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by smoldesu 1090 days ago
Maybe. Apple doesn't let you put third-party OSes on iPhones or iPads, it's unclear what would happen if they did.

It would probably start with something niche like a barebones Linux port, but then it might turn into an Asahi-style project that does give the user a perfectly normal user experience. Maybe people start shipping CalyxOS-style hardened iOS distributions for people who want to further neuter Apple's control over their system. Or maybe people reverse-engineer a Vulkan driver onto the hardware and use iPads as low-power ASICs. The sky is really the limit, here.
1 comments
scarface_74 1090 days ago
What’s “unclear”? A modern web browser wouldn’t be any more performant than a safari is in 2023 on any pre-64 bit iOS device.

Not that 32-bit or 64-bit by itself makes a difference. But the devices were dreadfully slow and RAM constrained by todays standards.

Which modern browser engine do you real think would work decently on such a device?

Besides that, no pre- 2012 iOS devices supported 4G and the carriers are dropping 3G support completely in the US by the end of the year.

Apple hasn’t abandoned any 64 bit post 2013 device yet. It reduced a security update for the iPhone 5s this year.

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smoldesu 1090 days ago
> But the devices were dreadfully slow and RAM constrained by todays standards.

Yeh. That's why people turn them into DNLA servers or FTP heads or motion sensors or security cameras or weather machines, spotifyd servers, Docker playgrounds, RC cars, GPIO controllers, home assistants, esoteric K8s nodes, et. al.. There's plenty of things you can do with hardware you don't intend to directly interact with, things that the iPhone is perfectly suited to do.

> Which modern browser engine do you real think would work decently on such a device?

Webkit? You can still build it for 32-bit arches, I don't really see what the holdup is. Firefox could squeeze into ~100mb of memory if you're light on tabs, and Chrome would... well, run. With a little help from swap space.

> Besides that, no pre- 2012 iOS devices supported 4G and the carriers are dropping 3G support completely in the US by the end of the year.

That's fine. If you want to use iOS, use iOS. Running the entire iOS userland would be a complete waste of CPU cycles if you wanted to just use it as a homelab.

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scarface_74 1090 days ago
> Webkit? You can still build it for 32-bit arches, I don't really see what the holdup is. Firefox could squeeze into ~100mb of memory if you're light on tabs, and Chrome would... well, run. With a little help from swap space.

If you tried to use swap on any older iOS device the storage would rapidly fail. Those devices had storage that was never designed for swap.

These are the minimum system requirements for running Firefox on Linux.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/114.0.1/system-require...

And you think WebKit would run on it or Chromium?

Apple hasn’t updated or supported WebKit for 32 bit processors for years and from what I can tell neither does Chromium or Firefox

How well do you think a 256MB RAM, 500Mhz processor will run Firefox and be able to access todays web?

The first iPhone introduce in 2007 had the performance of a 1997 iMac. By 2010, you weren’t even up to the speed of 1Ghz processor that came out in 2001. iOS devices didn’t reach anywhere near turn of the century PC performance until 2012 with the 1Ghz dual core iPhone 5.

That would also make a horrible DLNA server and god forbid you needed any transcoding. My old 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo from 2010 could barely handle Plex by 2017 with any moderately complex videos.

You can buy a $50 cheap Android phone today that would run rings around it or a $100 Raspberry PI or Windows stick.

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