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

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

#51

Post by neilv »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #34
behnamoh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission.

By "fairly rigorous", do you mean "fickle, random"?

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

#52

Post by phire »

Gigachad wrote: post #45
notnmeyer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which is not unreasonable for something listed in the App Store. It is unreasonable that you can’t sideload though.

I'm pretty sure the $99 fee is explicitly there to prevent "normal" users from side-loading.

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

#53

Post by winter_blue »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #44
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.

EcoFlow batteries are pretty expensive too. Also that's about 500kWh of power annually which averages to 50W. There is just no way iPhone uses that much.

The author has a mini PC plugged into the EcoFlow as well. That uses the bulk of the power.

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

#54

Post by mitemte »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #42
aerostable_slug wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device. You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days. They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.

What’s worse is it used to be 90 days. Apple changed it to 7 days years ago.

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

#55

Post by neilv »

Nice hacker effort and writeup, but I want to comment on a general HN pattern of what tech people promote implicitly with hacker network effects...

For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.

In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.

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

#56

Post by deadbabe »

The privacy obsession and the fact he never mentions what kind of images the service is processing or what they’re for just kinda gives me the creeps, especially for the amount of requests he gets. There is a non-zero chance this is for illicit purposes.

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

#57

Post by daneel_w »

WalterGR wrote: post #41
daneel_w wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a painfully sluggish alternative, but you can run older versions of OS X (and thus Xcode) in VirtualBox.

On Apple x86 hardware: Running Windows in VMWare Fusion works very, very well. I can’t see a reason why that wouldn't also be the case for old versions of OS X, though admittedly I haven’t tried. It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…

Software framebuffer. Remaining devices are also emulated.

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

#58

Post by brailsafe »

tech234a wrote: post #38
brailsafe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a great counterexample, since built-in video playback capability is awful. It's one of the few I still have installed if memory serves. It think I also have "The Room" and a few Google apps. Hardware-wise I always thought it was pretty solid, the software and general utility not so much, but I look at newer versions hat have come out since 2013 and don't really see how they're fundamentally any more capable than mediocre content consumption devices, and while that does do something for me, I would have hard time rationalizing the purchase of another one in the future.

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

#59

Post by cosmic_cheese »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #47
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The range of HomeKit-enabled doorbells and cameras is disappointing to begin with and even worse when removing options that require a proprietary adapter box and/or subscription. The best option at the moment seems to be a Ubiquiti setup that integrates into HomeKit by way of Homebridge or other similar solutions rather than anything that supports HomeKit specifically.

At this point I'd just avoid HomeKit entirely. Any sort of automation in Home app besides 2-3 line demo is quickly turning into nightmare, you are locked in bunch of annoying limitations and devices are always costing more than open source alternative.

It’s the smart home ecosystem that the FOSS world has kind of coalesced around, though (see HomeBridge, HomeAssistant, etc). The others are all much more centered around someone else’s servers and subscriptions and offer little to no possibility of running things locally.

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

#60

Post by HenryBemis »

slg wrote: post #46
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.

There is also the roughly $1k in costs for the solar and battery hardware even if we consider the iPhone itself free since it is so old.

I was just checking the combo he is using [0] (River 2 Pro + 220W solar generator) and it's currently at USD 619. In the post, the author sums it at USD 780. I assume price dropped because of newer models, etc.

[0]: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-s...

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