7 ms·

Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

70 points by luismedel 1y ago

1oooqooq 1y ago
they already got caught artificially slowing older iphones on ios updates, remember that? this is a way to slow older models and get away with it.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  It was a choice between two options in phones with bad batteries: - Slow down the phone so that it still works - Crash phone immediately Seems like the majority of people would've wanted option 2 for some strange reason? 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.
  - 1oooqooq 1y ago
    do you work with technology and you swallowed that crazy excuse? "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.
  - phoronixrly 1y ago
    Remind me, was the slowdown communicated in any meaningful way, and were the affected users directed to service their phones at the nearest apple store? '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?
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    The issue was always that of communication and trust. 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.
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      How has Apple improved on repairability?
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        They now actually sell some parts online, and offer official repair manuals and tools. That only covers a few basic repair types, the tooling is clunky (for a reason - those tools are designed to allow cheap-and-replaceable official employees to perform basic repairs to an Apple-acceptable quality) and the parts are hilariously overpriced. But it's considerably better than nothing. They also enabled a few repairs that were previously hard blocked by software, and required some incredibly complex hardware workarounds because of it - like FaceID replacement. Make no mistake - I have zero faith in this being Apple actually trying to be better. It's much more likely that this was them walking back their "no third party repairs never ever" stance under pressure from consumer rights activists and regulators in places like EU. But it's a change for the better either way - and it would be good to see more of that in the future.
    - foldr 1y ago
      The issue has always been that people who don’t trust Apple interpret everything that Apple does in the worst possible light. I make no comment here on whether such suspicion is justified. But let’s imagine that the current behavior (showing the battery warning) had been the original behavior. Then people would no doubt have complained that Apple was trying to pressure people into unnecessary battery replacements.
      - theshrike79 1y ago
        Ahh, the Misunderstanding Olympics and Apple's local CSAM scan implementation <3
  - nani8ot 1y ago
    > Seems like the majority of people would've wanted option 2 for some strange reason? 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.
  - thefz 1y ago
    > It was a choice between two options in phones with bad batteries: > - Slow down the phone so that it still works > - Crash phone immediately Three, actually: - Inform the user and provide decent repair and parts.
- can16358p 1y ago
  Great. Let's not slow down CPUs coupled with aging batteries and instead have a full system crash suddenly at the most demanding moment. Sure that would be much better.
  - hu3 1y ago
    None of that was communicated previously which made many customers buy a new iPhone instead of replacing the battery. I wonder why... /s
    - ErneX 1y ago
      True, but it’s no longer the case.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    On top of that, hard crashes and partial brownouts due to undervolting can and do lead to data corruption on all sorts of storage, no matter if eMMC, straight NAND or microSD cards. 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.
    - hulitu 1y ago
      > Most phone PCB designs do not account properly for the scenario "battery gone bad leads to undervolting of components" We were talking about Apple here. If they don't know that a battery can get discharged, maybe they shall do something else. For a SWE might be ok. For a HWE no.
- bslaq 1y ago
  [flagged]
hulitu 1y ago
> Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for 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.
theshrike79 1y ago
IMO the actual reason for Liquid Glass is that they can do it natively. 3rd party UI frameworks can't copy it without a massive performance hit. This brings a more clear divide between fully native iOS applications and React Native -style "build once and cross-compile" -platforms.
- darcien 1y ago
  I get where you're coming from but React Native(RN) is a bad example. RN is actually native and uses native components. So any native view will be supported, including Liquid Glass. e.g. https://expo.dev/changelog/sdk-54-beta#ios-26-and-liquid-glass https://expo.dev/changelog/sdk-54-beta#ios-26-and-liquid-gla... or https://github.com/callstack/liquid-glass https://github.com/callstack/liquid-glass
- zarzavat 1y ago
  If the native apps end up looking worse than the web apps then they played themselves...
- aatd86 1y ago
  Any third party UI frameworks which does NOT reuse the platform. There are different views on this. Perhaps that in the long run, that may make more sense since you may want to facilitate the same user experience across devices anyway. Especially for branded apps. So Liquid glass or not would not matter that much, especially if this is simply a design fad like the numerous ones before it. 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...
- maxvij 1y ago
  I wrote about this topic earlier, I believe there is one main reason for Apple to go in this direction: universal design language (spatial computing, Vision Pro). Of course, there can be many side-effects (or reasons) that can be the actual main reason instead, such as 'innovation' or like you mention, guiding people to use the native systems, we'll never know. In my eyes, the universal design language is the main reason. Apple is and always has been design-focused.
api 1y ago
Isn’t this stuff mostly rendered by the GPU, and pretty efficiently? 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.
SoKamil 1y ago
Has anybody tested it yet? It is computed as GPU shader. I wonder if it is that less efficient compared to frosted glass blur effect that was there for at least a decade.
- SoKamil 1y ago
