[HN Gopher] My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered...
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My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR
Server
Author : hemant6488
Score : 166 points
Date : 2025-06-18 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (terminalbytes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (terminalbytes.com)
| jdon wrote:
| 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...
| jkmcf wrote:
| 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.
| redundantly wrote:
| I love projects like this, doing things because you can.
| Especially low power, off-grid projects.
|
| However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of
| repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of
| repetition.
|
| I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at
| it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.
| rbinv wrote:
| It's AI slop. In fact, most (if not all) of this blog's recent
| posts are AI slop.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| 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.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| That's pretty impressive. I love when people give old devices a
| new life and save them from being eWaste. True to the hacker
| spirit.
| ideashower wrote:
| I'm confused. What are you OCR'ing that requires a solution like
| this? What images are you processing?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I loved the 'it turns out I'm an indoor cat with outdoor
| aspirations'. I often joke I'm an 'avid indoorsman'
| frereubu wrote:
| You might like this song, The Outdoor Type by The Lemonheads:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijlk0GTQbB4
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Maybe i'm missing something. Where are these thousands of users
| coming from? is this some service you offer?
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| 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/
| tclancy wrote:
| >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?
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| tech234a wrote:
| As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS
| 9.0
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| jerlam wrote:
| 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).
| criddell wrote:
| My iPad is a 2018 iPad Pro and it still works great. It's
| my most used computer by far. AFAIK, it's still supported
| by Apple.
|
| My phone is an iPhone 13 (2021) and I'll probably upgrade
| in the next 24 months to get a better camera.
| jiqiren wrote:
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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.
| laurensr wrote:
| In my browser the ads cover the actual content.
|
| User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)
| AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0
| Safari/537.36
| nickburns wrote:
| I found the page quite clean (with cloudflareinsights.com,
| googlesyndication.com, and googletagmanager.com blocked of
| course).
| nancyminusone wrote:
| >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.
| procinct wrote:
| 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.
| mcpherrinm wrote:
| 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 app) but is clearly
| intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the
| developer account "nearby".
| tech234a wrote:
| 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.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| 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).
| notnmeyer wrote:
| correct
| behnamoh wrote:
| 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 longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate
| relationship with the company.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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.
| mitemte wrote:
| What's worse is it used to be 90 days. Apple changed it
| to 7 days years ago.
| neilv wrote:
| > _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"?
| bigyabai wrote:
| "fair" would be letting me sideload if I didn't want to go
| through Apple's vetting. Their expensive review process is
| only required because _they_ decide it 's arbitrarily
| necessary and unavoidable.
| notnmeyer wrote:
| i'd guess it's more to keep extremely low effort submissions
| out of the app store.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Which is not unreasonable for something listed in the App
| Store. It is unreasonable that you can't sideload though.
| phire wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the $99 fee is explicitly there to
| prevent "normal" users from side-loading.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| It could be playing 2 roles, acting as a limiting gate
| for the App Store spam and preventing a simple 2 step
| tutorial to enable side loading.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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.
| winter_blue wrote:
| The author has a mini PC plugged into the EcoFlow as well.
| That uses the bulk of the power.
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| 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...
| nico_h wrote:
| Also you can only run the compile-sign-deploy from a mac AFAIK.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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 weak
| the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
| romain_batlle wrote:
| nop probably a very bad idea even if you had enough iPhones and
| you could parallelise them, it would be 10x less electricity
| efficient
| etra0 wrote:
| This reminded me of the guy that built a meme database using
| iPhone's OCR as well [1].
|
| I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life.
| I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned
| android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put
| ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315782
| tootie wrote:
| I have an ancient ipad that is still functional but stuck on iOS
| 9. Xcode doesn't let you target that version anymore. Is it still
| possible to compile an ipa for devices out of support?
| daneel_w wrote:
| It's a painfully sluggish alternative, but you can run older
| versions of OS X (and thus Xcode) in VirtualBox.
| WalterGR wrote:
| 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...
| daneel_w wrote:
| Software framebuffer. Remaining devices are also emulated.
| namuol wrote:
| Interesting tech but there's zero explanation of the actual
| application, so it's all a little abstract.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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
| yegle wrote:
| This still requires a mini PC to bridge the API call and the iOS
| app.
|
| I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining
| both.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| I think this wouldn't work with any iPhone that's on a version of
| iOS new enough to have the 'feature' where it automatically
| restarts after a few days without being used?
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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.
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