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Comment by CaptainOfCoit | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, if it was cross-platform maybe more people would be curious about it, but something that can only run on ~10% of the hardware people have doesn't make it very attractive to even begin to spend time on Apple-exclusive stuff.

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But you can have an apple device deployed in your stack to handle the OCR, right? I get on-device is a hardware limitation for many, but if you have an apple device in your stack, can’t you leverage this?

Yeah, but handling macOS is a infrastructure-capacity sucks, Apple really doesn't want you to so tooling is almost none existing. I've setup CI/CD stacks before that needed macOS builders and it's always the most cumbersome machines to manage as infrastructure.

AWS literally lets you deploy Macs as EC2 instances, which I believe includes all of AWS's usual EBS storage and disk imaging features.

Alright, so now the easy thing is done, now how do you actually manage them, keep them running and do introspection without resorting to SSH or even remote desktop?

How do you manage any EC2 instance “without resorting to SSH”? Even for Linux EC2 instances, the right answer is often tools like Ansible, which do still use SSH under the hood.

You usually provision them via images, that they then either install from or boot from directly. Not to mention there are countless of infrastructure software to run that works for at least Linux, sometimes Windows and seldom even macOS.

I specifically mentioned the imaging capability of EBS for Mac, which you dismissed as the easy part. Now you’re claiming that is the main thing? Well, good news!

And yes, Ansible (among other tools) can be used to manage macOS.

This discussion doesn’t seem productive. You have a preconceived view point, and you’re not actually considering the problem or even doing 5 seconds of googling.

Managing a Mac fleet on AWS isn’t a real problem. If Apple’s OCR framework were significantly above the competition, it could easily be used. I would like to see benchmarks of it, as the other person was also asking for.

10% of hardware is an insanely vast amount, no?

Well, it's 90% less than what everyone else uses, so even if the total number is big, relatively it has a small user-base.

I don’t think 10% of anything would be considered relatively small even if we talk about 10 items: literally there’s only 10 items and this 1 has the rare quality of being among 10. Let alone billions of devices. Unless you want to reduce it to tautology, and instead of answering “why it’s not benchmarked” just go for “10 is smaller than 90, so I’m right”.

My point is, I don’t think any comparative benchmark would ever exclude something based on “oh it’s just 10%, who cares.” I think the issue is more that Apple Vision Framework is not well known as an OCR option, but maybe it’s starting to change.

And another part of the irony is that Apple’s framework probably gets way more real world usage in practice than most of the tools in that benchmark.

The initial wish was that more people cared about Apple Vision Framework, I'm merely claiming that since most people don't actually have Apple hardware, they're avoiding Apple technology as it commonly only runs on Apple hardware.

So I'm not saying it should be excluded because it's can only used by relatively few people, but I was trying to communicate that I kind of get why not so many people care about it and why it gets forgotten, since most people wouldn't be able to run it even if they wanted to.

Instead, something like DeepSeek OCR could be deployed on any of the three major OSes (assuming there is implementations of the architecture available), so of course it gets a lot more attention and will be included in way more benchmarks.

I get what you're saying, I'm just disagreeing with your thought process. By that logic benchmarks would also not include the LLMs that they did, since most people wouldn't be able to run those either (it takes expensive hardware). In fact, more people would probably be able to run Vision framework than those LLMs, for cheaper (Vision is even on iPhones). I'm more inclined to agree if you say "maybe people just don't like Apple". :)

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