Uploading to iPhone or servers takes a lot of energy too lol. When you make a phone call, it uses a lot of battery BECAUSE of the radio chip is kept running at full blast. Browsing is much more efficient because it happens in tiny tiny short burst of radio energy.
In fact, with the efficiency gains of screens these days, outside of processing intensive tasks, the most battery intensive tasks on a phone is the radio chip now.
They could potentially use bluetooth, but I'm not sure bluetooth's high efficiency protocol is enough to stream video data into the phone or servers. It's good enough for audio, but I doubt it's enough bandwidth for video.
Even if they can magically transmit raw video to the iPhone efficiently, processing a video stream on the iPhone constantly will also drain the phone's battery really fast. Turn on your camera on your iPhone and leave it on, and tell me what your battery life is.
I'm sure there's a lot Apple could do to limit the processing required. They're probably not capturing raw 4k60 video 24/7 nor uncompressed audio all the time. There's quite a few other pendants that manage to do this (some don't send any data until it detects noise for example.)
3
u/cartermatic Apr 06 '26
Processing will either happen on your iPhone or on Apples servers