At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achieve double digit FPS. Even if this 'liquid glass' effect is heavier to compute, on the hardware we have today it will be a negligible performance concern.
And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.
I just want everything to look like Windows XP. I don't get it.
The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried.
(Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)
Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.
Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.
Okay, but what about the battery connected to the GPU? The battery in my iPhone has already degraded below 80% health in the 2.7 years I've had it, so I'd rather not waste its charge on low-contrast glass effects.
I don’t know, just kidding :-)
If GPUs can handle it, I guess why not. It’s some people will notice and say “wow, looks pretty, glad I upgraded”
3:30–3:45 in the video is painful. Describing “giving you an entirely new way, to personalise your experience”, while showing… white. White white white. Oh, and light tinted backgrounds to set your white on. I hope the personalisation you wanted was white.
But it is worth remembering that dark mode does actually get you some things; it’s not all bad: the restrictions do have some value.
Full customisation became paradoxically limiting: when you give too much power to the user, the app is essentially operating in a hostile environment. Of course, a lot of it was laziness on app and UI framework developers’ parts, but it really did limit innovation, too.
Dark mode gets you a pair of themes that you can switch between easily, and an expectation that there are only two themes you need to consider, with well-defined characteristics. This is a much more practical target, a vastly easier sell for app and framework developers.
The funny thing with monochrome icons is that in some ways they were actually a better fit for a full-customisation environment, where you had arbitrary background and foreground colours. Once it’s just mundane light and dark themes, you could more safely have full colour in two variants.
Certainly light mode and dark mode does not mean things need to be monochrome.
"Without any performance issues"? Entirely false - reviews at the time noted iOS 7 dramatically reduced battery life - all across the board for Apple devices, even for the then latest iPhone 5S and 5c (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...).
The abuse of transparency/translucency in the UI was the primary reason - you could go to Accessibility settings and disable animations + transparency/translucency and get notable increases in both runtime speed of the OS UI and battery life.
It has been like this for every Apple release for over 20 years.
Also, they do listen to feedback and do gather it. They won't change entire design language now tho.
WebKit sounds like the kind of scrappy startup Apple might want to acquire and gain some hard-earned engineering knowledge.
But apparently they still welcome app-crashing bugs and UI-stalling code!
Screwing with the battery life on a mobile device would be a showstopper bug if Steve were still around.
I's also true that iOS 7 made the 4/4S seem much slower, but the frosted glass effect still ran at 60FPS - that was my point. It was really impressive at the time. Though unless you spent hours sliding the control center up and down, it's hard to blame the blur effect for the reduced battery life, as it rarely appeared inside apps. Most likely the result of increased OS bloat and proliferation of background services.
I made a comment about this a couple of years ago, but I fudged the explanation of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618
I suspect that their new technique implements the existing fast gaussian blur, and since the patent is about to expire, it was a good time to spice it up.
I suspect as others have mentioned here, they use a "Liquid Glass" shader which samples the backing layer of the UI composition below the target element and applies a lens distortion based on the target element's border radius, all heavily parameterized so as to be used with the rest of the system's Liquid Glass applications like the new icon system.
And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.
I don't know how long you've been following Apple but with previous "high cost on old hardware" features they just disabled them for old hardware.
Apple loves their battery life numbers, they won't purposefully ship a UI feature that meaningfully reduces them. Now bugs that drop framerates and cause hangs, they love shipping those.
For devices currently being sold, primarily.
It's the first iPhone I bought and has lasted longer than any of the three Android phones I had before it.
...under pressure of consumer protection and e-waste laws. As it should be, I hope the other phone manufacturers are experiencing the same pressure.
Unlike previous GDI acceleration, DWM.EXE could composite alpha channel quickly with the GPU, and generally achieved much higher fill rates on the same hw - if the drivers worked properly.
