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I'm sure Apple could get it running on the A11, however people apparently forget there will be trade-offs to enable that to happen. What if enabling it on the A11 halved the battery life, would you want that, would that be a trade-off you'd be willing to make? Or perhaps the performance of the phone drops by 25%, how about that?

Apple can't (and shouldn't be expected to) support older hardware with every single new feature that's released. Apple do a good job of supporting older hardware far better than the competitors do (the iPhone 6s, a 2015 phone, gets iOS 15), they'll get the benefit of at least some new features and improvements.

I'm sure some people will want to upgrade their hardware to support the latest software additions, but I (and I'm sure like a lot of other folks like me with newish machines), won't be bothered enough. Nice features, but I won't lose sleep over not having them.


Of course they're not - Apple is a money making enterprise.
As someone rocking a 6S and about to upgrade to a 13 Pro I agree. My phone has been extremely well supported and I've never felt like Apple cut features for arbitrary reasons. This just sounds like Apple are making this available to the devices where this will work well.
 
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Been doing this for years with an app called Text Grabber.
You have a link for that app? I downloaded an app called "Text Grabber", but it worked like sh**. Did maybe recognise a word or two and the rest was some gibberish. But maybe it's the wrong app?
 
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the A11 the first chip with a Neural Engine? So surely they could make this work on the X (and even the 8 and 8 Plus) if they REALLY wanted to.
That's right, but if you compare the size of the Neural Engine on DIE (1.83 sqmm A11 vs 5.79 sqmm A12) and take the higher transistor density of the 7 nm process (~ +70 %) into account, you end up with more than five times the transistor count. This results in a much higher processing power and is a comprehensible reason for excluding A11 phones from this features.
 
Try using Word Lens for any sustained period - it absolutely hammered your battery. And just to be clear, that isn't a criticism of Word Lens - it was an exceptional app for its time, it just couldn't take advantage of optimised silicon.

The performance argument is *the* argument. Apple more than likely could implement it on all hardware, but what it it caused your battery life to be half of usual, or Safari and camera apps to be considerably slower while it runs CPU-bound neural networks on every image downloaded, or every camera frame?

Also worth noting, text recognition isn't a trivial task, especially with handwriting.
What do you mean “battery to be half as usual”? Why would your phone die 50% faster from an app that isn’t running? Or do you expect to have it open all hours while the phone is in use? In that case, let’s ban all games and apps that heavily use the cpu because they will drain the battery.

And then what’s the excuse on the desktop? There is no battery to worry about there.

Bottom line, apple is clearly doing this on purpose to entice people to upgrade. There is no technical hurdle here.
 
Another free iOS app that can do some of this is Microsoft Lens (formerly called Office Lens). If you haven't ever looked at that app, it's worth checking out.


It's capable of converting handwriting to printed text, doing OCR to business cards and more.
 
Not sure if serious... if you are, type an equation and I'll see.
Oh,, could you try with this?
math.jpeg
 
Implemented FIRST on Android. Can it be improved? Yes but is was on Android first.
Are we talking simple OCR here? As that’s been around since shortly after you could get an image into a computer. It’s used by Adobe Acrobat (and stand-alone apps), old scanners would convert through a TWAIN driver plug-in, and there were even dedicated document scanners: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2558-paperport-vx

If you’re thinking of iPhones; I recall using document scanner apps to output text with iOS5/6: you could clean-up and enhance an image of a page, and copy/export blocks of text.

Or the ‘live text’? Surely ‘first‘ would be the third-party app, which Google felt compelled to purchase in order to re-brand, then integrate into its own products?
Does it work with math equations?
I’ve used an app called ‘Photomath’. It does the basics, but I can’t say I used it much.
Try using Word Lens for any sustained period - it absolutely hammered your battery. And just to be clear, that isn't a criticism of Word Lens - it was an exceptional app for its time, it just couldn't take advantage of optimised silicon.
Just using the camera ‘hammered’ the battery to the same extent, so I considered it to be expected. In fact; I seem to recall stuff like GPS (with maps) being even worse.
I would imagine that on a more modern device with 100x the processing power; any large drain would again be the camera component.
 
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Or the ‘live text’? Surely ‘first‘ would be the third-party app, which Google felt compelled to purchase in order to re-brand, then integrate into its own products?
Yep. It's called "Word Lens". Used to have it on my iPhone before being bought by Google. 😄
 
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This is actually pretty neat...No-one likes dialing those long international numbers.
 
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