What to do with an old iPad
110 comments
·September 5, 2025nugzbunny
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).
Nextgrid
> 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.
tombert
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.
heavyset_go
> 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.
op00to
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.
lucb1e
> 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
trillic
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
```null
pdntspa
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
lucb1e
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
Retr0id
Closer to 10 at peaks, but a lot of sites are just fragile.
troupo
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
wzdd
I clicked and got a Cloudflare error page, said "I hope it isn't 'run a website'", and then visited the comments...
repparw
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
null
gizajob
iPad now resting as molten metal and glass in the corner of the room.
swinglock
Well, it's telling me:
502
Browser Working
Cloudflare Working
odb.ar Host Error
owenmakes
Tunnel fell down, I suspect connection issue while I was sleeping. iPad was still running the server locally and unplugged from power.
owenmakes
I actually delegated DNS to Cloudflare when nic.ar wouldn't take the localhost.run domain!
somat
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.
imglorp
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.
derriz
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.
somat
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.
jraph
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.
heavyset_go
Check out waypipe[1] if you haven't.
KaiserPro
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.
fragmede
oh man, between mosh and xpra at university, I thought that's how the future was gonna be.
bitwize
It's called HTTP+HTML+CSS+JavaScript :)
social_quotient
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.
owenmakes
Woah, this way cooler than what I did
mattmaroon
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.
owenmakes
The tunnel disconnected somehow. No idea what happened, cause the iPad was still running the server correctly, maybe network issue.
zb3
I remember Cloudflare's job was to cache the page back in the day.. is it still the case?
piinbinary
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)
kevincox
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)
pmarreck
I wish Apple would just unlock these things once they stop supporting them. It's such a waste of hardware otherwise.
jmpman
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.
pmarreck
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.
fsflover
Less people would buy new iPads, so Apple won't do this unless forced by law and the right to repair movement.
quotemstr
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.
hn92726819
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.
twinspop
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.
SoftTalker
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.
hn92726819
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 :)
nopelynopington
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
Tade0
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.
nopelynopington
These iPads I'm using are ipad2, well over a decade at this point
spectre3d
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.
nickthegreek
I use several for home assistant dashboards and haven’t run into this issue. Possibly an undersized power brick?
kjkjadksj
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.
imglorp
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.
owenmakes
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.
esafak
Apple should open their tablets after they stop supporting them.
MBCook
And what OS would that even be? I’m not aware of any others.
wpm
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.
Retr0id
There's no reason Linux couldn't run on M1 iPads, aside from the fact the bootloader isn't unlockable like on macbooks.
numpad0
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.
curvaturearth
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.
sbinnee
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.
wodenokoto
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.
mediumsmart
Bad gateway - I am probably in the wrong country on the wrong internet at the wrong time.
edoceo
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.
seriocomic
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 :(
amelius
> 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.
Coming back with my own blog (hosted on iPad 2) after asking here the same question