantic woo is leveraged to decide a smartphone is not a general purpose computer such that corporate entity can label it new thing and set new expectations.

Intellectual property law and protections need to be thrown in the garbage, no device sold without being unlocked.

It’s thought policing when I’m convinced a general purpose computer (smartphone) is something else altogether. We live in a carceral society that’s extracting our agency to coddle a handful of replaceable figureheads.

War is peace. Apple is anti-1984.

Smartphones are computing appliances. You can sometimes put a new OS on them to make them into feasible GP computers, but that's not what they're designed to be.

That there's a GP computer inside isn't that meaningful. There's one inside "smart" TVs, too, but those TVs are still just appliances.

Not only that, Windows 11 just did the same to a whole bunch of computers...

I use one of my old iPhones to run under my pillow every night with a sleeping app, wrapped in a faraday cage pouch to reduce emf concerns. Works well for me.

Interesting, I've got a bunch of old iPhones in a drawer and would be interested in doing some sleep tracking. What app are you using/any idea how old of an iPhone would still work for this?

The app I use is called "sleep cycle"; it is old. I don't know if i'd be able to download it now from the app store, honestly probably not, I haven't tried, but I already had it downloaded onto the phone.

basically, the app judges your current phase of sleep by sensing your movements, and purports to wake you up at the optimal moment. It seems to work for me, which is good enough for me, after all. YMMV?

But if you're unable to download it now, I don't have a good solution for you, sorry. I hope you figure it out!

This does happen with computers. Windows 8.1 stopped getting support in January. There are lots of computers that don’t meet requirements for Windows 10. The timeframe is much longer than smartphones. Linux is special case that low requirements mean works on anything and is kept updated for everyone. But Linux distributions do stop supporting old releases, but the new release works for a long time.

The point was that those old computers aren't locked into running Windows and so you can install Linux on them and keep using them for something instead of chucking them in the garbage pile; the same is not true of many phones and is certainly not true of an iPhone.

It happens at the operating system level, but on a desktop computer the hardware is not inexorably tied to the OS. When Windows stops supporting 8.1, you can easily install Linux.

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