What to do with an old iPad | Hacker News Reader

What to do with an old iPad

odb.ar

192 pointsowenmakes115 comments

Coming back with my own blog (hosted on iPad 2) after asking here the same question

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi.

When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare.

I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just curious why it wasn't mentioned in the blog post? My original question was going to be if your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the world that cares about using 130GB extra during a random month. Even in Belgium I think the caps were around twice that ten years ago

cloudflare is caching the image:

    ```
    accept-ranges: bytes
    age: 5397
    alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
    cache-control: max-age=14400
    cf-cache-status: HIT
    content-length: 3013598
    content-type: application/octet-stream
    date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:14:32 GMT
    last-modified: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:44:35 GMT
    server: cloudflare
    vary: accept-encoding

    ```

wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure

Closer to 10 at peaks, but a lot of sites are just fragile.

Exactly. I think this shows two things quite nicely:

- Very few sites need to cope with more than a handful of hits per second. A regular DSL connection and desktop PC can host the vast majority of them; you don't need clouds if you don't want them. (Even under variable load: if you need 80% of the systems more than 40% of the time, scaling down is probably not worth the cloud premium)

- If a site can't handle HN, that's a software limitation. Compare Wordpress' insanely slow page generation to simple blog software that generates pages in 5 milliseconds, or even to hosting the blog as static HTML files. I'd not be surprised if you can serve Wikipedia's page text from like one Raspberry Pi 5 per country. Not that you'd want to do that for reliability and redundancy reasons, plus you have the constant stream of edits to process and templates to (re-)render. Media and blob hosting is also a separate beast. Thankfully, most sites are not in the top ten world's most popular websites and you get away with a lot

WordPress is a static host for the vast majority of users. The generation time is irrelevant. Almost by default, it will just cache the rendered page and always serve from the cache.

At one point I had two pages in the top spot on HN: https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114852056319245427

- 20k peak unique visitors

- 162k peak requests

- 56 GB peak data but most of that data was cached by Cloudflare

Do you have stats for the peak requests / second?

Sadly, no :(

I'm currently on free cloudflare plan, and I don't think it shows rps. And it doesn't show stats more than 30 days back

That peak is a 24-hour cumulative value if I'm seeing it right?

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic)

Does your ISP have a problem when your computer/phone/etc does a cloud backup? Or when you torrent? Because both of those will max out your upload bandwidth much more than hosting a static website.

I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.

I do use a VPN, but I have torrented many, many terabytes of, errr, Linux ISOs. I haven't ever gotten so much as a nastygram from Verizon, and I still appear to get pretty close to advertised speeds.

> I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.

Look at your agreement with your ISP. They typically segment the market into consumer/business plans where running a server requires a business plan versus a consumer plan.

I have fiber in the east coast of the US with a national provider. They don’t care about uploading, at least up to 10-15 TB/month.

judging by the .ar ccTLD he's from Argentina, same as me.

First hand experience tells me local ISP's don't care, and/or don't know to care. they don't even serve piracy notices here (I believe most of latin america is like this) so they definitely won't be bothering with something like this

I clicked and got a Cloudflare error page, said "I hope it isn't 'run a website'", and then visited the comments...

Well, it's telling me:

502

Browser Working

Cloudflare Working

odb.ar Host Error

Tunnel fell down, I suspect connection issue while I was sleeping. iPad was still running the server locally and unplugged from power.

iPad now resting as molten metal and glass in the corner of the room.

I actually delegated DNS to Cloudflare when nic.ar wouldn't take the localhost.run domain!

Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this"

And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.

If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.

http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/

Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.

I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it.

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

Unfortunately, as far as old iPads are concerned, one of the major issues with old iPads is the old safari version. And so old web standards. I've this potentially nice projects to mirror screens from the web browser, but they won't run on old iPads for this reason. Shipping programs to the old iPad will suffer the same issues: only programs specifically written for these old Safari versions will work.

I suspect this will be an issue for most old devices. Especially old Apple devices (though there's hope for the newer ones now that the EU requires them to allow other browsers), but for all devices ultimately.

Check out waypipe[1] if you haven't.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

It's called HTTP+HTML+CSS+JavaScript :)

oh man, between mosh and xpra at university, I thought that's how the future was gonna be.

Oh man it was fucking great.

