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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

#131

Post by freedomben »

keerthiko wrote: post #107
sigmoid10 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. It actually does - in a free market. That's, like, one of the main arguments why capitalism is good for the population and not evil. But in a gate-kept oligopoly like phones, actors can abuse the system to squeeze more money out of consumers, leaving the corporations as sole beneficiaries. That's why this kind of stuff usually…

I'm pretty sure in a free market, how much someone is willing to pay for something is what determines how much a company charges for something, not how much it cost to provide. We wouldn't have inflation of most goods/services if it was based on how much it cost to produce/provide.

You're right, but generally in a free market competition will force prices down until they are close enough to production costs that going lower risks loss. In practice this rarely happens because we don't really have "free" markets, but rather a weird hybrid plus legal landmines all over the place.

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

#132

Post by deadbabe »

CaptainFever wrote: post #119
deadbabe wrote: post #56

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.

It's not your business. This is just the old nothing to hide argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

The idea of him looking outside a window at peaceful birds feeding, while his phone also sits in the foreground of the window crunching whatever horrifying OCR workloads may be hitting the device, is a juxtaposition worthy of cinema.

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

#133

Post by kaonwarb »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #95
cortesoft wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app? How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run. Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for…

>How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something. It actually does - in a free market. That's, like, one of the main arguments why capitalism is good for the population and not evil. But in a gate-kept oligopoly like phones, actors can abuse the system to squeeze more money out of consumers, leaving the corporations as sole beneficiaries. That's why this kind of stuff usually…

Only for commodities, and even then only sometimes.

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

#134

Post by freedomben »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #94
rkagerer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days. I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.

In this very narrow case, the grass on the Android side is much greener: You can install your own APKs on an Android device without paying anyone at all, without having to upload anything anywhere, and without requiring any particular device to build the APK in the first place. You don't even need to touch the bootloader or root it; you just toggle a setting to allow the installation and it works.

For now at least. There have been articles recently about how Google is looking to change that

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

#135

Post by lillecarl »

latexr wrote: post #124
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…

> Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". No, they do not. That is how you are interpreting their actions . It’s obviously not the narrative they are pushing, that would be utterly absurd. The narrative Apple pushes over and over is that it’s your device, and that what you do with it is private and stays with it. Outright saying the device is theirs and they only let yo…

I recall seeing a lot of "in your hand", "on you device", "tailored for you" and such in their keynotes and press material.

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

#136

Post by xd1936 »

jdon wrote: post #2

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...

Faster, but... quality? I would take something 10× _slower_ than Whisper 3 if it meant a 5% increase in quality.

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

#137

Post by robertlagrant »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #130
robertlagrant wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s one of the great achievements of capitalism that it managed to convince people that trade == capitalism and that without capitalism you are reduced to the Soviet Union, because no other options are possible. Never heard anyone say this before, although it may be pretty much the case[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_Soviet_Un...

If you criticise capitalism one of the most likely responses you're going to get is ''so you want to become communist like the SU"? And that wkkipedia article is of course not proving that trade equals capitalism (or are you saying that America stops being capitalistic if Trumps dream of a self-sufficient nation somehow succeeds?). Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and ther…

> Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and there will be trade in the future when capitalism no longer exists.

Indeed. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise. Fuedal lords traded. Totalitarian states traded. We know there was and is trade.

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

#138

Post by iwontberude »

kccqzy wrote: post #125
irrational wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can’t be that many iOS developers that the $99 really affects their bottom line. I always assumed it was a barrier to entry to help discourage low effort apps.

But it's asinine for developers to have to pay $99 in order to test their app, such as on TestFlight. When you have an app idea, when you are far from deciding on monetization, you just want to test out the central features of the app among friends, it's wrong to require payment for that. Remember all apps have once been low effort apps: the first few weeks when you begin working on them. Polish comes later.

They can test and iterate using simulator without spending $99

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

#139

Post by II2II »

ndr42 wrote: post #112
timewizard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand. This does provide opportunities to make more money during some periods than others. If you have a monopoly then you can ignore this and just pick what makes you the most. > Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most. It's absolutely a besp…

>> A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. > No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand. I read an interview a long long time ago (with Jobs, Schiller or Cook - I don't remember) where they were saying explicitly that Apple charge the amount that get them the most money not marketshare. I remember the times when analysts where obsessed with market share and that apple had to lose…

At the time, eroding marketshare was a legitimate concern. It takes money to develop products, and without continuous development they would not remain competitive. Whether they liked it or not, marketshare is a factor in making the most money since you need to spread out the cost of development. Many companies were failing at the time, including those who made high end workstations because of that. Many years ago, I read an article about how the development of Alpha processors could not keep up simply because Intel could invest far more into R&D.
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