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

71–80 of 198 posts

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

#71

Post by dzhiurgis »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #59
dzhiurgis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes I run Home Assistant too. Also got quite a bit of devices on Aqara's platform, and a device each on Ewelink, Tuya, Meross which all technically are a platforms. There's probably another 5 devices with their own apps. Tasmota + Home Assistant is the only one I'm happy about.

Home Assistant (with all its dumb quirks) at least makes an attempt to integrate them. Some FOSS devices I've exposed to HomeKit for presence automation, but seeing Siri is going nowhere I don't think I'll continue.

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

#72

Post by piperswe »

joshstrange wrote: post #16

I wonder if someone will make a LLM farm from older (probably not too old) iPhones using Apple's new foundation models. I know they won't hold a candle to SOTA models, they are much smaller for one, but when they announced API access that's the first thing I thought of, a sort of "folding @ home" but routing queries to a phone and spitting back the results. It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how w…

Used Mac Minis are probably cheaper and more energy efficient

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

#73

Post by rtaylorgarlock »

neilv wrote: post #55

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 Act…

THANK YOU. For example, I'm currently a user of an android app (installed thru Play Store) which I found through front page; cool. The headline: "I developed and didn't use ". Tragically, I care less about framework than I do about functionality, and ever since installing, i've been left wondering how many of the hundreds of upvoters tried running what I describe as the single buggiest app on my phone. I've rage uninstalled multiple times in hopes of fixing issues which are sometimes only fixed by clean installing. My point: Guiding philosophies are important, and evaluating them at scale is critical* work.

*see what i did there

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

#74

Post by theshackleford »

asimovfan wrote: post #67
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…

what is it that you "love" about Apple?

Not op but...

It started out originally that I just needed a UNIX/Linux like but I also needed at the time better support for some propietary stuff than linux had, which is how I entered the fold.

What has kept me a customer has been their quality of service over the 15 years I have been a customer, which has more than made up for the extra cost of their hardware.

I get an OS I find reasonable to use, in a hardware package I like (give or take quite a few years there) and generally at this point still know that if something goes wrong the apple of today (but maybe not tomorrow) will look after me as a customer. If this changes, i'll go elsewhere, shunt OSX off and just go back to linux on the desktop I suppose. I'm not wedded to them. If they had'nt released the silicon variants when they did I was already getting to jump ship over to Lenovo/Dell land (at the time.)

Phones are a bit different, i've still received brilliant service from them in that regard, but I tend to flip back and forwards between android and iOS depending on my mood at the time.

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

#75

Post by nfriedly »

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.

The iPhone 8 has the unpatchable checkm8 bootrom vulnerability, so while it doesn't say this in the article, the author could have jailbroken the device to run whatever software they want without paying any Apple fees.

That vulnerability was a huge win. It just recently stopped, with the final vulnerable device (7th gen iPad) not getting the iPad OS 26 update.

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

#76

Post by demosthanos »

mitemte wrote: post #54
rahimnathwani wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

90 days is still absurd. I have custom apps I install on my Android phones once per phone. I go years without bothering to rebuild them.

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

notnmeyer wrote: post #35
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’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by notnmeyer »

phire wrote: post #52
Gigachad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah, this also makes sense

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

#79

Post by selcuka »

nfriedly wrote: post #75
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.

The iPhone 8 has the unpatchable checkm8 bootrom vulnerability, so while it doesn't say this in the article, the author could have jailbroken the device to run whatever software they want without paying any Apple fees. That vulnerability was a huge win. It just recently stopped, with the final vulnerable device (7th gen iPad) not getting the iPad OS 26 update.

Isn't it an in-memory exploit, though? I believe it would stop working if the phone restarts for some reason.
Post reply on HN