3 ms·

>to prevent creating digital waste. Approximately nobody is going to be reprogramming their 8 year old iPhones to "prevent creating digital waste", especially

by gruez 1y ago

>to prevent creating digital waste. 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.

codedokode 1y ago
I also meant microcontrollers. I am sure someone would remove chips from old devices and resell if they were reprogrammable. Also you could use them for your hobby for free.
- BenjiWiebe 1y ago
  The chips in phones would be horrible to work with - they're too small. Plus, the SoC is much more complicated to deal with than a microcontroller intended to be stand-alone.
- gruez 1y ago
  Why would anyone go through all that hassle when you can get a ESP8266 from aliexpress for less than $2? The skilled labor cost alone needed to desolder the chips is going to wipe out any savings, not to mention the hassle of fabbing custom PCBs to work with your hodgepodge collection of microcontrollers.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    There are countries where people would sit all day desoldering phones if they were paid $2 for each. Also even in my country minimum wage is less than $2/hr (although that is rare).
    - gruez 1y ago
      Note $2 on aliexpress gets you a fully assembled module. If you're trying to repurpose chips after desoldering you still need to sort, test, and resolder them.
mathiaspoint 1y ago
8 year old phones are fine if you run a decent OS on them.
rpastuszak 1y ago
My 8 yo iPhone is perfectly usable, the battery wasn’t expensive or difficult to replace.
- gruez 1y ago
  I'm not claiming that they're literally unusable, only that they're unusable by most people's standards. Case in point, when was the last time you've seen a touchid iPhone? The last such device was introduced as recently as 2022 (or 2017 if you only count "mainstream" models). The 2022 model is still in support, and 2017 models were still getting security updates as of 5 months ago, yet virtually nobody uses them. If so many people ditched their iPhones while they're in support, what gains could there possibly be to allow people to flash third party ROMs? I'm sure there's some diehard enthusiasts that'd keep it alive, but as I argued above, it's not going to make a meaningful difference.
  - torstenvl 1y ago
    Lots of people use the iPhone SE or are holding onto the iPhone mini 13. Dislocating your thumb to bring up the Control Center is shit. (Reachability and Back Tap are not solutions.)
    - gruez 1y ago
      The internet means it's easy to find "lots" of people for anything. Excluding yourself how many iPhones do you see in the wild have a home button? I'd estimate less than 1 in 20, or 5%. If less than 5% of people are keeping their phones while they're in support, how much e-waste can you possibly divert by allowing third party OS?
      - torstenvl 1y ago
        > Excluding yourself how many iPhones do you see in the wild have a home button? I'd estimate less than 1 in 20, or 5%. If less than 5% of people are keeping their phones while they're in support 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.
oh_my_goodness 1y ago
A spurious justification is not ideal, but it would be acceptable at this point.
slug 1y ago
All my personal and family computers are more than 10 year old, running latest Ubuntu. They have probably slower CPUs than that 8 year old iphone, but can run the latest web and email clients just fine. These are almost all salvaged from e-waste. I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down.
- gruez 1y ago
  >I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down. 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.
  - slug 1y ago
    I just gave you an use case about having family members using old computers for all their needs. If those old phones can continue to be used with software updates not locked down by their original hw vendors, don't see why that is a bad thing. 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.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >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.
torstenvl 1y ago
Cool. So if the device is ostensibly so old and unusable now, what possible commercial rationale could exist for preventing its use for other ends?
- gruez 1y ago
  If you read my comment carefully, you'd see I'm not objecting to regulations that devices must support programming, only to the argument that such regulations will meaningfully reduce e-waste.
  - xerox13ster 1y ago
    You don’t know that because the regulations have never existed. Please try to refrain from unscientific thinking such that there are things you think you can know without experimental verification. This is the thinking of a technological dark age.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >You don’t know that because the regulations have never existed. Please try to refrain from unscientific thinking 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".
wslh 1y ago
The first iPhone is more powerful than the VAX computer my high school used to teach in over fifteen simultaneous terminals.
whycome 1y ago
Weird, did the CPU somehow slow down over time? Did it get tired?
- gruez 1y ago
  https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-qualcomm_snapdragon_801-vs-qualcomm_snapdragon_8_elite https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-qualcomm_snapdrago...
  - whycome 1y ago
    You’re comparing different models? I don’t understand the connection here to a supposed change in performance over time. 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.
dvdkon 1y ago
IoT sensors, thermostats, dashcams, home intercoms, mobile data modems, smart TV dongles... I could name a dozen more products that could have an old phone as their heart, if they were cheap, unlocked, and easier to develop for. 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.
- gruez 1y ago
  >IoT sensors 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.
  - dvdkon 1y ago
    Way to go denying the relevance of multiple established product categories. - 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.
everdrive 1y ago
Those 8 year old phones were plenty fast when they were new. Why did operating system, apps, and websites need to get more bloated? Do they even do anything they didn't (or couldn't) do 8 years ago?
xandrius 1y ago
Approximately nobody is not nobody. 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.
wpm 1y ago
How about 8 year old Macs with Apple Silicon, which are rapidly going to become a thing in just 3 short years, and are the same thing as an iPhone architecturally 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?

by gruez 1y ago

codedokode 1y ago

I also meant microcontrollers. I am sure someone would remove chips from old devices and resell if they were reprogrammable. Also you could use them for your hobby for free.

