EDITED FOR CONTENT 10/26/2024

I'm a bit of a hoarder, I hate to throw anything anyway if I think I can jury rig some kind of after-life utility out of it. this comes in handy frequently enough that I can personally ignore the many downsides (I have both more time and drawer space than I do money to purchase new things).

the one place that this does not hold very often is old cell phones and tablets. I still have nearly every cellphone I've had since ~2004. from grey flip phones to those weird krazor things with the tiny keyboard to mxfirst smart phone (some kinda droid) as well as several old kindles (both e-ink and regular) a couple post-hdd ipods and a single ipad from a decade ago that I swiped out of the dumpster at the place I was working.

none of these devices are easily repurposed, but my hoarding instincts cannot allow me to throw them away. The thought of them rotting away in some landfill, leaching god knows what kind of mutagenic substances into the earth is a bit too unpleasant.

All the old laptops, pcs, thin clients etc have all relatively easily been pressed back into service with a bit of time and a resource-light distro to give them a new lease on life, but there is, to my knowledge, no equivalent procedure for these phones and tablets that doesn't require major surgery. the newer devices probably don't need any kind of hardware modification but it is by no means a trivial procedure.

i have adequate tools and possiply enough know-how to get one of the real antiques up and running as a not-phone but I don't know how many I would break before figuring it out.

I have a drawer full of devices that are basically paperweights. even the real old flip phones could become useful as, for example, a simple controller for a weather station or a minimal garden irrigation system. the newer devices and the tablets could easily accomplish many home automation tasks at or near modern performance expactations.

These things could be used to help offset the environmental costs of renewable energy infrastracture by negating the need to extract additional resources from the earth to manufacture some of the devices required. A 10 year old ipad has enough oomph to become the brains of a modest, but fully adequate, home solar setup, as just one example.

Think about a home autamation setup that uses many distributed and modest cotrollers to achieve several tasks. you really don't need all the power of an alexa device to dim your lights or control your thermostat when you're away. Even something as modest as those infamous nokia phones has the capacity to read a sensor and send adjustment commands to, for example, a thermostat or light dimming circuit.

But these devices are not designed for reuse or a long life. They're designed for fast and cheap manuafacture, rigid and inflexible use, dictated not by the consumer but by the producers, and an economy that requires fast turnover of consumer goods to maintain growth.

We're on a deserted island, slowly starving, looking longingly at the pallet of canned beans we can't eat because we forgot to pack a can opener. Except it's even worse, because you can open a can with a rock. you can't jailbreak an iphone with a rock.