You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network.

Google notably does well here with 7 years of support, but others such as Sony are 4 years, and Xiaomi on non-flagship devices are similar, or Samsung on their lowest budget models...

It’s a genuine shame how locked down iPhones are compared to even Android. Hypothetically you could run Linux inside UTM[0] but outside the EU Apple makes it intentionally difficult, and there’s still memory restrictions and performance penalties.

My group’s senior year project was a computing cluster on phones (specifically targetting LLM inference) [1]. Instead of installing a new OS we built separate apps per OS. Our devices were older, so the Android phones had worse hardware and the iPhones had more software restraints.

[0] https://getutm.app/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/rmcluster/repositories

I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a second life. I’m already considering running old servers from e.g ETB but the cycles per watt on a phone are probably much better.

Does anyone have recommendations for novels, movies or video games with that topic?

This also solves alot of the security issues as your in a sandbox.

https://far.computer

https://compost.party

> With Google’s support, [researchers at the University of California San Diego] plan to deploy a datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones

Ah.. well maybe success here will give internal folks some ammo for enabling more reuse of the mountain of Android (and Chromebook) devices.

You can already run any workloads on it at a fraction of a price of traditional cloud services.

And the balcony camera didn’t work out because I wanted it to be solar powered and the angles of sunshine available to me without active tracking don’t give me sufficient energy on a daily basis.

But the machine is still a good machine. I will perhaps return to one of these projects. It’s annoying how much power access dominates everything.

Anyway, this is a cool project!

Not sure if I should take this as a joke or a sign of an internal power struggle. If it's the former, there's still some catching up to do before you can match Samsung's "Upcycle", but you're on the right track.

- Are these phone processors really as compute-pet-watt efficient as a regular data center processor?

- There’s so little embodied carbon in a phone motherboard - and presumably some embodied carbon in whatever custom racking hardware up is being used to house these. Is that really compute-power-per-embodied-carbon-footprint efficient than making a new server?

So people are to blame, not the companies shoveling ads, offering promotions to buy new phones, and in general creating the huge demand that they later, "are forced to satisfy".

I wonder how long this takes per phone. Presumably it could be a pretty fast shucking process if you don't care about any of the other components. I can't see it making much economic sense if it takes more than 1 minute/phone.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06870

c'mon Google, release that shit.

From my observations, phones get destroyed, used until the battery swells and breaks them, or handed down to kids or less careful users. No one I know has a bunch of old phones that are still useful but unused.