Re:Why get an expensive Pi when I have an old phone?
by gambiting on Saturday November 14, 2026 @06:26AM
(#50496134)
>>Herein lies the issue. I don't know fuck all about phones. I don't want to. They are engineered to keep me out, and that is a pain in the ass I don't want to deal with when doing hardware work.
I mean, you do know we're on a forum called hacker news, right?
In most cases it's not some magic voodoo process that you need an LLM for, it's the first result on Google and one command to run or in some cases you just hold two buttons together when booting up and click the unlock button.
Like, I completely understand your perspective and desire to have things which "just work"(I'm in the same boat a lot of the time lately) but like, let's be realistic - rooting an old phone and running some software on it is really not a big deal, I'd hope especially for people on here.
>I’ve unlocked and rooted the Redmi
Herein lies the issue. I don't know fuck all about phones. I don't want to. They are engineered to keep me out, and that is a pain in the ass I don't want to deal with when doing hardware work. I want to own something that works the second I get it and doesn't fight me the entire way. Sure, I could let an LLM guide me through it or even do it for me, but why bother when the whole point of the hardware is for me to fuck off and use it as a subscriber to the OEM and carrier? This is tedium, removed by further spending. Not to mention documentation - what bullshit is the OEM hiding in their board or firmware thats going to ruin my day? I'm sure that some of these devices are great for reuse as a self contained server with media and modem, but _is my old phone going to do this?_
I'm not gonna spend $50 on ewaste to _try_ to do something unless I _want_ to use _that_ ewaste (old keyboards, old toys? :3). Old phones are a non-sequitur because, again, they're engineered to keep me out.