Something like this would solve 80% of the problem; sure you might have to negotiate a bit on exactly how it would be implemented, but being able to repurpose old but quite capable hardware would be wonderful.
I still have an old WiiU in my entertainment center exactly because of the robust homebrew community behind it. It has no doubt saved many WiiU consoles from going into the bin.
I have an iPad Mini 2 mounted on my fridge showing our google calendar so me and my wife always know what's planned each week, there is something really cool about making something useful out of old tech.
At the very least, it's gratifying to know you saved the equipment from the landfill. Saving money is also highly gratifying the older you get (I find).
Same. I have an iPad 2 mounted in my bathroom plugged in to a timer so it doesn't just charge all day. I use it for calendar and check on my fledgling stock portfolio. That's all it is good for. Time to jailbreak it I suppose, but wish I could install Ubuntu.
I use our old iPad mounted to the fridge with velcro command strips to interface with Home Assistant. I thought the wife was going to hate it, but she loves it more than I do.
I got one of these for it[0], so it attaches directly to the fridge - then I just run a 3m long lightning cable along the side of the fridge in slim trunking
Only in the warped, "5 years is ancient!" sort of compressed timeframe of consumer electronics.
It's not hard at all to find a wide range of parts for 20-30 year old vehicles - though quite a bit of this is due to the OEM not being able to lock down physical parts. I expect it will be far harder to maintain current cars in 30 years than a 1990s car today, due to exactly this issue: "Well, we don't build parts, but you also can't replace a door handle with one that doesn't support VIN-pairing, and you can't use a used one because it's VIN-pared to that other car so... would you like a loyalty discount on a new one?"
Your phone has all your personal information and has the ability to record conversations or take video. All of which is secured on the assumption that you can’t just replace a component with a compromised one. And we do know that sophisticated state actors do exist and are willing to go after journalists, dissidents even protestors.
We need a way for these devices to be repaired or supported longer but allowing any random component is not the answer.
> allowing any random component is not the answer.
Leave that up to the owners of the device, they know better what they want than you do. Will there be scam attempts? Sure there will, like there are already. Inform about that risk - without exaggerating for monetary purposes - and let the customer decide. Not you, not the manufacturer, not the government.
How would owners possibly know that a compromised component has been added ?
And we have decades of experience that the majority of people simply do not care enough to learn about the intricacies of their products and would prefer vendors do that on their behalf.
> How would owners possibly know that a compromised component has been added ?
Some will, some won't. They don't need you or some other individual or company or institution to decide for them they are too ignorant to decide for themselves where to go for replacement parts. If you're so worried over these problems just take the thing to Apple to have it repaired but leave open the option for others to get their own parts and repair it themselves or have someone repair it for them. The same goes for anyone else, it is not as if the option to use 'authorised' repair services will disappear.
Cars that are 30 years old don't connect to the Internet in general or cellular networks specifically (for core functionality). Desire as they might, Nokia couldn't meaningfully support a 3360 today. There's no AMPS or IS-136 networks for the phone to connect to.
Dell doesn't support thirty year old OptiPlex PCs, Intel doesn't support thirty year old CPUs. These don't have any serial pairings, they're just old and long out of production.
Ford isn't going to support a thirty year old Mustang either. Part manufacturers might still make compatible parts but that's more about sub-components being shared among many years of product models. You could find a power supply for an old OptiPlex because it uses an ATX connector on the motherboard. You might find a NOS battery for a 3360 but that's only because a battery conformed to a spec shared among many models.
Out of support smartphones will see their certificate roots expire making using the Internet not practical. This is true of Android and iOS. I don't know why ten years of active support for a very complicated device somehow isn't good enough.
Or it could be that the addressable audience is larger for OEM car parts. Many more people have the hand tools necessary to work on cars. Not many people have ball grid desolderers needed to replace chips in highly dense pocket electronics.
No. Most people don't. Just like most people don't work on their cars themselves anymore.
