iPhone 5 or earlier I've got an old iphone 4S on iOS 8. What to do with it?

[myusernamedoesnotmatter]

I was looking for old stuff in my house and I found a family member's old iPhone 4S. The battery is good (I actually found two, the other had a spicy pillow in it, so I got rid of the battery), and it is running iOS 8. I know the iPhone 4S can run iOS 9, but I've heard that iOS 9 runs terribly on it. The only idea I have to use it is to jailbreak it (I have never jail-broken a device and honestly malware makes me nervous to do it). I know how to program, but I don't have a mac. Do y'all have any ideas?

Edit: I tried my best to jaibreak it and none of the (really shady Chinese) software was functional. I tried TaiG which is broken, and it seems that pango8/PPJailbreak is macOS only (I don't have a mac) for 8.1.2. bummer.

 

[rambo47]

The 4S is now 12 years old and Apple dropped support 10 years ago. Connectivity will be severely limited as carriers retire old cellular frequencies. You can still use WiFi though. Not much you can do with such an old model. If you can accept the sever limitations and if you have a carrier that will activate it, you can still use the 4S. Just don't expect the bells and whistles of the newer models as the hardware will prevent many modern-era features. I've never jailbroken an iPhone and have no interest in doing so.

 

[myusernamedoesnotmatter]

The 4S is now 12 years old and Apple dropped support 10 years ago. Connectivity will be severely limited as carriers retire old cellular frequencies. You can still use WiFi though. Not much you can do with such an old model. If you can accept the sever limitations and if you have a carrier that will activate it, you can still use the 4S. Just don't expect the bells and whistles of the newer models as the hardware will prevent many modern-era features. I've never jailbroken an iPhone and have no interest in doing so.

RIP 3G 🥺 you will be missed (I wasn't going to put a SIM on it anyways)

 

[NSMacGuru]

Just spitballing here... I wonder if it would be recognized by certain apps to use as a webcam for multi-cam streaming? I have an old iPhone 5 I was thinking of using for my son, who wants to dabble in game streaming.

 

[eyoungren]

I was looking for old stuff in my house and I found a family member's old iPhone 4S. The battery is good (I actually found two, the other had a spicy pillow in it, so I got rid of the battery), and it is running iOS 8. I know the iPhone 4S can run iOS 9, but I've heard that iOS 9 runs terribly on it. The only idea I have to use it is to jailbreak it (I have never jail-broken a device and honestly malware makes me nervous to do it). I know how to program, but I don't have a mac. Do y'all have any ideas?

iPod perhaps. I've heard that the 4S has one of the better DACs.

As to jailbreaking, that's a misunderstanding right there. Jailbreaking does not use malware - although if you're dumb enough not to look after your phone and what you do with it, malware can affect it.

Jailbreaking uses exploits. While malware does too, the Secretary of Congress has ruled that jailbreaking is a legal exemption to the DMCA. Therefore, legit jailbreaks are not malware.

All of that aside, things started changing for jailbreaking around iOS 8. I'm not sure Cydia (the appstore for jailbreak tweaks and apps) is functional now and a lot of stuff is likely to be broken. Some devs make tweaks/apps and are never heard from again. Servers go down, etc.

If you want to try it for the practice, I'd suggest a visit here:

r/jailbreak

This subreddit is for any and all iOS jailbreaking news, questions, etc. Got a question about iOS jailbreaking? You're in the right place! For additional jailbreak help, join our Discord at https://discord.gg/jb.

www.reddit.com

 

[myusernamedoesnotmatter]

iPod perhaps. I've heard that the 4S has one of the better DACs.

As to jailbreaking, that's a misunderstanding right there. Jailbreaking does not use malware - although if you're dumb enough not to look after your phone and what you do with it, malware can affect it.

Jailbreaking uses exploits. While malware does too, the Secretary of Congress has ruled that jailbreaking is a legal exemption to the DMCA. Therefore, legit jailbreaks are not malware.

All of that aside, things started changing for jailbreaking around iOS 8. I'm not sure Cydia (the appstore for jailbreak tweaks and apps) is functional now and a lot of stuff is likely to be broken. Some devs make tweaks/apps and are never heard from again. Servers go down, etc.

If you want to try it for the practice, I'd suggest a visit here:

r/jailbreak

This subreddit is for any and all iOS jailbreaking news, questions, etc. Got a question about iOS jailbreaking? You're in the right place! For additional jailbreak help, join our Discord at https://discord.gg/jb.

www.reddit.com

I tried jailbreaking as a noob and none of the software worked. I'll update the original post

 

[eyoungren]

I tried jailbreaking as a noob and none of the software worked. I'll update the original post

Yeah, things started breaking around the launch of iOS 8. One major dev (BiteSMS) walked away from his company/product and many other devs just moved on.

After iOS 9.1 jailbreaks became semi-untethered and lots of people just lost interest. I had stuff for years that Apple has only gotten around to in the last couple of versions, but eventually even I gave up on trying to keep iOS 9.0.1 functional on my 6s+.

I won't say that I'll never jailbreak again, but things have got to change for the better in that scene before I go back to it on a primary device.