I spent last weekend trying to revive a bricked iPod Touch 1G. Not the physical device—that poor thing’s battery swelled up and popped the screen off back in 2019. I’m talking about the digital ghost of it, running inside a QEMU instance on my Fedora workstation.
It’s weird to think that the S5L8900 SoC—the silicon heart of the original iPhone and the first iPod Touch—is nearly two decades old. In tech years, that’s ancient. It’s practically archeology. But here we are in 2026, and thanks to some absolutely obsessive work by the open-source community over the last few years, we can boot iPhoneOS 1.1 on an x86 machine with surprising stability.
Why bother? That’s what my partner asked when she saw me staring at a terminal window spewing verbose boot logs at 2 AM. “You can just buy one on eBay for twenty bucks,” she said. Well, that’s not entirely accurate — this isn’t about using the device. It’s about owning the hardware logic.
The S5L8900 Emulation Hurdle
