"The Liquid Glass effects are not expensive and anyone claiming they are has no idea how modern GPUs and animation work. Anyone saying it is is either just parroting or is an idiot."
Now that I'm running the iOS 26 beta, I frequently feel animations going slowly or hitching. It's not terrible, but for the first time, I have the feeling that my experience using my iPad would be noticeably improved if I bought a new and more powerful one.
But I guess this makes me an idiot according to Mitchell?
Same thing with Windows. If they just stopped touching it 20 years ago, it would be 50x more responsive now.
I always so this with all phones as it saves battery life and feels way snappier to me than some random animation between windows.
I have a hard time believing that the GPU is somehow magically energy efficient, so that computing this glass stuff uses barely any energy (talking about battery drain here, not "unused cycles").
But Apple went down that xPU-taxing path a long time ago when they added the blur to views beneath other views (I don't remember what that was called).
Gaussian blurs are some of the most expensive operations you can run, and Apple has been using them for a long time. They’re almost always downscaled because of this.
The first retina iPad (the iPad 3 if I recall) had an awfully underpowered GPU relative to the number of pixels it had to push. Since then, the processors have consistently outpaced pixels.
Your device is easily wasting more time on redundant layout or some other inefficiency rather than Liquid Glass. Software does get slower and more bloated over time, often faster than the hardware itself, not in the ways you might expect.
The GPU has so much headroom that they fit language models in there!
When you have a frosted glass overlay, any pixel change anywhere near the overlay (not just directly underneath) requires the whole overlay to be redrawn, and this is stalled waiting for the entire previous render pass to complete first for the pixels to be valid to read.
The GPU isn't busy in any of this. But it has to stay awake notably longer, which is the worst possible sin when it comes to power efficiency and heat management.
> Now, with the powerful advances in our hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies, we have the opportunity (…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGztGfRujSE&t=42s
Coupled with the reports of sluggish performance from the early betas, it’s understandable people would reach the conclusion that the new design pushes the hardware significantly more than before.
a.) Compute-cycles: Some added passes to apply additional shading on top of the completed render, or
b.) Power-consumption: Some added delay in putting components to sleep (reducing CPU/GPU-clock) on every screen update.
Deferred sleep for a portable, battery-powered device because of a longer UI-rendering pipeline can easily add up over time.
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I'd be quite interested to see some technical analysis on this (although more out of technical curiosity than the assumption that there is something huge to be uncovered here...).
There's also the aspect of iOS prioritizing GUI-rendering over other processing to maintain touch-responsiveness, fluidity, etc. Spending more xPU-time on the GUI potentially means less/later availability for other processes.
For sure non-native apps trying to emulate this look (i.e. Flutter) will create a significantly higher impact on the power-profile of a device than a native app.
This brings a more clear divide between fully native iOS applications and React Native -style "build once and cross-compile" -platforms.
Looking back at the announcement, it's more likely that the Management had to decide on the key message for the unveiling prior to the event, and there wasn't much "media-disruptive" to choose from.
So Liquid Glass got elevated to top priority and then all teams got the order to ensure it is present in as many apps as possible.
Now my personal inclination is to integrate with the platform still, as someone currently in the process of building such 3rd party frameworks. Less work for me as the platform handles rendering, keyboard events etc.
The only issue is that on iOS, UIKit is far easier to interact with than SwiftUI. And Swift is too large a language and SwiftUI not simple enough for my taste. Just too bad it is difficult to piggy back on what exists in SwiftUI and is not available in UIKit (yet). There are ways to bridge in a tripartite way perhaps.. But I digress...
Do you believe pixel shaders are some unique magic that only Apple has the secret sauce to and noone else can use? There were some efficient implementations of liquid glass for flutter before the iOS beta was even released. Glass effects are dime a dozen on shadertoy, they're one of the most basic effects you could learn to do when learning about texture sampling.
The platforms that will take a large performance hit are the ones that can't drop down to the native platforms, i.e. the web.
(Actually, someone probably will. People are weird that way.)
I'm pretty sure any recreation will still be just that little bit off compared to the native one, which is their intention IMO.
> I have this little web app I built for my kids to help them manage their day. It has those tiles that animate when you hover on them.
I have absolutely no idea what “those tiles” are. They are familiar to the author, but he has not bothered to explain them well enough to deserve that familiar “those.” AI would have explained them better.
This isn’t AI slop, just sloppy writing.
Also, a sibling comment suggests that "those tiles" is some sort of slop; but I find it no more sloppy than "this little web app" in the preceding sentence. Both are handwavy markers of imprecision common in oral speech. A comment on English Stack Exchange points out that this feature is referred to as the "indefinite this" [0].
[0] - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/389637/using-thi...
But at this point I'm seeing it everywhere... the "Trash question? Trash answer" format posed as poetry EVERYWHERE and it is correlated with slop and I'm finding it very annoying to read. I might (to my own detriment perhaps) start factoring that in into what I'm gonna continue reading.
Examples of that question format in this article: - Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for - That glassy transparency and window animations? A notorious resource hog that brought mid-2000s hardware to its knees - The moment a single tile wiggles? The entire UI crawls - Checking mail? Browsing? Streaming? Your M4 is bored out of its silicon mind - That whole section on: Battery life? ... Thermals? ... Future-proofing? ... Real workloads? ... ugh. - Is it worth it? For Apple’s vibe? Probably. But next time your fan whispers or your battery dips faster than expected… maybe blame the glass.