I had a shitty pentium or mmx, with fuck all ram, my dad however had a DUAL PROC P3 monster just a network hop away.

I could SSH in and run GIMP on his machine and run https://logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/removal in a quarter of the time.

But that time has passed now. Perhaps web APIs are the best way to do that kinda offload.

It was amazing. Multiple applications running on different servers/machines all working side-by-side on a single desktop workstation. Effectively every GUI application could automatically be run in "client-server mode" (using the terms in the traditional sense not the inverted-X11 sense) without having to write any architecture or OS specific client code.

Although technologically completely unrelated, rich browser applications also fill this niche, and even share warts like the lack of standardized UX behaviors or having issues with dealing with (subtle) difference between "client environment" implementations (different browsers or X11 "servers").

Effectively the web browser became the universal "graphical terminal" in the same way as (in the past) serial TTYs were the universal "textual terminal". Thus X11's "killer app" just slowly became irrelevant.

I’m reminded of this story

https://terminalbytes.com/iphone-8-solar-powered-vision-ocr-...

83,418 OCR requests processed over more than a year of operation

Up to 1,000+ requests on busy days

If you forget about the million other ways to try and solve this issue. It’s an amazing repurposed piece of tech.

Woah, this way cooler than what I did

I wish Apple would just unlock these things once they stop supporting them. It's such a waste of hardware otherwise.

Less people would buy new iPads, so Apple won't do this unless forced by law and the right to repair movement.

It's probably more because some IT people at Apple take pride in locking things down. After that, it takes Apple real effort to actually support your use-case.

So you think that "taking pride" is more important than profit at Apple? I seriously doubt that.

I would love to run Linux on my old iPad hardware. The newest iPad Pro running Linux would probably be faster than my current laptop.

Right? That's exactly the waste I'm referring to.

I hope that jailbreaks continue to be discovered for these. Perhaps quantum computing will "free" the rest.

It's unlocked once it goes thru shredder and is made into new iPad. I wish more people were had common sense and were pro-growth.

I get a bad gateway error and can’t load the site and Cloudflare tells me it’s a host error (they are doing their job just fine, the first two bullet points assure me) so hopefully hosting a website isn’t what to do with it.

I remember Cloudflare's job was to cache the page back in the day.. is it still the case?

It depends on how the site is configured in Cloudflare. I'm pretty sure I had to change the default settings to make it keep my site up even if my server goes down (and even then I'm not sure I did it right)

The default settings don't cache HTML. (Maybe even if the server says to cache it. I seem to need to add special rules to make it respect the standard cache headers)

The tunnel disconnected somehow. No idea what happened, cause the iPad was still running the server correctly, maybe network issue.

I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at peak use while charging without drawing down the battery.

This bug happens to the ipads we have set up as AV controls in conference rooms at work from time to time as well. I think I first noticed it 2 years ago and assumed it was an issue with the hub it was connected to.

I use several for home assistant dashboards and haven’t run into this issue. Possibly an undersized power brick?

Kind of a nasty solution, but if you have a smart plug, you could plug the iPad into it and have HAS toggle power for an hour a day (or whatever time). That way it's as if you unplugged the iPad yourself for a period.

How does unplugging the charger for an hour improve the situation? Does it reset the charging logic back into "high charge" mode or something?

Would not even need a smart plug for that, just a simple mechanical timer would do it.

I don't know if it will. I actually have never even heard of this bug before, but I would assume that it gets fixed somehow and I imagine it involves unplugging it and plugging it in again.

I just suggested a smart plug because the original commenter said it was for HomeAssistant, which is really good at scripting stuff like this (if smart plug detects wattage below X, assume ipad is bugged and cut power and return it after n duration, for example). A mechanical timer might also work.

Also, I just bought 11 smart plugs so everything is starting to look like a nail :)

This is exactly what i do with an older iPad. It’s running HASS. The smart switch* is turned off when charge is over 80%, and on when charge drops below 30%. It’s been like this for 4 years. No issues. And I’ve been logging every on/off cycle. Some day I’ll check to see how it’s changed over the years.

Sounds like you're using a low power adapter. I have a few ipad2 that the kids use for things. Even if they have 1% and we plug them in they can be used while they charge.

