My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

Soon you'll also be able to do speech to text locally, as Apple is adding a SpeechAnalyzer API [0] which is apparently faster than whisper [1].

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/277/

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api...

I see your fruitPhone 8 and raise my Motorola MB525 'Defy', Motorola MB526 'Defy+' and Samsung J3 which are in use as Wifi-enabled trailer camera. The phones provide a Wifi hotspot through which the camera's images are accessed. Hook up the trailer, connect to the Wifi network and voila, you can see what's happening in the trailer behind you. The oldest device in this list is from 2010, all of them run either Cyanogenmod (MB525 and MB526) or its successor LineageOS (J3). I replaced the batteries in the Motorola's, the J3 runs on its original battery. Oh, all of them run without a screen since that is not visible anyway and was broken in 2 of the 3. Android runs just fine without a screen and using the things this way takes a little less power.

Tangentially, https://github.com/finnvoor/yap

  A CLI for on-device speech transcription using Speech.framework on macOS 26 

The MacStories article made it seem about 2x as fast as Whisper, but there's no network or shared servers involved, so it's effectively faster.

Maybe i'm missing something. Where are these thousands of users coming from? is this some service you offer?

HomePods perform real-time vision processing on multiple camera streams for HomeKit. However, the primary quality challenge lies in the video quality of HomeKit-enabled doorbell cameras that can consistently stream to Wi-Fi. For instance, my doorbell operates on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, resulting in highly compressed video streams. This compression likely impacts the results.