And apart from that question format, there's another thing but I can't quite figure out the pattern behind it but is slop: (I would really love to figure out what my brain thinks as "off" in these - maybe sentence length variability, maybe colons, or maybe trying to be poetic or dramatic or too self-assured with basically no data/substance underneath it, idk): - Let’s be real: eye candy always comes at a price. - When the system’s stressed, the pretty things break first. - They chew through GPU/CPU time. Always have. - Here’s my hot take: Apple knows exactly what they’re doing - It's stealth bloat. - You might not feel the drag today. That’s the point! The M4’s raw power is the perfect smokescreen. But those cycles aren’t free - TL;DR: Liquid Glass is gorgeous tech debt. Your M4 can afford it… for now. But never forget: fancy pixels demand fancy math.
Basically the entire article at this point. There was one place which was a bit personalized about the web app he built for his kids where I was like OK at least something seems OK, but as another user pointed out "It has those tiles that animate when you hover on them" doesn't make any sense. What tiles. How are we supposed to know.
When one pixel changes underneath a blur the entire blurred area needs to be redrawn, meaning that all elements on top needs to be redrawn. As the blur cannot render before the underlay is finished, the graphics pipeline is stalled. Fancy blur look past the area immediately underneath to more accurately lens effects, meaning each output pixel reads a lot of input pixels.
When it comes to power and heat management, the goal is to be able to power the GPU down again as fast as possible, and this kind fo thing prolongs it quite a bit. There may be a point where efficiency makes the result acceptable, but it's always going to be much worse than not doing that.
There's some truth to that, in the sense of "the hardware can handle it now" (but he also mentions Vista, which came out like 20 years ago...)
If it's actually resource intensive, then the logic would probably be "let's make all last-gen devices a bit slower to encourage people to upgrade..."
At least, that's been my experience when upgrading iOS. It's basically the same thing except mysteriously way slower. (I wonder if the CPU throttling thing was part of the iOS upgrade that made my phone slow to a crawl a few years ago.)
It's not for font smoothing, their fonts are rendered with anti-aliasing in the first place. The 2x scaling thing is due to how they handle non-integer scaling factors, or rather how they don't, instead they render at a higher resolution with an integer factor and then downscale the result to fit the display.
e.g. if you set a 3024x1964 Macbook to a virtual resolution of 1680x1050 (1.87x scale), it'll actually render internally at 3360x2100 (2x scale) and then squish that down to 3024x1964.
I remember eye candy Linux desktop stuff like Enlightenment doing stuff like this back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not as pervasive or flashy but similar: lots of translucency, skins, themes, etc. Ran fine on a 400mhz machine, though at a much lower resolution.
It’s not free but I’m curious to see how significant it is. I also wonder if you can turn off the animated stuff.
The biggest gripe I have with the Tahoe shots I’ve seen is thst they seem to show it wasting more space with larger margins, etc. I hate that trend. I have a huge ultra wide monitor and often find myself wanting even more screen real estate while I’m working. Stop wasting my pixels.
I wonder if it had enough capabilities to run the extra passes needed for all that blur.
So the problem might not be that it makes things slow, but that it prevents low-power modes. AKA: slightly less battery life, possibly unused hardware
Is it possible to turn the effects off? I mean something like accessibility settings to tone down the transparency and "glassiness"?
This is like saying: Wallpaper ? That's what your (Win 95 SD)RAM is for.
The OS should not consume all resources in a system. But tell that to Apple, Google or Microsoft.
The CPU processes draw calls and runs the compositor, and most compositors are fairly straightforward. The GPU runs the rasterisation, shaders, culling, occlusion, etc to achieve the effect.
I wonder if OP at least tested macOS Tahoe to base his impressions upon.
Works fine on my M1 Macs sooooo whatever.
Wasn't that even before the beta was released...?
If it can't be disabled and ends up crippling my otherwise perfectly adequate M1 it will accelerate me to switch to daily use of Asahi Linux.
Edit: That's assuming the effects are even expensive for the GPU.
Defaults matter. Most people never change them.
this is a way to slow older models and get away with it.
- Slow down the phone so that it still works
- Crash phone immediately
They did fix it by giving people the option, but I wonder how many still opted for "yes, I want my phone to suddenly just die instead of slowing down".
And the fix for all this was a 50€ battery replacement.
Communication: at no point has Apple tried to communicate "your phone's battery has gone bad, the device now suffers for it" to the user. Even though they obviously knew that this was what was happening.
Trust: with how openly anti-repair Apple was at the time, how can you trust that this was a honest oversight, and not another malicious action designed to prevent people from repairing their devices?
Apple has improved upon both since. But they're still not anywhere near perfect - and it took a lot of getting their shit kicked in by the media, the public and the regulators for Apple to get even this far.
> - Slow down the phone so that it still works
> - Crash phone immediately
Three, actually:
- Inform the user and provide decent repair and parts.People want to know this is what happens. If a slow down is not communicated, the average person doesn't go "Oh, I need a new battery.". They are going to buy a new phone because their old one is slow.
"oh we're protecting you. it's not like we have a dozen voltage and temperature sensors, and not like we already throttle when those sensors detect any of the things we're claiming in the excuse" ... and everyone fall for it. geez.
'Hey, there's an issue with your battery so we've slowed down your phone to prevent it going off. Please visit your local apple store to address this.' As opposed to misleading them that their phones are old and slow/crashing and they need to buy new ones?
Most phone PCB designs do not account properly for the scenario "battery gone bad leads to undervolting of components" at all, the best you're gonna get is the BMC cutting off everything when the voltage at the battery drops way too much - but that is a failsafe mechanism, the flash, memory and processor chips will have undergone brownout events before the BMC emergency shutdown hits.
I wonder why... /s