BenjiWiebe 1y ago
The chips in phones would be horrible to work with - they're too small. Plus, the SoC is much more complicated to deal with than a microcontroller intended to be stand-alone.
gruez 1y ago
Why would anyone go through all that hassle when you can get a ESP8266 from aliexpress for less than $2? The skilled labor cost alone needed to desolder the chips is going to wipe out any savings, not to mention the hassle of fabbing custom PCBs to work with your hodgepodge collection of microcontrollers.
- codedokode 1y ago
  There are countries where people would sit all day desoldering phones if they were paid $2 for each. Also even in my country minimum wage is less than $2/hr (although that is rare).
  - gruez 1y ago
    Note $2 on aliexpress gets you a fully assembled module. If you're trying to repurpose chips after desoldering you still need to sort, test, and resolder them.

mathiaspoint 1y ago

8 year old phones are fine if you run a decent OS on them.

rpastuszak 1y ago

My 8 yo iPhone is perfectly usable, the battery wasn’t expensive or difficult to replace.

gruez 1y ago
I'm not claiming that they're literally unusable, only that they're unusable by most people's standards. Case in point, when was the last time you've seen a touchid iPhone? The last such device was introduced as recently as 2022 (or 2017 if you only count "mainstream" models). The 2022 model is still in support, and 2017 models were still getting security updates as of 5 months ago, yet virtually nobody uses them. If so many people ditched their iPhones while they're in support, what gains could there possibly be to allow people to flash third party ROMs? I'm sure there's some diehard enthusiasts that'd keep it alive, but as I argued above, it's not going to make a meaningful difference.
- torstenvl 1y ago
  Lots of people use the iPhone SE or are holding onto the iPhone mini 13. Dislocating your thumb to bring up the Control Center is shit. (Reachability and Back Tap are not solutions.)
  - gruez 1y ago
    The internet means it's easy to find "lots" of people for anything. Excluding yourself how many iPhones do you see in the wild have a home button? I'd estimate less than 1 in 20, or 5%. If less than 5% of people are keeping their phones while they're in support, how much e-waste can you possibly divert by allowing third party OS?
    - torstenvl 1y ago
      > Excluding yourself how many iPhones do you see in the wild have a home button? I'd estimate less than 1 in 20, or 5%. If less than 5% of people are keeping their phones while they're in support 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.

oh_my_goodness 1y ago

A spurious justification is not ideal, but it would be acceptable at this point.

slug 1y ago

All my personal and family computers are more than 10 year old, running latest Ubuntu. They have probably slower CPUs than that 8 year old iphone, but can run the latest web and email clients just fine. These are almost all salvaged from e-waste. I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down.

gruez 1y ago
>I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down. 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.
- slug 1y ago
  I just gave you an use case about having family members using old computers for all their needs. If those old phones can continue to be used with software updates not locked down by their original hw vendors, don't see why that is a bad thing. 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.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >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.

torstenvl 1y ago

Cool. So if the device is ostensibly so old and unusable now, what possible commercial rationale could exist for preventing its use for other ends?

gruez 1y ago
If you read my comment carefully, you'd see I'm not objecting to regulations that devices must support programming, only to the argument that such regulations will meaningfully reduce e-waste.
- xerox13ster 1y ago
  You don’t know that because the regulations have never existed. Please try to refrain from unscientific thinking such that there are things you think you can know without experimental verification. This is the thinking of a technological dark age.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >You don’t know that because the regulations have never existed. Please try to refrain from unscientific thinking 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".

wslh 1y ago

The first iPhone is more powerful than the VAX computer my high school used to teach in over fifteen simultaneous terminals.

whycome 1y ago

Weird, did the CPU somehow slow down over time? Did it get tired?

gruez 1y ago
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-qualcomm_snapdragon_801-vs-qualcomm_snapdragon_8_elite https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-qualcomm_snapdrago...
- whycome 1y ago
  You’re comparing different models? I don’t understand the connection here to a supposed change in performance over time. 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.

dvdkon 1y ago

IoT sensors, thermostats, dashcams, home intercoms, mobile data modems, smart TV dongles... I could name a dozen more products that could have an old phone as their heart, if they were cheap, unlocked, and easier to develop for. 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.

gruez 1y ago
>IoT sensors 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.
- dvdkon 1y ago
  Way to go denying the relevance of multiple established product categories. - 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.

everdrive 1y ago

Those 8 year old phones were plenty fast when they were new. Why did operating system, apps, and websites need to get more bloated? Do they even do anything they didn't (or couldn't) do 8 years ago?

xandrius 1y ago

Approximately nobody is not nobody. 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.

wpm 1y ago

How about 8 year old Macs with Apple Silicon, which are rapidly going to become a thing in just 3 short years, and are the same thing as an iPhone architecturally 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?