This fall, Apple will cut off millions of iPads from further OS updates. This will leave owners of perfectly-good hardware with no choice but to watch it slowly wither its way to the recycling center. Ideally Apple would support its computers with service updates for much longer, but there’s another way. Apple could fix this without much ongoing effort on its part, and give this still-great hardware years and years of extra life: let users install a different operating system (OS).

The iPad has an amazing screen; robust, long-lasting hardware; and very capable silicon. And to its credit, Apple does a very good job of supporting aging devices. My 2018 iPad Pro still runs the current latest iPadOS 26, 8 years after launch, even though it’s not as snappy as running older OS versions.

Apple finally abandons the the 2018 iPad Pro. Photo Charlie Sorrel

When Apple does cut off new OS support for old hardware, it usually makes a pretty defensible call on when to do it. Trying to run the latest OS on incapable hardware can mean slowdowns and unsupported features. The unspoken issue is that older hardware can’t support the features Apple wants, and it’s a lot of work maintaining and translating current software for older devices.

The thing is, just because my old iPad won’t run the upcoming iPadOS 27, doesn’t mean it can’t run any operating system. If you have an old PC or Mac, you can install Linux on it, and enjoy a modern experience even on very modest hardware.

Linux on iPad

So why can’t we just install a new OS on our old iPads and give them a new lease of life? Because Apple won’t let us.

There are plenty of tablet operating systems that should be able to work on iPad hardware. The iPad Linux project has documented the GNU/Linux community’s efforts to get a stable Linux install working for iPad. So far, sadly, there hasn’t been much success. Linux install options for the iPhone, such as Project Sandcastle, only work on the 10-year-old iPhone 7/7S and not on any iPad models.

The biggest barrier is the iPad’s locked bootloader, known as iBoot. When you start up an iPad (or iPhone, or Mac), a small program is loaded from the device’s ROM (read-only memory) which takes care of loading the actual operating system. On the Mac, the PC, and many Android devices, you can unlock this bootloader and tell it to load an operating system other than the one it came with.

Wouldn’t this look great on an iPad? Screenshot: Michio Kawaii, GPL

On the iPhone and iPad, you can do no such thing.  This is in the name of security, but if unlocking the bootloader is so insecure, why is it allowed on the Mac? This should be a user choice, not a vendor choice. It’s your computer after all.

The locked bootloader also prevents users from rolling back to previous versions of iOS and iPadOS. Did you install iPadOS 26 and find it made your iPad sluggish? Tough luck, because Apple locked away iPadOS 18 almost immediately after iPadOS 26’s launch.

Designated drivers

Even if Apple unlocked the bootloader, or decided to “sign” certain Linux distributions to allow them to run on the iPad, we’d still be only halfway there. Linux, like any operating system, needs drivers to interoperate with the various hardware, from the display to the Wi‑Fi and cellular radios.

This is why older computers tend to be better supported by Linux, because people have had more time to make software for them.

Apple used to provide Windows drivers for Intel Macs

But creating Linux drivers for Apple hardware isn’t easy. Before Apple Silicon, Macs ran on the same Intel hardware as PCs, and Linux support for Intel Macs remains excellent. But making drivers for M-series Macs means reverse-engineering proprietary drivers for proprietary hardware. 

The Asahi Linux project is doing exactly this, and allows installing Linux on M1 and M2 Macs, but nothing newer. It’s something of an arms race, and even on M1 Macs, many things don’t work right in Linux. In my own experience, battery life is substantially worse, for example, and you won’t receive firmware updates from Apple unless you keep a MacOS partition and boot back into it from time to time. For Apple to really commit to allowing Linux on old iPads, it should release and maintain a set of drivers, something they used to do for the Mac. Bootcamp lets people install Windows on a Mac, providing all the drivers required to do so. But history has shown that Apple doesn’t consider the iPad a general-purpose computer, despite being just as capable as many Macs.

Still, let’s imagine a set of Apple-created drivers for older iPads. It wouldn’t be that much work, in terms of volume—Apple would only have to add drivers for extra iPads whenever it dropped iPadOS support for those models, and that’s not even a yearly occurrence. 

(Lack of) repairability strikes again

There’s another part to this story, and my Asahi Linux-on-an-M1 Mac speaks to the problem. On an old iPad, a software install that limited already-degraded battery life could make it basically useless as a tablet.

An eight-year-old iPad Pro like mine will usually have very low battery capacity remaining. Installing Linux won’t help with that part, but I know the nerds of the world have plenty of projects for old tablets that would work just fine with an always-plugged-in device, from baby monitors to sheet music computers to car head units.

Still, to make those old iPads truly useful for the long-term, you should be able to at least change their batteries.

iPads are a nightmare when it comes to battery swaps. Those things are buried deep, and you have to go in through the screen, which is an extremely delicate process. Plus, the parts are priced ridiculously. A replacement 12.9 iPad Pro screen (for my 2018 model) runs at $230 for the part only, or $237 for a complete fix kit. A brand-new basic iPad costs $350. It’s hardly an iPad Pro, but it makes it compelling to simply buy a new one—which is of course what Apple would prefer you do. 

iPad batteries are a bear to replace

Of course, there’s no way to make batteries easier to replace on older iPads that were never designed for it.

But if you want to keep your iPad plugged in all the time and run a Linux digital photo frame or kitchen assistant or a full-time video conferencing station… shouldn’t the choice be yours, not Apple’s?

All Apple needs to let folks install an alternative OS on the computer they already own is to let them unlock that bootloader. So come on, you cowards. Do it!