My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

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.

nop probably a very bad idea even if you had enough iPhones and you could parallelise them, it would be 10x less electricity efficient

Used Mac Minis are probably cheaper and more energy efficient

Manufacturing 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-comp...