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What to do with an old iPad

I recently inherited my parents’ old iPad 2. It had iOS 9 on it and was barely usable, in part due to how slow it was but mostly because of old SSL certificates and apps stopping support. But I wanted to give it some life because I hate to see a working machine go to waste. So I asked around and got a great answer: The iPad 2 can be downgraded to iOS 6.1.3 or 8.4.1. Both offer better performance than iOS 9 and have untethered jailbreaks. Once downgraded and jailbroken you can sideload hours and hours worth of games. A lot from that era are IAP-free.

Tunneling, as I understand it, is setting an SSH connection to a server which processes requests, and forwards them to your local machine, in this case the iPad. I’ll omit many details here just in case I’m exposing myself, but basically, I opened up a port to my router, got a dynamic DNS from FreeDNS, and once that was done, I could get the VPS to connect to my iPad remotely. So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi.

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