Even on modern devices though which have more computation and graphics power to the point that they aren't going to actually lag or anything while rendering it, why waste cycles and battery animating these useless and distracting things? There's no good justification.
I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone
To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone. EDIT: wait a minute...your eight year old phone won't even be supported.
(EDIT: reworded first paragraph to account for the ninja edit.)
It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent.
But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc.
Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down.
which I am doing exactly, but still new iOS version make my phone slower and slower and I cannot even opt out of updates.
because some apps are forcing me to use the latest version of iOS (Authentication, Okta 2fa, etc)
And you can use third parties as well which Apple now officially supports.
It is just a lie to say you need a new phone.
The worst part was that during the boot sequence, the CPU ran at full-throttle for a few moments until the power-management components were loaded. So I couldn't restart it. As long as I didn't open a game or YouTube or a wonky website with super awful javascript, I could continue using the phone for another couple hours. But if the phone turned off, it couldn't be turned back on without charging it more ... even though it had "18%" battery left (as determined by voltage, not taking into account increased internal resistance in the battery as it ages).
I was envious of iPhone users that got a real fix for this (Apple slowing down the phone when the internal voltage got low). I would have greatly preferred that Samsung had done the same for my phone too.
That said, Apple _significantly_ erred in not over-communicating what they were doing. At that point, the OS would pop warnings to users if the phone had to thermal throttle, and adding a similar notification that led the user to a FAQ page explaining the battery dynamics wouldn't have been technically hard to do.
There is literally a zero percent chance it was anything to do with batteries. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's an objective fact.
I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.
Apple absolutely effed up by not communicating the specifics well, but that’s corporate policy. Apple docs have always been targeted at the non-technical user and therefore inadequate for others.
You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices, the first A chip came out 2 generations after yours as has 2% of the power of a current chip so modern chips are likely close to 100x as powerful as your phone.
Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
What are apps and mobile sites doing differently today besides loading up unnecessary animations and user tracking? How has user experience improved for those operating on devices fast enough to make up for developer laziness?
I can now do on-device transcription without issue, security improvements at the chip level, HD graphics for video streaming, etc.
You can't choose when to use your OS, and you need to 'update your os' to stay secure.
Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world besides just complaining about no one continuing to support them long after the useful life of their devices.
Maybe there's also a cost to updating phones as frequently as people do, and inefficient software running across billions of devices.
I wouldn't blame people who make their hardware last longer and call them "laggards". And it's not their responsibility to write security patches for their device, that falls on the manufacturer.
For these people, me included, they don't need the latest hardware features to ray trace a game or run some local LLM. We're just taking some photos, making calls, getting map navigation, messaging, interacting with CRUD apps, and web browsing. None of that requires the latest hardware, and especially Apple hardware from 8 years ago is more than capable of handling it smoothly.
If you're running an insecure device past it's support life it's your responsibility and your fault if it's used to attack others. You are fully to blame for choosing to use something past it's serviced life. You cannot expect companies to support old software forever.
For what? So a designer can get a promotion? This is not progress, this is pure fashion. As if the planet being literally on fire needed more fuel.
So that we can have better features and functionality in our future systems. Backwards compatibility is an anchor. If you want new things then expect to get new platforms to run them on don't expect everyone to limit their possibilities to support you.
We are not talking about new features. Of course no one expects to run a LLM on an ten year old phone, again we are talking about fashion. It is change for change's sake. It is not providing value to users it is so the the designer gets to eat and management and shareholders are kept happy.
There is a difference between actual technical progress and you throwing out your skinny jeans because baggy pants are now in fashion.
Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?
>We are not talking about new features
We are, you are just choosing to ignore them and call them fashion. There have been immense changes in capabilities over the past 10 years.
>Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?
We do, dumb phones, why don't you own one of those instead of trying to limit progress in the phones pushing progress?
