Like a lot of people, I am an Apple fan. Since I am also an iOS developer, I watched the recent WWDC developer conference live and felt delighted with all the new features that Apple unveiled.
One of those cool features was copying text through the camera app and also from already captured photos in your photo library. Apple calls it “Live Text”. I could clearly visualize situations in my workplace where this feature could come real handy.
Copying text (with bullet points) from a whiteboard instead of capturing a photo would be such a positive quality of life change, I thought. Also, digitizing text from meeting notes would be so awesome! The possibilities that this brings to the way I do work was thrilling to think about.
So, with all this in mind, I hastily installed the iOS 15 developer beta software on my secondary phone, an iPhone 8Plus. And then I experienced the most disappointing iOS update ever!
The phone did its thing and showed me the lock screen. I put in my password, opened up my camera app, pointed it at the board and.. nothing! 🤔
I opened the photos app found an appropriate photo with typed text and… nothing again! 🤷♂️
So I searched online and found some articles saying that this feature would work only on devices that have an A12 chip or newer. That is an iPhone XS or newer. 😥
But didn’t Apple promise that iOS 15 would work on iPhone 6s and above? Doesn’t “iOS 15” mean everything? So Apple thinks that my phone cannot handle this? I’ve never felt my phone was slow, so why can’t it do this text capture thing?
I am sure Apple would say that there is some hardware limitation on my 8Plus’ chip, such as a missing technology, required to use this feature. But to that I say “then why does this text capture work using Google Lens on the same phone?”.
This particular incident has made me realize Apple’s recent hardware sales strategy. And that is to build a new chip, give it some fancy marketing name, say it can do some things not possible before and then make software features just available on those newer phones. I’m not saying it’s a lie, I’m just saying it sucks!
Obviously your older phones wouldn’t be able to do those new things if Apple deliberately holds back on those features. It’s disappointing but a fact. One that we have to live with, unless of course you buy a newer phone. 💸😔
By the way when I say in this post’ title that “nothing happened”, I mean that I could not figure out what I got from this upgrade. Definitely not the live text feature, and looks like nothing else either.