I'd also suggest lowering the brightness slightly, can make a huge difference to battery drain

Over a decade ago it was common for tablets of any kind to not be able to hold a charge while plugged in when pushed to their limits.

Perhaps with some tablets, but the iPad 2 and first gen shipped with an adapter (20W?) that didn’t allow that to happen, in my experience.

It was a 10W. I ran many system-intensive games and only remember battery drain when using a smaller power brick, but never ran Geekbench on loop to test that.

These iPads I'm using are ipad2, well over a decade at this point

HA on my MacBook occasionally pushes M1 to its limits. I suspect it's the dashboards with too many items.

This makes me so angry.

I have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it. Not only do they control it, they decide when it's time for me to buy new hardware and force me to landfill this one.

Why do I need to "jailbreak" my own hardware? Why do we put up with this madness? There should be allowance for accessing my own hardware, especially 13 year old hardware abandoned by the vendor and locked for the user.

Apple offers recycling service, so that’s an option.

Recycling is strictly worse than reuse, and that's even assuming apple does good recycling.

I'm with you here. I think Apple should let you install whatever OS you want in the device after the support cycle ended. But that's not gonna happen any time soon. Until then, we jailbreak.

And what OS would that even be? I’m not aware of any others.

There's no reason Linux couldn't run on M1 iPads, aside from the fact the bootloader isn't unlockable like on macbooks.

No OS exists because everyone knows it couldn't be installed in the current status quo. Why would anyone do the work of porting $OS to old iPads if they knew it was fruitless? How could they even do it?

Apple needs to step TF out of the way. They sold this hardware, they got their money. Move aside and let people use what they bought.

There aren't because non-x86 computers are really poorly standardized. Most x86 PCs probably are capable of natively booting MS-DOS for an IBM 5170 PC/AT but iPhone 17,1 and iPhone 17,2 run completely different images. Efforts like PostmarketOS have no chances of success when literally everything is model subtype specific.

Apple should open their tablets after they stop supporting them.

The hardware could absolutely be made useful too. For example Apple could have a decent low bloat long term support OS that can be deployed on a device. Maybe it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but who cares, at least it would be usable. They won't do this though because it makes them no money.

I am in the same boat. I have two ipads, one is probably ipad mini 2 if I remember it correctly and another one is the first ipad pro. Ipad pro is still usable but not fully functional because I cannot upgrade the os and many apps dropped support for old os. Ipad mini on the other hand is totally unusable. I even think it’s in a better shape than the pro one. It feels snappy when navigating. But I cannot use it in any meaningful way.

Wouldn't "spicy pillow" be the main problem with old iPads? My iPad Air 4th gen doesn't have an option to limit charging to 80% etc.

Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged.

I keep mine unplugged and it gets surprising good battery life, and I think it kinda improved with the downgrade. On normal use I would get like 8-10 hrs screen on time. No spicy pillow yet, though I did have that issue with my old iPod.

Do you know long it can last unplugged answering requests with insomnia?

My old iPad lasts weeks on its battery if I don't use it, I can only imagine it actually sleeps and would not answer network requests in this state.

No idea honestly, but the main reason the battery lasts so long is that it turns the WiFi off, which is why I had to install Insomnia. It was doing fine so far, with 60% battery, but decided to plug it in since it's getting many requests now

OK, thanks!

Congrats for the successes :-)

Then you're lucky. I had iPad 2 and Air 1. Older one is completely dead for 5 years now and doesn't react to plugged cable at all, while newer charges whole day and keeps battery for 4-5 hours.

Air 3 I've got on ebay-like site holds pretty well but the same model that my partner got from official dealer had always issues with touch recognition.

The battery might have been changed once, not sure about this.

I'm still using an OG Gen1 64GB iPad for movies/etc when traveling. The battery does just fine and easily survives watching a full movie or two.

I have an old project with an Esp32 Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad 2. I only later found out that the iPad 2 does not support Bluetooth LE, which is what the Esp32 uses. If anyone knows a good solution please let me know.

ESP32 has bluetooth classic.

I was using this library at the time.

https://github.com/T-vK/ESP32-BLE-Keyboard

Do you know of any other that can act as Bluetooth classic keyboard?

Edit: this could be fruitful

https://community.platformio.org/t/using-esp32-as-a-bluetoot...

