Maybe it's time for the legal requirement that every computing device or microchip more powerful than 1 MIPS and having writable storage, must support reprogramming, to prevent creating digital waste.
I know you have “let’s reprogram old phones” in mind, but approximately nobody does this even when it’s an option. If you don’t like phones being locked down, then argue that on its own merits; e-waste is not a good argument.
Every shitty iPhone could still be a MP3 player, home control or something else. But no, its Garbage because your only way to install is by going online and hoping that your critical apps are still in a useful version in the app store.
Besides, when the options on the market range from "impossible" to "damn hard to reprogram", can you blame the market for not taking advantage of that? I'm certain a law that would allow waste recycling companies to unlock any phone, even without password or receipt, would lead to phones or phone motherboards being reused in a variety of lower-volume products.
Compare that to GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone), which will be supported forever, since they run mainline Linux.
But that kinds of threats must be theoretically established and acknowledged - which I think is ultimately inevitable but could be delayed or hastened by human actions. The point is, you could be seen as throwing pointless tantrum about your toys until it happens.
Approximately nobody is going to be reprogramming their 8 year old iPhones to "prevent creating digital waste", especially when the CPU is unbearably slow and the batteries are well worn out. Say reprogramming is important for user freedom or whatever, but claiming it's going to make a meaningful difference in reducing e-waste is always going to be a spurious justification.
An iPhone doesn't have to be an iPhone forever, and end-users don't have to be the ones doing the conversion. All we need is a law that would stop phones from going to a landfill and instead actually get them recycled as general computing devices.
The market can figure out the rest. If manufacturers today are willing to deal with antique toolchains and expensive programmer gear to save a few cents on microcontrollers, imagine what they could do with cheap boards running Android or iOS.
The average person has no need for "IoT sensors", whatever that means.
>thermostats
Seems unlikely given that most HVAC systems in north america operates off 24V wires, so you'd to add some sort of electrical relay switch on top for it to work. That alone is going to kill most of the savings. Moreover is your heating system really something you want to DIY? Sure, it's all fun and games to spend an entire weekend setting up your own home surveillance system from repurposed phones, because if it fails nothing really bad happens. A thermostat is something that you don't want randomly failing because your phone decided to randomly bootloop or turn into a spicy pillow.
>home intercoms
Most people would just use their phones
>mobile data modems
What's wrong with tethering off your phone? Why bring an extra device?
>smart TV dongles
Assuming your phone even supports 4K output in non-mirroring mode (you really want to watch TV shows in 1080 x 2400 that your phone's screen runs at?), this seems like a suboptimal solution given that you'll need a usb-c hub for it to work, and will be missing niceties like supporting a TV remote. All of this hassle, just to save $30 for a fire TV, or $100 for a SBC.
- IoT sensors are a thing, whether the "average person" needs them or not. Think remote weather stations, car counting cameras, GPS trackers...
- "Smart thermostats" exist, surely you could just copy whatever they're doing with ease. And let's not limit ourselves to DIY here.
- Every block of flats I've been in here has had an intercom system, some even have video transmission. Sounds like a job for old phone hardware, no?
- Carriers still sell USB modems, and I guess they know what they're doing.
- A hardware manufacturer could surely just build in a USB-C to HDMI converter. A DP-to-HDMI chip is a common enough component already.
And just to repeat, I don't want regular people to start making these things out of old phones en masse, I want businesses to have that opportunity. You're arguing against a strawman.
Something tells me that your average municipal government or enterprise isn't going to want a hodgepodge fleet of phones as IOT sensors. Most of the applications you describe don't even need to the phone to be reprogrammed. There's a dozen apps that allow your phone to be repurposed as cameras or GPS trackers today, what's holding back their adoption?
>- "Smart thermostats" exist, surely you could just copy whatever they're doing with ease. And let's not limit ourselves to DIY here.
Yeah but how much is this custom hardware going to cost, especially when you don't have economies of scale? You can get a sleek looking smart thermostat for $150-200. Most people will take that over a tangled mess of wires that a DIY solution is going to look like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahmed_Mohamed_Clock_by_Ir...
>- Every block of flats I've been in here has had an intercom system, some even have video transmission. Sounds like a job for old phone hardware, no?
So you're going to be gluing a phone next to your door? Sounds like a great way to lose an old phone.
>And just to repeat, I don't want regular people to start making these things out of old phones en masse, I want businesses to have that opportunity. You're arguing against a strawman.