If we want to take increasing device lifetimes seriously we need to normalize testing and development against slow/old models. Even if such testing is automated, it’d do wonders for keeping bloat at bay.
like Charlie Munger have said: "Show me the incentives and I will tell you the outcome"
Reality is that designers, product managers, engineers — they all wanna build cool things, get promoted, make money etc.
You don’t do that by shipping plain designs, no matter how tried and true. The pressure to create something new and interesting is ever present. And look we have these powerful Apple silicon chips that can capably render these neat effects.
So no I don’t think it’s a shadowy conspiracy to come after your iPhone 8. Just the regular pressure of everyday men and women to build new and interesting things that will bring success.
Otherwise saying it is definitively true is misleading to put it mildly.
Whatever is it that you're saying that Apple does, it's either not obvious or they're shit at it.
And yes, “looking different” doesn’t have to mean “requires faster hardware”, but picking something that requires faster hardware makes it less likely that you will be accused of being a copy-cat of some other product’s UI.
It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating, etc. but my summarized initial thoughts are “it’ll take some getting used to, but it feels pretty fast”
I have a feeling the whole smooth animations thing contributes to this a lot. Obsessing about the reaction time and feeling of how stuff comes on the screen. But yeah iPhone 16 pro is probably a bad performance test case
> It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating
The overheating is a common occurrence, but it doesn't persist. It seems to be certain things (setting the animated backgrounds in iMessage is a good example), but the moment I'm not doing one of those things the temp feels fine. My battery does drop a percent or two during those cases (which sucks), but my typical use of the phone hasn't yielded any noticeable battery life loss compared to 18.5
I imagine this was on mobile devices.
Blending was relatively expensive on GPUs from Imagination Technologies and their derivatives, including all Apple GPUs. This is because these GPUs had relatively weak shader processors and relied instead on dedicated hardware to sort geometry so that the shader processor had to do less work than on a traditional GPU.
Other GPUs vendors rely more on beefier shader processors and less on sorting geometry (e.g. Hierarchical-Z). This turned out to be a better approach in the long term, especially once game engines started relying on deferred shading anyway, which is in essence a software-based approach that sorts geometry first before computing the final pixel colors.
Also reported here for example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255911835
Re-enabling transparency improved this a lot, also keyboard still hangs a bit from time to time. I’m always in power save mode, on an iPhone 12, running iOS18.
I had "Reduce Transparency" check-box in settings turned on because I distaste semit-transparent interfaces. Was not noticing performance problems except one application - Ogranics Maps which were unusably slow after switching to another app and returning to maps so I had to restart it freqently (swipe up). I was thinking that the problem is with Ogranics Maps code.
After seeing this comment re-enabled transparency (iOS default) and Ogranics Maps working fast even if I switch between Organic Maps and other apps!
Also reported here for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1d2ncvu/if_your_old...
Not sure if it is planned obsolescence but it certainly is an upsell to upgrade.
For older models, on the other hand, it would be an issue, and will put pressure to people to buy a new one.
They're going to backport this? I seriously doubt it.
I feel like a few years back when I still used an Intel macbook i noticed an increase in battery life and less frames dropping (like during 'Expose' animations) by disabling transparency in Accessibility settings.
I think this was after the BIg Sur update.
oh wait. it's not like they did. they did say it.
Plus, vista was released in 2007, XP SP2 (the most popular version) was in 2004. so its like ~3 years diff. So its not like hardware has progressed in 3 years, its more like new software got significantly slower
They WAY overreached in their goals with Longhorn. When they finally decided to cut back features to something actually attainable, they didn't have enough time to make a high-performance OS.
Windows 7 was a well-loved rebrand of what was essentially just a Windows Vista service pack and improved performance (though it was still too heavy for a lot of the older machines people tried to upgrade to Vista). If they'd have cut back on their goals earlier, Windows 7 is likely a lot closer to what would have shipped as Vista.
Windows 7 benefited from coming later with Vista being the battleground in which vendors were forced to update to NT6.0 models.