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Comment by MyFirstSass | Hacker News Reader

Another thing is the issue of e-waste.

At some point i had multiple older iPads with perfectly great screens, and i wanted to use them as "hubs" for a home setup to control various things, another option was using them as secondary screens, or maybe just give them to a kid.

You couldn't, they were simply to old for the new IOS update, and almost all apps including browsers requires the newer IOS and update automatically without asking - essentially bricking them on purpose.

Anyway i ended up giving them to a "safe e-waste center" but i'm sceptical they'll actually be recycled.

I think locking down a device should be illegal especially e-waste considered, and if there's some reason not to, then it should at least be opened the day official support ends so the device can be used to watch videos/games for kids/whatever.

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As a counterexample, the other day I found my old Nexus 5, from 2013, running Android 6. While it was not completely straightforward, I was able to reset the phone and link it to a new Google account, and after several cycles of updates the entire Google suite seems to work, including Maps, and not slowly at that. I was, and still am, genuinely impressed.

A story going in completely different direction --

I have a Sony Xperia phone from 2017. It has stopped receiving OS updates after Android 8, and I don't use it any more other than occasionally as a backup phone. A while ago, I discovered that people on xda are putting LineageOS (a custom ROM based on AOSP) with Android 14 on it, tried that myself, and it works! As slow as the phone is, it can run apps without any problem. This is truly amazing.

Same, I wish once device stops being supported it should give easy option to be jailbroken and unlock bootloader. Such devices could be retrofitted for many other roles e.g robotics toy with arduino/raspberrypi, smart home, smart router etc.

Of course they were recycled, there are valuable minerals in these devices.

Well, in my country there's been multiple scandals about waste handling where it was found very little ended up being recycled, the sorting people did in some cases created more pollution because it had to be transported and huge amounts ended up in big dumps of toxic assorted garbage either here or in some third world country where kids then make a few cents a day scavenging in the toxic piles.

So yeah, i'm sceptical. There's a reason it's called reduce, re-use, recycle as a very distant third as far as i've seen.

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