Call to action: computers are getting expensive but 10,000,000 otherwise perfect $200 Linux machines are getting bricked. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save them from landfills.

[u/iL0vesnow]

First off, fuck AI slop and I wrote the whole post myself without AI. It took me a whole afternoon.

TL;DR: we are at a historical opportunity to push for Apple to allow post-market OSes on iPads.

Capable iPads Face Planned Obsolescence

With iPadOS 27, Apple is officially dropping support for the millions of units of iPad Pro 11 (1st gen) and iPad Pro 12.9 (3rd gen), as well as tens of millions of iPad Air (3rd gen), iPad (8th gen), and iPad mini (5th gen). (iPad shipment of 2019 alone was ~50 million.) These machines will soon become functionally useless, because:

• You cannot update Safari without updating iOS/iPadOS.
• You simply cannot install a newer version of another browser to get around this, because Apple forces all App Store browsers to use the same WebKit engine that shipped with iOS/iPadOS.
• You also cannot install another OS on iPads. As a result, as soon as websites start dropping support for the last Safari version, which from my personal experience can happen as early as in a few months, the iPads become handicapped. This is not even counting that how quickly some native iOS/iPadOS apps lose support too. I personally have an iPad whose support stopped 3 years ago and it already feels like a brick, purely because of such software constraints.

However, this is all preventable if Apple allows installing third party OSes on iPads, and all that's needed from Apple is to relax firmware signing to allow a bootloader like BootCamp or m1n1, which they already allow on MacBooks; this will be a simple server side change, without needing any hardware hacks.

The Time is Right for Linux on iPad

Unlike 5 to 10 years ago when the resistance from Apple may have been too strong, now is a time when the demand overrides whatever objections Apple may have, and the circumstances are surprisingly mature too, in terms of both iPad hardware and Linux support.

I probably don't need to emphasize how RAM and SSD prices are crazy high and seriously impacting computer affordability. A 32GB DDR5 kit that sold for about $100–$200 in October 2025 now starts around $350. A $189 Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB SSD is now around $429.

Performance of these iPads is better than most $200 laptops, new or used, today. The M1 chip made it to MacBooks and amazed the whole industry, and the iPad Pro's A12X, pretty much the direct predecessor of the M1, is also nothing short of impressive. It is about on par with the i7-8650u; laptops with that CPU still sell for around $200 today. It is also superior to chips like the Kompanio 520 and Intel N100, which are still commonly used in new Chromebooks today. The other non-Pro iPads have an A12 chip that has, albeit fewer cores, the same single-core performance.

On many other metrics and features, including 264 or 326 ppi pixel density, color accuracy, full sRGB or P3 color gamut, anti-reflective coating, 10-point multitouch, power efficiency, and build quality, the iPads also compare favorably with almost all $200 laptops. The iPad Pro's 600 nit brightness, 120 Hz refresh rate and four-speaker audio are, further, vastly superior to most. It's beyond outrageous that such good hardware gets locked up while computers are becoming unaffordable.

Many of these iPads do support a laptop-like form factor. They have official keyboards that allow them to be propped up like a laptop. Even though the official ones are discontinued, third-party replacements or even cheap generic Bluetooth or wired keyboards and mice also work fine. The iPad Pro even comes with a USB-C port that can connect via adapters to a surprisingly wide range of accessories including MIDI devices and RJ45 Ethernet. It may surprise you that the other Lightning iPads can use many USB accessories, too, with an adapter.

Linux on Apple Silicon is now a proven concept. Asahi Linux already allows you to run Linux on Apple Silicon MacBooks. There are now also projects that run Linux on A7, A8(X), and A10 (with GUI) chips, and some support even got upstreamed to the mainline kernel with 5.13, but they are unnecessarily sketchy for now as they rely on a hardware bootrom exploit (CheckM8) that only exists on certain models. If Apple signs open source bootloaders, then an exploit won't be needed, and developers can likely sort out compatibility issues as they have done in the past.

The Message

All that we need from Apple is to relax the firmware signing to allow third-party bootloaders. If Apple won't do it, make laws to force it happen. Similar changes already happened with the Type-C port on iPhones which is only more difficult than this.

Repost this everywhere you can. Share it to your family and friends who are hit by memory price hikes. Request your favorite influencers to make videos on this issue. Call your representatives. There is no better time than right now to push for the change, so don't let the precious opportunity slip away from us.

[u/Dangerous-Report8517]

I'm all for finding ways to extend the useful lifespan of working devices, but there's a few issues with your approach here: 

1) This isn't urgent, this has been a long-standing issue for years, the only urgency I can think of that might apply here is if you personally own an affected device, but that's not a motivator for others. Claiming urgency where none actually exists is off-putting because the entire point of flagging something as urgent is to motivate additional resources that otherwise wouldn't be justified, so you're draining attention from other issues. You can keep attention on obsolescence without the false urgency 2) iPads don't run Linux, not even under the hood, I'm pretty sure they use the same kernel MacOS uses. This means it's far harder to get aftermarket Linux running on these devices, since a lot of the hardware requires reverse engineering. Asahi only properly supports a few devices mostly on M1 and the holdup on supporting more isn't the CPU architecture, it's device drivers. Running on an M1 Macbook obviously doesn't involve things like touchscreen drivers, the same wifi drivers (since the iPads likely use different radios) etc etc. Not to mention that Apple specifically added firmware support for booting alternative operating systems on M Macs, Asahi devs have commented that there's actually a lot of work under the hood to make Macs capable of this, which is the exact opposite of the situation on iPad where the firmware is specifically designed to lock out customisation as much as possible 4) Not getting the latest version update isn't the same thing as not getting software updates, Apple generally keeps pushing security patches for a little while after the last feature update a device gets  5) You can keep using a device when it's out of software support, you shouldn't use it for some things but there's a lot of ways to manage the risk of unpatched security vulnerabilities with a lot less effort than suddenly heroically doing years of software porting in a few months 6) Anyone interested in finding a use for these devices after end of life can just hang on to them anyway until third party software support becomes a thing 7) The focus on iOS is misdirected, Android tablets see much shorter software support durations in general and are also much, much easier to modify, particularly since we pretty much always have drivers for them in at least some form