But it still has an impact on "cost of paying someone to do it." If you can only take your car to the dealer, it's a lot more expensive than independent shops.
Also, have you worked on electronics much? Very rarely is the problem something that requires BGA rework.
I've had a half-dozen appliance failures that required support in the past 10 years. Funny enough, most of them were made by a large korean conglomerate that also makes phones.
I had an original iPhone SE that I intended to keep until they pried it from my cold dead hands.
But keeping it stopped being tenable rather sooner than I expected. Shortly after Apple released the first version of iOS that couldn't be installed on it, app developers started shipping versions that required that new version, and shortly after that they started killswitching older versions of their apps. I was able to say "good riddance" the first few times that happened, but once it started happening to apps I consider indispensable, I ended up deciding that I didn't actually want to live in a parallel universe where Steve Jobs won the fight to not have 3rd-party apps on iOS.
RMS has a point about how you don't really own any software or devices that depend on a closed-source cloud service to function.
You basically have a device which can and will be hacked by attackers. One thing to keep in mind is while some malicious code infections are obvious (typically using lots of CPU and/or GPU), others are not because their main purpose is to look for sensitive information and/or spread to other devices.
My main point is using devices which do not receive security updates is not safe. This goes for the iPhone, Android phones, Windows PCs (this is why using Windows 7 on a machine connected to a network is a horrible idea), MacOS, Linux, etc.
No security updates = do not connect the device to ANY network.
Am I right in saying some Apple hardware is now a brick because the initial setup requires creating/logging in with an AppleId, but Apple no longer will let those old insecure devices login?
Am I right in saying some Apple hardware is now a brick
Not the ones I use.
I use a 2008 iPhone 3 (15 years old) as an iPod daily with no problems, and a launch day iPad (2010 - 14 years ago) for reading e-mail with no problems. Plus a couple of shuffles I listen to in bed.
All sync with the latest version of macOS and Apple's Music program with no problems.
I don't think any of them force you to have an Apple ID.
There are millions of bricked Apple devices out there though because they are iCloud locked. If someone loses their iPhone or donates it or sells it without removing their Apple ID, then it is literally impossible right now on newer devices to break into them. The parts can't be sold as they all have IDs burned into their ICs that stop them being reused.
A friend last year who owned a bar gave me a huge box of lost iPhones for which the owners could not be found/reached. I could only get into one of them. Rest were expensive doorstops.
Why not just take them to Apple or third party to be recycled.
Allowing you to profit from someone’s lost iPhone invites criminal behaviour and potentially allows you to access private information that is still on the phone. No one at a bar asked for that.
It's more nuanced than that, though. I try to be the most ethical person in the room. I don't want to make a profit from someone else's loss, but the bar owner had tried to find the owners and these were the ones that couldn't be traced.
I totally understand the motivation with setting the phones up like this. In theory it should stop theft if there is literally no incentive to steal someone's phone because nothing can be re-used. I just wanted to flash them back to factory and use one of them because I was homeless and needed a phone.
I would have happily returned them to Apple for recycling (have you seen their iPhone recycling machine?!), but someone set fire to the building where I'd stored them and so they all went up in flames...
This is actually a common misconception, but you don't have to sign into an Apple ID to setup any device (except maybe the watch? But definitely not phones or tablets.) You have the option to skip the step.
I think people just assume it's required because when Microsoft implemented their shittier version of it they made it required.
Related—I still use my old iPhone 5s with Libby, WNYC, and SoundCloud apps—all for streaming audio.
SoundCloud made an update last year, and something broke. I emailed the support line at SoundCloud and it was shortly fixed. Can’t say they ‘support’ iPhone 5’s, but they didn’t balk.
Unfortunately we already had to retire the iPhone 7 in our family. It was used as a byob device for corporate email to keep separate from actual personal device. No longer supported by those apps.
According to Apple. How about releasing those "obsolete" iPads so Linux distros can be created for them so they won't just go in the landfill? Extend their lives beyond Apple.
