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My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server
- tootie 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt's a painfully sluggish alternative, but you can run older versions of OS X (and thus Xcode) in VirtualBox.
- WalterGR 1y agoOn 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 1y agoSoftware framebuffer. Remaining devices are also emulated.
- jdon 1y agoSoon 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/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/277/ [1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api-faster-than-whisper/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api...
- jkmcf 1y agoTangentially, https://github.com/finnvoor/yap 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.
- xd1936 1y agoFaster, but... quality? I would take something 10× _slower_ than Whisper 3 if it meant a 5% increase in quality.
- redundantly 1y agoI 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rbinv 1y agoIt's AI slop. In fact, most (if not all) of this blog's recent posts are AI slop.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- CaptainFever 1y agoThat's not what slop means. This is anything but low-effort or low-quality.
- yawnxyz 1y agothe project isn't AI at all, but the writeup is definitely AI. It overuses clickbait / hijacking / hook patterns that makes it really jarring: - poses a lot of questions: "Me? I turned mine into a server that saves me money" / "Could I have just run this on my Mac like a normal person? Absolutely. But where’s the fun in that?" - it's not just X, it's Y: "it’s not just dumping power into devices; it’s managing charging curves properly" - creates scenarios and juxtapositions: "The workflow is beautifully simple: My image processing service sends images to the phone for OCR processing using Apple’s Vision framework. The phone processes the text, sends it back, and updates its dashboard with processing stats. All while I watch birds outside my window and feel smug about my setup." I think this kind of writing borrows from twitter threads and youtube videos. I think we're going to be so sick of these patterns soon. And also, I don't think this is necessarily what the LLMs do natively, I think it might just come from bad RLHFs
- hagbard_c 1y agoI 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 1y agoThat’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 1y agoI'm confused. What are you OCR'ing that requires a solution like this? What images are you processing?
- theandrewbailey 1y agoMy guess is that he wanted to use that Apple OCR framework and that iPhone was whatever he had handy. I went to his blog's homepage hoping to find some article as to what he's processing, but I didn't find anything. Is he scanning all of his novels?
- wing-_-nuts 1y agoI loved the 'it turns out I'm an indoor cat with outdoor aspirations'. I often joke I'm an 'avid indoorsman'
- frereubu 1y agoYou might like this song, The Outdoor Type by The Lemonheads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijlk0GTQbB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijlk0GTQbB4
- wing-_-nuts 1y agoThat was utterly fantastic, thank you
- mmmlinux 1y agoMaybe i'm missing something. Where are these thousands of users coming from? is this some service you offer?
- leakycap 1y agoYes, the author offers a public-facing website that allows free OCR of uploads.
- FlyingSnake 1y agoWonderful 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/ https://samkhawase.com/blog/dumb-smartphone/
- tclancy 1y ago>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?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- brailsafe 1y agoMy 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 1y agoAs a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0
- brailsafe 1y agoThat'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.
- jiqiren 1y agoHomePods 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoAt 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 1y agoIt’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.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoYes 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.
- laurensr 1y agoIn 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 1y agoI found the page quite clean (with cloudflareinsights.com, googlesyndication.com, and googletagmanager.com blocked of course).
- Dansvidania 1y agouMatrix?
- nancyminusone 1y ago>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 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt'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 1y agoIf 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.
- weaksauce 1y agois there a reason to be wary of sidestore? first time i've heard of that but seems like a legit opensource project. doesn't seem like it would be a project that is all that lucrative for bad actors... people that don't want to pay $99/year to load apps on their personal iphones/ipads doesn't seem like a big score.
- tech234a 1y ago
- joshstrange 1y agoI 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 1y agonop probably a very bad idea even if you had enough iPhones and you could parallelise them, it would be 10x less electricity efficient
- lucb1e 1y agoManufacturing newer CPUs makes sense only if the device it's meant to replace is like 25 years old: "The emissions from production of computing devices far exceed the emissions from operating them" [...] "the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential [...]. For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years" https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-computing/ https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
- piperswe 1y agoUsed Mac Minis are probably cheaper and more energy efficient
- etra0 1y agoThis 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315782
- leakycap 1y agoThis was a great read! I'd never heard of a website hosted in any way on an iOS device... makes me wish it was an option.
- namuol 1y agoInteresting tech but there’s zero explanation of the actual application, so it’s all a little abstract.
- unangst 1y agoAgreed. Came to the comments thinking the same thing.
- nerbert 1y agoA little detail in the otherwise great write up! I'm curious too.
- lizhang 1y ago> The real challenge was making it run continuously without iOS deciding my app wasn’t important enough to keep running Would like to see more thoughts here
- novoreorx 1y agothe code example of vision framework, and the links in "Software Resources" section are enough I guess, you can feed them to an LLM to get a full application if you are too lazy to figure out by yourself
- namuol 1y agoI meant what is the _author’s specific_ application.
- throwawaytodey 1y ago[dead]
- troupo 1y ago> 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agoI 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?
- deadbabe 1y agoThe 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.
- nottorp 1y agoMaybe he's ashamed it's not done in Rust...
- CaptainFever 1y agoIt's not your business. This is just the old nothing to hide argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
- deadbabe 1y agoThe 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.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 1y agoMore like a juxtaposition worthy of a thriller novel trilogy. Where's the OCR in cinema?
- neilv 1y agoNice 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.
- rtaylorgarlock 1y agoTHANK 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 <insert FOSS app which meets regular value prop> and didn't use <insert commonly used framework>". 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
- neilv 1y agoYes, but usually it doesn't come down to something that works vs. doesn't work. And some of the times that it does, it's because someone earlier didn't think about values before establishing network effects that stuffed a bad-values thing while starving a good-values thing.
