Devices Compatible with Live Text, Visual Lookup, & Camera Translate
Many iPhone, iPad, and Mac users may be interested in using various features related to Live Text, Visual Lookup, and Camera Translate, but not all hardware will support these features.
Live Text, which allows you to select text from photos and images, Visual Lookup, which allows you to identify objects found in photos and images, and Camera Translate, which allows you to use the camera to translate languages for you, all have specific hardware requirements and needs, and therefore are not available to all devices.
Live Text, Visual Lookup, & Camera Translate Compatible iPhone & iPad Models
According to Apple, the following iPhone and iPad hardware supports the ability to use Live Text, Visual Lookup, and Translate with Camera, as long as they’re running iOS 15 or newer:
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iPad mini (5th generation and later)
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iPad (8th generation and later)
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iPad Air (3rd generation and later)
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iPad Pro 11-inch (all generations)
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iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd generation and later)
Live Text, Visual Lookup, & Camera Translate Compatible Mac Models
You can also use Live Text on Mac. According to Apple, the following Macs support the various Live Text features, as long as they’re running MacOS Monterey 12.x or newer:
- MacBook Air 2015 and newer
- MacBook Pro 2015 and newer
- MacBook 2016 and newer
- iMac Pro
- iMac 2015 and newer
- Mac Mini 2014 and newer
- Mac Pro 2013 and newer
- All Apple Silicon Macs
You’ll notice this is basically the same list as what Macs can run MacOS Monterey.
The article says it lists iPhone models, but it it only contains iPad models
I have used this type of feature for years using Google Translate on my iPhone 6s plus. The camera input works just fine in this app, which is unavailable in the app that this article is based on. This is simply a failure of Apple to make the feature available on older hardware.