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Comment by throwaway48476 | Hacker News Reader

The glass transparency effect is just very computationally expensive.

The glass UI renders on my Apple Watch 6 just fine and that thing has probably 0.5% the GPU power as the Macbooks.

There's visible lag & stutters opening the control center on my Series 10.

Likewise, while it performs "fine," interacting with the UI still feels sluggish on Tahoe on my M4 Pro compared to Sequoia. I still have another M4 Pro with sequoia on it and it's a night and day difference, in favor of Sequoia.

There may not be any real performance loss but there is definitely UI latency and it's very noticable.

Like others have said, check whether you have any Electron apps that weren’t updated with the latest Electron framework. Both my M1 Pro and my work M3 Pro don’t feel any slower (unless I open an offending Electron app). I was updating a Mac that uses Sequoia yesterday and it didn’t feel any faster.

Your watch also has a screen resolution of (3024 * 1964) / (368 * 448) = 36 times less than a Macbook, so it's all a wash. Except the wasted coulombs.

It also renders on my M1 Macbook just fine as well for what it's worth. If it's running slow, it's because something is bugged out rather than the UI inherently being too heavy.

I just don't understand how if Visa could render its transparency efects smoothly on Intel 920 grade GPUs with 128mb of ram.

That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.

That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1% extra battery usage for it would be too much even though I kinda appreciated the new look.

>>That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.

I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).

Vista problems were largely nvidia driver crashes and low spec machines. Otherwise vista was fine.

Yes, though I think it worth noting that at that point "low spec machines" was like 80% of laptops and maybe 50% of desktops. It also really hurt when you went from XP which ran great to Vista which noticeably dragged on your machine.

My friend had an Alienware laptop which absolutely screamed with Vista

I mostly disliked Vista for a number of reasons, but the looks were incredible. I was actually blown away at the beauty

I liked aero too, XP was too fisher price.

XP Media Center Edition had a pretty slick theme, not at all toy-like. To say nothing of the Metro interface in its titular app, though it seems Metro was kind of a dud when they tried to apply it to other apps.

Vista did translucency and a statically positioned reflection mask, whereas this glass effect involves refraction/tinting that samples from surrounding surfaces.

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