I use an old IPad as a desktop status panel. Shows me timers, today's agenda, countdown to meetings and some to-do notes. A little focus/productivity tool.

> What to do with an old iPad

Install Linux on it. If that is not possible, shave its head and put it in the pillory for public humiliation.

- Surprised UTM wasn't mentioned here.

Depending on the version of iPad, you may be able to get UTM SE on it, which will let you run a virtualized operating system on it.

https://getutm.app/

- There appear to be some jailbreaks too

- iSH would let you install and run local linux packages

> The most common provider is cloudflare, but you need to install cloudflared on the machine you’re using to host

This is actually (strictly) true. You can use cloudflared on any system which can communicate with your host. This is useful in more realistic deployments as it means you can install cloudflared in a VM/container and then have it relay your services hosted in other VMs/containers/devices. It isn't helpful here as "I hosted my website on an iPad (but I now have to have this other real computer plugged in all the time so that iPad works)" is not as zesty :)

I'm also in this situation where I have same kind of old iPad, which was lying in a drawer at my parents. It's running iOS 9.3.6, for which only a semi-tethered jailbreak exists. IIUC, this means that you can jailbreak it by side loading an app to the iPad.

The good thing is that you can do all this jailbreaking with free software from Linux, apparently. Of course it's endless browsing shadier and shadier / scammy websites before finding something that looks somewhat less shady. The world of iOS jailnreaking is very strange.

The bad thing is that sideloading requires an Apple account. I don't have one. Creating an Apple account from the device is not possible anymore. Creating an apple account from the apple website seems complicated. It wants a phone number which I'm not willing to give. I tried these services that provide burner public phone numbers to get the verification code it wants but have yet to find one that works. When i manage to get a verification code, it tells me that this is not possible at this time, please try from an Apple device. I don't have another one. I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this.

I'd like to make this device useful. Up to recently I could use it to display music scores in PDF, I even wrote a web app for it to annotate them, but the screen is a bit broken and this makes the touchscreen very erratic to the point of being unusable.

I'd be happy to make it useful for something else but on the other end, I have other things more interesting to do than to deal with Apple's bullshit.

Too bad.

> I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this.

While this is possible, it isn't as straight forward as just running macOS via kvm or whatever. You'll be tinkering in order to register an account from the VM.

Funny how some things you were thinking about before you log-on for the morning suddenly become front-and-centre for you.

I have an old original iPad wall mounted showing an AppDaemon dashboard from my HomeAssistant. I wish the old Safari could handle a standard dashboard but alas. I even had to add a specific certificate to enable Safari to access and show things such as HTTPS feeds from my cameras.

Looking at the comments, there doesn't appear to be anyone who has solved this issue :(

Linux on iPad (ipadlinux.org)

469 points by homarp on Nov 21, 2020 | 282 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883

this might be a good thread to ask this as i cant get a straight answer from apple forums - i have a relatively recent iPad that was bricked after i updated to iPadOS 26 dev beta and then didnt like it and downgraded - now it simply wont turn on. its out of warranty so apple doesnt care/doesnt help - but i know the hardware is just fine.

what can i do with it? i'm willing to disassemble it but i have no idea where to start on what's wrong; all i know is itd be a waste if i just threw this in a trash.

DFU restore it

https://web.archive.org/web/20250906222008/http://odb.ar/blo...

BTW I anyone is curious, IIRC managed to jailbreak iOS 9.3.5 just from linux without any apple interaction (no cloud account), but since for some reasons phoenixpwn expired

I've been considering getting a new(er) iPad or iMac. I think it might have a better interface with my iPhone than my current pc. I hate to think about product lifespan, obsoleting, etc since I already have lots of devices that aged out.

Reading this guy's tale just made me appreciate how awesome it is to be sitting here posting on my Dell T5400 from 2008 running Win7Pro. It still runs even though there are 3 blown caps and 3 swollen caps on the mobo, and one RAM slot crapped out several years ago so I lost access to 8 GB of RAM in my 32 GB system. One of the PCie slots is also bad but so far the one with my 1070 GPU works fine driving two monitors. The only real problem is with the hard drive. Every so often I get a hardware error on the Win7Pro installation (I dual-boot Win10 Pro on this machine) and that sends me into a multiple hour reboot fest where I have to run Startup Repair several times, go Command Line in and fix MBR errors, and scannow to fix whatever else is borked.

