This might be quite UK centric and is a very dry answer but old smartphones should be donated to asylum seekers.
I remember reading an article a year or so ago about how asylum live on the welfare afforded to them and their phone bills (a necessary expense) were a huge chunk of it, basically all of them paying well more than I do on my PAYG for similar service. What I see must be the issue is that, without a phone of their own, the cheapest short term option is to sign up for an option that provides a phone.
This immediately limits them from the ultra low budget GiffGaff/Asda/etc type options and will very frequently tie them down to a much less budget friendly carrier if not straight into a contract.
"Secure the Call is a 501(c)(3) charity that provides free 911 emergency-only cell phone to Domestic Violence Centers, Senior Citizen Centers, Police and Sheriff departments."
I don't understand this. If their problem is that they HAVE TO use Giffgaff, I can't sympathise with that - I use it myself and love the service Giffgaff provides.
So this doesn't make sense to me - it doesn't feel they're forced into a corner at all. I'd rather sell the phone and donate money to asylum-seeker supporting charities.
Their problem is that they _can't_ use SIM only options as they need a phone (potentially multiple) too, so it's cheaper in the immediate term to sign up to a £15-20 a month plan that provides a (really crappy) phone than a similar £7 a month one which doesn't.
Of course, on a purely rational level seeing as we're talking about iPhones as opposed to just phones in general, the best option would be sell the iPhone and use the proceeds from it to buy and donate multiple cheaper (but sturdy) Androids
Old smartphones are good as security cameras: they have a nice camera and wi-fi of course, but also could be much better than traditional security cams as they also can have 3G/4G networking and a battery, in case power/internet is cut for example. They could also record or play sounds, like an alarm. I have an iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 doing that. However, it's not easy to find an app for such a use, I'm planning to open-source my custom one + setup.
However, BE CAREFUL, devices with batteries MAY BE DANGEROUS. I have had so many bulging/swollen batteries, even with devices just stored in a drawer. No incident or fires yet fortunately. So always keep an eye on them!
I agree with your use case and I am interested in your solution. So many functions to add like face recognition, record only on motion detection (what is threshold)--object size/distance, send alerts, attempt license plate scan, etc
CCTV processing is often done server-side (ZoneMinder, Sinobi, ...), but nowadays "old" devices could do some stuff too. Motion detection is maybe not that intensive, but is hard to pull off (a car passing in the street might change the light on the walls/ceiling, it should not trigger the alarm, dogs/cats, ...). On iOS, you could do face detection using some Apple provided CoreImage components.
A few things I have been missing in the current apps/software: simple way to turn on/off (I had to open/kill apps), use less bandwidth (by pushing to the server only when motion is detected for example, MJPEG stream was about 200Kb/s), play an alarm sound when motion is detected, being able to interact remotely with the device like saying something out loud (if kid came home, triggered the motion detection and forgot to turn off the camera), ...
I wouldn't go for license plates though: you should not point a security camera to the outside/street!
There are also a few open-source projects with this kind feature: StreamIt for example (https://github.com/twittemb/StreamIt), which also provides an MJPEG stream.
Not an answer, but this seems like it would be a fun, and fairly painless side-project. I've never tried writing something for streaming video over a network so it seems like it would be a good learning experience.
I run repair shops for a living, so I can tell you the #1 thing people do is give them to their kids or other family members.
Trade-ins with carriers are big as well, and of course selling them will still net some money as well. You can sell to local stores or online at sites like Swappa.
People who aren't as technical as the typical HN reader often don't know that iPhone, iPad, and laptop batteries are replaceable, and it's usually relatively cheap to do so. Please educate your friends and family members!
Donate. There are a lot of organizations that collect secondhand phones for people in need, including the homeless, refugees, people escaping domestic abuse, and the like.
Every time I upgrade I sell my old phone on eBay. I keep my hardware in good shape and I’m often surprised at the resale value after 2-3 years. Feels great to recover some of the cost of the upgrade!
I use them. I've actually never bought a smart phone (nor gotten one for "free" due to some contract) because there seem to be so many people willing to stop using functional phones. Currently I'm using an iPhone 5c and don't have any upgrade plans anytime soon.
