I designed and deployed several custom CNN-based AI models to ipad hosts around 2018-2020. It was a finicky process - CoreML didn't give you much control (or ev

I designed and deployed several custom CNN-based AI models to ipad hosts around 2018-2020. It was a finicky process - CoreML didn't give you much control (or even feedback) on what parts of your model would run on the CPU, GPU, or ANE - but you could usually tell right away when they didn't, just based on big latency differences. Performance to power (and size) ratio was pretty good and I was impressed at the time, despite being generally not really happy about working with the apple ecosystem. I would've preferred something Android (or Linux)-based but there wasn't really anything comparable out there back then. (SBCs like the Jetson would've worked, but we would've had to figure out how to add an interface for human operators which would've been a big lift compared to just using off the shelf hardware).