What to do with an old iPhone 7?

[Cookiecrumbles222]

Hey guys, Recently upgraded phones and no longer need this iPhone 7 and was wondering if there's any interesting uses for it other than selling it. I watched some basic videos that mentioned things like a webcam and a security camera. are their any cool ways to use it with your pc like maybe a simple server or if you add storage to it a basic NAS or things like that maybe a fancy to use it as another monitor?

[Zando_]

iOS is pretty locked down. If you're running an older version that has a jailbreak, then that can be fun to just fiddle around with themes and tweaks you can't usually do. If you want a device to fiddle with, sell the iPhone and use the money to get a Raspberry Pi or two, they're also ARM devices but you can do way more with them. At some point I need to get a few and mess around with setting them up in a cluster, just for fun. 

[WhitetailAni]

As mentioned above, jailbreaking can be an option.

The A10 Fusion CPU, which is inside the 7 and 7+, is currently the king of jailbreaking modern OS's, as it's the newest fully checkm8-compatible chip. checkm8 is an unpatchable exploit as it's hardware-based, and is currently used in the jailbreak checkra1n.

and also is compatible with Project Sandcastle, in case you ever wanted to run a not-quite-complete version of Android on your iPhone.

Note that if your iPhone is running iOS 15, there is no jailbreak at the time. checkra1n, the current jailbreak that uses checkm8, does not support iOS 15 yet (though the devs are working on it). If it runs iOS 10.0-14.8.1, you can jailbreak it with checkra1n, otherwise not.

If it is on a version of iOS 14, you may be able to make some money by selling it with its signing blobs for its current version of iOS, or files that let you reinstall unsigned iOS. You'll need to save these manually, though, use this script (works only if you have a Mac sadly):

https://github.com/MatthewPierson/deverser

If you need help with any part of jailbreaking or have questions about jailbreaking, let me send you to the r/jailbreak reddit and the r/jailbreak Discord server. Reddit goes get a bad rap but I've found them quite helpful.

It may also be useful as a backup device; that's why I still have my 6S.

[Imbadatnames]

Tbh I keep an old iPhone around as a spare 

[RejZoR]

Uuum, use it? Despite its age, it's still pretty capable phone and gets iOS 15 and most likely will get iOS 16 too in fall 2022. Or just charge it to 50%, turn it off and save it as backup phone.

[Charkel]

Jailbreak and keep when needed. Thats what I do with my old androids. Root them

[boiled4safety]

On 1/27/2022 at 5:29 AM, Imbadatnames said:

Tbh I keep an old iPhone around as a spare 

Yeah this is the way. Accidents can happen at any time and not having a spare phone by can be such a pain. A colleague of mine a few months back dropped his phone getting into a car, only to have it get run over seconds later, and his spare served its purpose perfectly! 

[boiled4safety]

On 1/30/2022 at 12:41 AM, huilun02 said:

Maybe it can be a music/media player, media caster/remote, remote computer screen (something like teamviewer), wifi adapter (tethering), Kali nethunter

I used to carry a separate phone as a music player, I'd put some larger, higher fidelity audio files on that phone that I didn't want clogging up the space on my main device. That though was back in the day of headphone jacks so it was a lot less of a pain and made a little more sense to do back then. But if you were to do the same thing with a nice USB DAC that would be cool too.

[Imbadatnames]

5 hours ago, boiled4safety said:

Yeah this is the way. Accidents can happen at any time and not having a spare phone by can be such a pain. A colleague of mine a few months back dropped his phone getting into a car, only to have it get run over seconds later, and his spare served its purpose perfectly! 

Tbh I need to update it my spare atm is a 1st gen SE which goes out soon 

[boiled4safety]

8 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

Tbh I need to update it my spare atm is a 1st gen SE which goes out soon 

That 1st gen SE was pretty sick, it got updates for a while & was nice and compact! Maybe a 2nd gen SE to replace it

[Imbadatnames]

3 hours ago, boiled4safety said:

That 1st gen SE was pretty sick, it got updates for a while & was nice and compact! Maybe a 2nd gen SE to replace it

Or a third in a year or two. The SE is on iOS 15 it’s the same chip as the 6S