I gave them to my parents. I also still have an old iPhone 5 that I bring to the rock climbing gym and use on the WiFi because I won’t be as upset if it plummets to its death from my (zipper) pocket or gets crushed somehow.
With the ability to receive phone calls on linked devices over WiFi, the old phones are still useful where the risk to the device is unusually high.
I have an old iPad2 and I'm honestly amazed at how bricked it is at this point just from the passage of time.
Recently I turned it on after a long while, asking myself this post's exact question.
I went into the browser, but I got SSL errors accessing Google, Apple, etc. Okay...
Then I went to the settings app to see if there are updates, but the device is obviously unsupported at this point.
Finally I went to the App Store to try and install some picture frame app or something, but that was stupid of me since I already knew Apple certs were no longer valid in my obsolete OS.
Bottom line: It's trash with a touch screen. Galaxies are much better in that aspect. Rooting them provides a world of possibilities.
I disagree, I also have an iPad 2 and it works perfectly fine for watching youtube and browsing. I can't say I have any issues with downloading apps either, of course most new ones wont be supported.
We've had an iPhone 3gs (30-pin) plugged into a speaker playing music in our son's room for years. He plays the violin, so listening to the piece he's working on and previous pieces is useful and calming for him.
I had to use my old iPhone 6 as a backup recently when water got into my 6S and the touch screen became erratic and had dead spots on it. Took a few days for it to get repaired (sister-in-law's husband did it for free so I wasn't going to complain about how long it took) so I had to use the old one during that time.
I mostly only get new ones when there are serious issues with the old one, so generally they just get recycled. My first, a 3GS, did last many years with a white noise app as a overqualified noise machine in the kids' room but even it is finally dead. One of my wife's was still in good condition at one point and we did resell it.
I use my old iPhone as an international travel phone. I keep the Messages, Mail apps, but add things like WhatsApp, VPN, Skype, Google Translator, Measurement Converters, GoEuro for use when I travel overseas. Bonus points if you have to turn it on when you get back to the US and it doens't have many apps on it.
I pass them down to my kids as iPod Touches. Then I mostly forget about the previous generation.
I'm hesitant to replace their iPhone 6's with our iPhone 7's. It doesn't feel like an upgrade. Our 7's have had issues since the beginning, and the headphone jack is very valuable to the kids.
I'm going the opposite way, I'm trying to get rid of the 6s. I've had nothing but bad luck with touch disease and NAND solder joints breaking over and over.
The whole early build of the 6 and 6+ is cursed. I hope Apple loses that class action lawsuit in a super-bad way.
I've jailbroken a couple and given a few more away to family that otherwise wouldn't have paid to upgrade.
Would love to run little servers and other dumb stuff on them, but I never have. Always felt like it'd be fun to run a server/Python process on my older phones.
I thought about using mine as a Fire TV remote because the one that comes with it is so bad, but the battery life just isn't good enough (and I don't want to have to always plug it in after use - I keep my remotes in a tray inside my coffee table).
I have several phones doing sterling duty as paperweights and look forward to suggestions. One disappointment of our market system has been the failure to produce new apps designed to run on older hardware.
It’s also kind of tragic that companies stop providing software updates for older working devices, or allow open source to fill in. I can pull my PC from 20 years ago out of a closet and reasonably expect to run Linux on it, yet there is no equivalent for my 8 year old iPad.
I created an itunes account for my daughter when she was two months old. The phone stays on a charger in her room and is used for nothing but playing apple music when she's sleeping.
Not really considering the battery is not charging constantly (contrary to popular fear-mongering, once a phone is at 100% and left plugged in, the phone will simply run off the power and disconnect the battery).
Sell the old one - I get around $500 back every year from Craigslist when I upgrade. If that’s too much of a hassle Apple will buy it back from you for a little less.
I remember reading an article a year or so ago about how asylum live on the welfare afforded to them and their phone bills (a necessary expense) were a huge chunk of it, basically all of them paying well more than I do on my PAYG for similar service. What I see must be the issue is that, without a phone of their own, the cheapest short term option is to sign up for an option that provides a phone.
This immediately limits them from the ultra low budget GiffGaff/Asda/etc type options and will very frequently tie them down to a much less budget friendly carrier if not straight into a contract.