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> What's to be gained... by offloading inference to someone else?

Access to models that local hardware can't run. The kind of model that an iphone struggles to run is blown out of the water by most low end hosted models. Its the same reason that most devs opt for claude code, cursor, copilot, etc. instead of using hosted models for coding assistance.

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But apparently this model is sufficient for what the OP wants to do. Also apparently it works on iPhone 15 and 17, but not on 16.
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Claude code produces stuff orders of magnitude more complicated than classifying expenses. If the task can be run locally on hardware you own anyway, it should.
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