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Comment by miffy900 | Hacker News Reader

> Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.

"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.

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Memory unlocked: the awful slog that was an iPhone 4S with iOS >= 7.

Indeed, I remember the switch to iOS 7, for me battery life seemed to get slightly worse but there were conflicting opinions at the time. It's fresh in my memory as it was around the same time I binged on all five seasons of Breaking Bad :)

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.

You can’t judge battery life and performance off a .0 release when the priority is on delivering features with the minimum number of showstopper bugs. At least wait until the .1.

It has been like this for every Apple release for over 20 years.

Maybe for "Apple", but there's one team that takes performance seriously. The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions (https://webkit.org/performance/) dating back to the implementation of the Page Load Test in 2002 (Creative Selection, p. 93).

WebKit sounds like the kind of scrappy startup Apple might want to acquire and gain some hard-earned engineering knowledge.

>The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions

But apparently they still welcome app-crashing bugs and UI-stalling code!

WebKit is the only browser that lags when there is too much logs in devtools console on my M1 mac... Pretty funny.

If Apple has been shipping betas for 2 decades that do not meaningfully prepare the release candidate for users, something is horribly wrong. They're either not listening to the feedback they receive or they're not giving themselves enough time; both are firmly within Apple's control.

Well, firstly, this is a developer beta. So the target audience are developers that want to get a head start on getting their app(s) ready. So measuring battery performance of those dev betas is dumb.

Also, they do listen to feedback and do gather it. They won't change entire design language now tho.

The parent comment wasn't talking about the developer beta, they were talking about the .0 release. They should use the release candidates as an opportunity to dogfood new solutions instead of shipping an MVP to prod.

Poor performance of a GUI is a showstopper bug. It should be, anyway.

> number of showstopper bugs

Screwing with the battery life on a mobile device would be a showstopper bug if Steve were still around.

Maybe we should stop accepting this?

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