[gruez]

>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]

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]

>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.

[slug]

I think we are confusing the perfect from the good enough.

If there's an ecosystem that allows converting old hw, lot of people will less resources can make reuse of that e-waste.

Installing ubuntu nowadays is a few clicks that anyone minimally proficient on computers is able to do, not much more difficult than installing a browser "or an app on their phone".

Sure, there's "dozen of apps" for that iOS/Android, but if the HW+OS combination is no longer supported, how can we continue using it or update it ? $50 might not seem a lot to you or me, but it's a lot to many people in the world, specially with something they already have. Using cloud for inference, which is also not free or private, bringing again dependency from some entity, where local HW is perfectly capable of basic object detection. I personally have "professional" PoE cameras with built-in object detection for surveilance, but see a use case where cheap access can also be useful.

I'm still mystified why there's so much push back from people to own and make use of old HW for whatever purpose they see fit.