The most-used screen in this house is a five-year-old iPad propped against the kettle, and I did not plan that at all.
It started as somewhere to put the news while cooking and it has become the default. The television in the living room gets used in the evening. The iPad gets used from about half six in the morning until whenever the last person leaves the kitchen.
What I have learned running an old tablet as a permanent screen.
Age matters much less than I feared. A device from five years ago plays a live stream perfectly well, because decoding video is the one thing old hardware is genuinely good at. What it struggles with is everything around the video — a heavy interface, a large guide, several apps open — and that is a memory problem rather than a processor one.
Restarting it once a week fixes most of what looks like decline. I resisted this for months because it felt like admitting defeat and it takes twenty seconds and works.
Keeping it plugged in permanently is worse for the battery than people think, and I have accepted that, because the alternative is a screen that is flat every time you want it.
And the wifi in a kitchen full of appliances is genuinely worse than in the next room. This surprised me. A microwave running will visibly affect a stream on the same band, which sounds like folklore and is straightforwardly true.
The one thing I would do differently: I would have set the picture quality manually from the start instead of leaving it automatic. On a screen that size the top setting achieves nothing and makes the connection work harder.
Which apps hold up on older iOS devices, and what to set on them, is covered here.
Five years old, propped against the kettle, and the busiest screen in the house.