No, you're arguing against a strawman. If you read my initial comment you'd see it states in no uncertain terms that I'm skeptical of the argument that it'll meaningfully reduce e-waste, not that there's going to be exactly zero people repurposing their phones.
> There's a dozen apps that allow your phone to be repurposed as cameras or GPS trackers today, what's holding back their adoption?
Personally I think it's the lack of control over devices that's hindering these apps. A common modern phone doesn't let you replace the system UI with some purpose-built app, it doesn't let you run without a battery, it doesn't even let you disable all notifications. The result just isn't up to snuff unless the user/device manufacturer has full access to reduce the system to just the parts they need.
> If you read my initial comment you'd see it states in no uncertain terms that I'm skeptical of the argument that it'll meaningfully reduce e-waste, ...
And you haven't provided any meaningful counterargument so far. You still seem to be under the impression that reusing phones means hobbyists "gluing phones" places, but that's far from what I'm advocating.
The average person doesn't have any need for "computer nodes". Just because some homelabbers want to create a k8s cluster off their 10 year old phones, doesn't mean any significant proportion of phones are going to be salvaged in that manner.
I also didn't mention any use of k8s which I don't make use of or using rpis as nodes on a computer cluster ("homelab"), so you are extrapolating in a very weird direction.
By nodes I meant, say robotic applications, simple room surveillance camera, baby monitor,audio streaming, multimedia/tv remote control, where a rpi/custom hw could be perfectly be replaced by an old phone, since it comes with imu, cameras, audio, touchscreen, wifi, storage, etc.
For the family that has a techie willing to jump through a dozen hoops to set those up, sure it might mitigate some e-waste. However I doubt that's applicable to most or even 10% of people. Moreover I don't see how an unlocked OS is necessary for most of the applications you mentioned. Why do you need an unlocked bootloader to turn a phone into a camera/baby monitor? Aren't there a dozen apps that basically serves that purpose? Finally, as the saying goes, "[insert OSS project] is only free if you don't value your time". Sure, you can spend an entire weekend turning your old phones into cameras, installing frigate on a docker container somewhere, and adding a coral TPU to do object recognition. Or you can pay $50 for a 2-pack of wyze cameras which have cloud connectivity and object recognition out of the box, and is in a far better form factor than a smartphone.
The point isn't that exactly zero phones will be diverted from landfill, just that approximately zero phones will be.
If there's an ecosystem that allows converting old hw, lot of people will less resources can make reuse of that e-waste.
Installing ubuntu nowadays is a few clicks that anyone minimally proficient on computers is able to do, not much more difficult than installing a browser "or an app on their phone".
Sure, there's "dozen of apps" for that iOS/Android, but if the HW+OS combination is no longer supported, how can we continue using it or update it ? $50 might not seem a lot to you or me, but it's a lot to many people in the world, specially with something they already have. Using cloud for inference, which is also not free or private, bringing again dependency from some entity, where local HW is perfectly capable of basic object detection. I personally have "professional" PoE cameras with built-in object detection for surveilance, but see a use case where cheap access can also be useful.
I'm still mystified why there's so much push back from people to own and make use of old HW for whatever purpose they see fit.
They certainly DON'T. I don't know where this estimate is coming from, but it's inarguably wrong
5% of all iPhone users having a home button does not mean that only 5% of iPhone SE purchasers are keeping their phones, since the population of iPhone SE purchasers is smaller than the population of iPhone users.
Let's be conservative and say about 10% of iPhone users ever bought an SE. If SE users now make up about 5% of the iPhone user base, that would mean that about half have kept their devices -- an order of magnitude off from your 5% claim.
You're accusing me of "unscientific thinking", but you're basically making an argument from ignorance? You haven't provided any rebuttals to my argument, and you're basically arguing "we haven't tried so if you try to argue against it you're WRONG".
And saying this in a forum literally named after the act of hacking and repurposing devices is quite bold.
I have old devices still laying around in the hope one day I could reuse them for something, anything useful, I simply can't get myself to throw away something which seemed magical a few years ago.
What happens when Apple stops putting new macOS versions out for the M1, which by all accounts is as far better computer than my old Sandy Bridge Thinkpad, but will become completely useless far earlier?
The ways performance is reduced is when processing power may be throttled (eg Apple battery gate) or because a newer App or Os has high requirements.