Very interesting article. I'd be interested to know if a M-series Mac Mini (this article was early 2023, so there should've been M1 and M2) would have also filled this role just fine.
> My preliminary speed tests were fairly slow on my MacBook. However, once I deployed the app to an actual iPhone the speed of OCR was extremely promising (possibly due to the Vision framework using the GPU).
I don't know a lot about the specifics of where (hardware-wise) this gets run, but I'd assume any semi-modern Mac would also have an accelerated compute for this kind of thing. Running it on a Mac Mini would ease my worries about battery and heat issues. I would've guessed that they'd scale better as well, but I have no idea if that's actually the case. Also, you'd be able to run the server as a service for automatic restarts and such.
> My preliminary speed tests were fairly slow on my MacBook. However, once I deployed the app to an actual iPhone the speed of OCR was extremely promising (possibly due to the Vision framework using the GPU).
I don't know a lot about the specifics of where (hardware-wise) this gets run, but I'd assume any semi-modern Mac would also have an accelerated compute for this kind of thing. Running it on a Mac Mini would ease my worries about battery and heat issues. I would've guessed that they'd scale better as well, but I have no idea if that's actually the case. Also, you'd be able to run the server as a service for automatic restarts and such.
All that said, a rack of iPhones is pretty fun.