- kennywinker 1y agoRepurposing an old device is good. If the closed platform bothers you, don’t buy and iPhone - but regardless of what you do there are millions of old iPhones that could be saved from the landfill by projects like this
- bpiroman 1y agothis is so cool! Is it possible to boot linux on an old iphone?
- hackyhacky 1y agoI'm not sure if there's a FOSS OCR package of equivalent quality to Apple Vision. I'm happy to be corrected otherwise.
- pabs3 1y agoIt has definitely been done before, but probably not recently. Maybe if you use the checkra1n bootROM exploit you could do it with lots of dev work. https://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/ https://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/ https://checkra.in/ https://checkra.in/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xydac 1y agoMine bailed out on a Baseband error due to which i am not even able to boot it anymore :(
- eddieh 1y agoThe iPhone 8 was peak iPhone. I’m on my second iPhone 8 and am posting from it now. I did also like the original iPhone SE mostly because of the size, but the haptics make the the iPhone 8, along with having a bezel, square screen, and home button.
- gregoriol 1y agoHad the iPhone 8 and now on an SE3, which is the same but better, peak device forms and features indeed.
- nikolayasdf123 1y agointeresting, who (why?) is using and even paying for this service? 1. if you are on device, then use on device OCR (e.g. use Apple Vision directly) 2. if you are on cloud, then self-deployed OCR models 3. if you are on browser, then WASM/local self-deployed OCR models
- nottorp 1y ago> One unexpected discovery: the phone performs OCR faster when slightly warm (but not hot). Cold Canadian mornings mean slower processing times - something I never would have noticed with wall power. Interesting. Apple throttles on cold too? In my experience it would shut down on cold, but I don't think I noticed throttling. But then I don't run anything important enough to benchmark on a phone...
- victorantos 1y agoI donated my iPhone 8 a few years ago and it’s still going strong, at least from what I heard last time earlier this year. Honestly impressive how long these older iPhones keep up, both in performance and battery life (still original battery)
- CaptainFever 1y agoA classic related article, also using iPhones as OCR servers: https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-iphone-racks-building-an-internet-scale-meme-search-engine-Qzrz7V6T.html https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip...
- seanalltogether 1y agoI have about 7 old android phones/tablets that I would love to put to use as some kinda makeshift server farm, I just can't think of a good workflow that could take advantage of them
- elchangri 1y agoRun webservers with Cloudflare Tunnels or ngrok. Free compute
- gganley 1y agoEven in death, it still serves.
- crazygringo 1y ago> The phone’s battery health held up reasonably well. After over a year of constant operation, it’s at 76% capacity. I have an iPhone SE that I've tried keeping plugged in all the time and its battery has turned into a spicy pillow three times, first with Apple replacing the whole device (since they won't touch it with a swollen battery), then using third-party replacement kits. This isn't going to work for long if the battery is usually at 100%. My #1 wish for being able to repurpose old phones is to operate without touching the battery, and/or keeping the battery at 50%. Newer Apple phones have an 80% limit option which is an improvement, but I'm not sure how much. And unfortunately the option isn't there on any but the most recent phones, even on up-to-date iOS.
- KolibriFly 1y agoIt's frustrating that Apple doesn't offer a proper "battery bypass" mode or even let you set charge limits
- kccqzy 1y agoI don't believe a battery bypass mode is physically feasible, since the user could be charging the phone with a cheap 5V 1A charger, and yet the peak power consumption of an iPhone could very well exceed that.
- progbits 1y agoMost of these devices can't run "without touching the battery" because the external supply can't provide the required peak current, so during some CPU burst it would shut off. I've seen hacks that replace the battery with a supercapacitor though.
- crazygringo 1y agoCouldn't the power management simply throttle the CPU to never go above supplied power in a battery-free mode? Don't they already implement a power threshold for degraded batteries? It seems like that would just be part of the feature I'm asking for, and easy to implement. It really seems like, if it weren't for the battery part, these phones could run for decades... but right now you have to replace the battery every couple years because it swells when constantly kept at 100% which it is not designed for.
- DinoNuggies45 1y ago[flagged]
- The_President 1y agoI have an iPhone 8 still in service and compared to an equally old Android device, the Android (some kind of Motorola eX series low end phone) runs circles around the iPhone. Even playing background video or audio streamed from wifi and output over bluetooth with the screen off, the Android will burn 15% in an hour while the iPhone will burn over 60%. Both are the same age but the iPhone feels subjectively obselete while the low end Motorola feels like a mid-2010s computer. Even for it's age the Android will last two weeks in Airplane mode.
- martey 1y agoThis just suggests that the battery in your iPhone 8 is more degraded than your low end Motorola. This could easily occur if you have used the iPhone more over its lifetime and isn't a good measure of relative performance.
- KolibriFly 1y agoLove the mix of "just because I can" engineering and actual practical benefits
- arjie 1y agoThis is very cool! I have a similar EcoFlow battery hooked up to a Pixel 4. With Termux this is a very capable tool. I have it on Tailscale (using my own headscale server) and I use it for speech to text and text to speech using the native APIs (which are well supported with Termux's APIs and helper functions). It's a very capable computer. The one thing that I haven't quite figured out is how to run a high-quality wake-word tool. I initially intended to use it with a ReSpeaker speaker/mic system so that I could use it as a smart home assistant / Q&A bot since Google Home constantly frustrates me with its inability to answer questions that LLMs answer flawlessly but the mic/speaker on the phone is good enough. The only problem is the wake word functionality. I'm going to try Porcupine next and see.