At one point I spent a week on Win10 Pro (I hate that OS) because after hours of trying to force Win7 Pro to boot normally it looked hopeless. After a week of that I made the huge mistake of clicking the "install updates now" button on Win10 Pro and it proceeded to grab several years worth of updates and install them, rebooting multiple times in the process. It may have finished except that one of those updates left me with a hardware bluescreen related to a driver for the 1070 and I was not able to get that fixed.

After much frustration and the spewing of several one-time use profanity clusters I decided to try to boot into Win7 Pro again and it worked normally.

One day this machine will bork itself and I will have to accept that I can no longer operate in my beloved Win7 and have to fire up this new pc that has been sitting idle for four years now. That day is not today though.

Unless you enjoy rebooting, why not run Windows 7 in a VM on newer hardware?

Hmmmm. I had not considered this. I guess I am in a rut with more than one project going all the time so I never took the time to look for other options.

I did buy a new pc several years ago when the T5400 started to have problems on reboot and I found a couple of bad caps. I figured it was only a matter of time. Oddly enough that still seems to be true.

I have an iPad going strong-ish for over a decade now.

There’s a lot of stuff you can’t do, but it runs VLC and I can connect to iTunes and move files.

The Retina display is still gorgeous and it can connect to my AirPods (although _they_ really don’t like it)

I watch TV-series on it while on the treadmill in my gym. I’ve considered getting a new one, but it just seems like a lot of money for something that isn’t broken.

502: Bad Gateway - Host Error. Hilarious

Clearly the iPad ran out of battery!

I do hope the site comes back as it has a convenient old ipad jailbreaking summary and i do have this ipad 1 gathering dust somewhere...

It's back up! iPad was still working correctly, but the connection to the VPS had dropped. I suspect network issue.

[Begin whine]

Not that anyone is likely to read this 6 day old thread any more, but I fished my "collectible" iPad 1 out of where it was rotting...

... and the battery is bulging. To the point of deforming the aluminium casing. Time to run and drop it at recycling instead of jailbreaking it :(

[End whine]

So question: is it possible to put MacOS on an M1 iPad?

I want a Mac with a touchscreen and a pencil. So not sure if it's easier to retrofit MacOS on an iPad or retrofit a touch screen on a Mac.

I know this question is adjacently relevant, but I wonder if someone has some experience in it and are willing to share :)

There are plenty of successful mods and even paid products capable of making a MacBook include a functional touchscreen.

As far as I know the closest thing you can do with an iPad running macOS is some form of Remote Desktop / VNC. The QEMU attempts on jailbroken iPads are unusable, and impractical. Certainly no one has done it natively (outside of Apple of course)

People have ran macOS userspace on iPhone

Wait really? Can you link me please?

https://twitter.com/khanhduytran0/status/1954724636727587237

And yet it must be Jailbroken, and is not an iPad.

Yes, this is what I said

Genuine question:

1) I am surprised there is no mention of trading it back to apple? 2) I am sure putting a decent “churn” schedule for apple devices is already been done right? Top of my head I can imagine coming up with one where for of the major product line apple offers (mbp, iPad, iPhone) we can look at the typical depreciation curve and find optimal “get in” points and “get out” points right? How hard could it be. I agreed there is a friction and activation energy needed to going down to the Apple Store and trading it in but you could get a new device every 1-2 years and keep largely churning the same out of money plus a slightly more to top up (call it premium to avoid the anger /pain inflicted by not doing it.)

What am I missing here ?

You can only trade it back for (time limited ?) store credits. I assume there's also additional limitations requiring you to move the device under your account for instance.

Selling it secund hand could be an alternative, but then the value is usually ridiculously low for older iPads, so the question is a pretty common one.

Well, you're assuming there are Apple stores in Argentina (there aren't any). So any trade in would require flying to the US (or nearest Apple store).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko

the site seems to be down; and after reading some comments, apparently it's because you were hosting the site in the iPad itself. looks like it stopped working, so I won't be able to read your post.

Bad gateway - I am probably in the wrong country on the wrong internet at the wrong time.

Gen1? Ideally on the original firmware? Display it as an artifact. Gen2 or later? E-waste.

It’s down again btw.

Yeah, had to move back to my apartment, haven't gotten around to doing the setup here

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