Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

terminalbytes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 198 posts

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

#31

Post by sheepscreek »

procinct wrote: post #26
nancyminusone wrote: post #12

>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually. I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.

I believe you only have to pay to put your app on the App Store. I’ve made apps for my iPhone before and never had to pay.

I’m not a 100% on this, but I believe you need to pay them to “sign” your app. For iOS, that means there is no way anyone else will be able to use your app unless they side-load it themselves (and we all know how cumbersome that is, Apple doesn’t want to make it easy).

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

#33

Post by tech234a »

mcpherrinm wrote: post #30
procinct wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you only have to pay to put your app on the App Store. I’ve made apps for my iPhone before and never had to pay.

It's the "for longer than a week" bit - Unless you have a paid developer account, you can only sign apps to sideload that last one week. There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week. The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an…

If you trust it, SideStore manages to do it on device by using a local VPN to make an on-device server appear to be an external device on the network.

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

#34

Post by aerostable_slug »

behnamoh wrote: post #29
nancyminusone wrote: post #12

>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually. I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.

This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…

I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.

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

#35

Post by notnmeyer »

behnamoh wrote: post #29
nancyminusone wrote: post #12

>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually. I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.

This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price. I'm a longtim…

i’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.

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

#36

Post by troupo »

> Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m Hemant, a Senior Software Engineer based in Canada . I’m passionate about cloud computing, DevOps, and building robust distributed systems.

Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out

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

#37

Post by notnmeyer »

sheepscreek wrote: post #31
procinct wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you only have to pay to put your app on the App Store. I’ve made apps for my iPhone before and never had to pay.

I’m not a 100% on this, but I believe you need to pay them to “sign” your app. For iOS, that means there is no way anyone else will be able to use your app unless they side-load it themselves (and we all know how cumbersome that is, Apple doesn’t want to make it easy).

correct

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

#38

Post by tech234a »

brailsafe wrote: post #25
tclancy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking. I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?

My iPad 3 is only unusable because anything beyond iOS 9 isn't installable, most of the like 5 Apps I did have installed on it didn't survive a "backup", and obvs nobody's going out of their way to support ancient platforms. Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.

As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0

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

#39

Post by jerlam »

tclancy wrote: post #18
FlyingSnake wrote: post #9

Wonderful story! We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking. I have a similar story wherein I repurposed my ancient OG iPhone SE and gave it a new life. https://samkhawase.com/blog/dumb-smartphone/

>We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking. I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?

For me, iPads (base model, non-Air/Pro) and iPhones seem to exist on opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. Never had an iPad last over 2-3 years without feeling sluggish and ready for an upgrade. Never had an iPhone since the 4 that felt sluggish when Apple stopped supporting it (5+ years).
Post reply on HN