  I suppose we have to wait for official release. Beta builds have some debug stuff which makes OS slower. This has always been the case with all previous macOS beta versions that felt slower.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- arghwhat 1y ago
  Blur is expensive because it propagates damage and has to wait for all previous rendering to be complete. 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.
  - artemisart 1y ago
    No, you never compute individual pixels because you never need to, and it's always faster to it in bulk (vectorization, memory access...) and so over an area you take the same number of pixels as input (or a little bit more with padding) and the blur will only increase significantly the compute.
    - arghwhat 1y ago
      You misunderstood, this is not about computing individual pixels but only selective rerendering graphical elements which have been changed, and in turn figuring out the total area of change. This propagates through the entire stack to let the GPU scanout hardware know which tiles have changed, and allow partial panel self refresh updates (depending on hardware). Rendering is still done in bulk for the changed areas, avoiding rendering expensive elements (e.g., transformed video buffers, deeply layered effects, expensive shaders). It's a fundamental part of most UI frameworks.
depr 1y ago
I'm inclined to believe what 'mitchellh wrote: "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." https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1933314816472723728 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1933314816472723728
- conradev 1y ago
  I agree with Mitchell. 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!
  - ccapitalK 1y ago
    Gaussian Blur isn't the most efficient way of doing a frosted glass blur effect though. IIRC the current state of the art is the Dual Kawase blur, which is what KDE uses for its blurred transparency effect, I've never observed performance issues having it running on my machine.
  - arghwhat 1y ago
    The problem with these kinds of blur effects is not the cost of a gaussian blur (this isn't gaussian blur anyway as it has a lens effect near the edges). It's damage propagation and pipeline stalls. 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.
echelon_musk 1y ago
As long as it can be disabled it is a complete nothing burger. 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.
- maxvij 1y ago
  It can be disabled (or at least tuned down) via accessibility settings.
- robin_reala 1y ago
  It can be disabled: reduce transparency in the accessibility settings.
- latexr 1y ago
  > As long as it can be disabled it is a complete nothing burger. Defaults matter. Most people never change them.
bradhe 1y ago
Anyone else get strong GPT5 vibes from this article?
- firefoxd 1y ago
  Author here. No the article is not generated, it's dictated. This was more of a shower-thought (car thought I guess, since i was driving) that I dictated and fed to deepseek to punctuate and structure for myself. When it's a quick, short, unrefined article, I post it on the byte size section of my blog. So no, these are my words, and you can find it on some of my old comments where I mention how I've been testing AI editing and it's a hit or miss.
- artursapek 1y ago
  the TLDR especially
- yellow_lead 1y ago
  Yes, either the author writes like AI, or this was written by AI. Either of which are not great
- Telemakhos 1y ago
  Not really: as much as I despise AI slop, LLMs do a much better job than this author of making sure I have the information needed to understand a point. For example: > 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.
- abhaynayar 1y ago
  Yea. I was not going to say that because apparently it's bad etiquette - and we're supposed to look at the substance. It happened to my writing once where someone said it was AI written and it did hurt me. :'( 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.
mmcconnell1618 1y ago
Doesn't MacOS already render as 2x resolution and downsize in order to do font smoothing? Looks are important to Apple and I think they are willing to add custom hardware capable of handling these type of effects without killing battery life and CPU cycles.
- jsheard 1y ago
  > Doesn't MacOS already render as 2x resolution and downsize in order to do font smoothing? 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.
koakuma-chan 1y ago
More importantly, why did the version jump from 15 to 26?
- maxvij 1y ago
  Consistency throughout the OS versioning: https://www.theverge.com/news/679221/apple-ios-macos-watchos-ipados-26-name https://www.theverge.com/news/679221/apple-ios-macos-watchos...
- mcphage 1y ago
  To match the year.
- abtinf 1y ago
  Because they switched from release number to release year.
- fatata123 1y ago
  [dead]
danielfalbo 1y ago
Nobody mentioning the Vision Pro ?
- maxvij 1y ago
  I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658103
lupajz 1y ago
I haven't tried any of the beta releases, but would like to hear an opinion by somebody who did. Is it possible to turn the effects off? I mean something like accessibility settings to tone down the transparency and "glassiness"?
- maxvij 1y ago
  Yes, I've been on all the public beta's so far and yes, you can turn it down. You can turn on 'reduce transparency' in the accessibility settings. It breaks most of the effects, but text is definitely more legible. Haven't noticed anything performance wise (when Liquid Glass is turned on), but then again I might not be the best test candidate as I just got a new phone.
delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
That's what your M4 *GPU is for 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.
weikju 1y ago
Written before any beta showed up. Works fine on my M1 Macs sooooo whatever.
- adamors 1y ago
  I don’t see the point in posting a 3 month old article either, especially without any updates.
ErneX 1y ago
If anything it’d more taxing on the iPhone because some of the effects are tied to the gyroscope of the device. We’ll see. I wonder if OP at least tested macOS Tahoe to base his impressions upon.
Tiberium 1y ago
It's sad that HN top nowadays has articles that are completely AI-edited or AI-generated, with the default style that's obvious to anyone who has used them for enough time.
andai 1y ago
The article says "M4 isn't using much CPU so let's add fancy effects." 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.)
rickdeckard 1y ago
The article is already 3 months old. Wasn't that even before the beta was released...?
Luker88 1y ago
I was under the impression that the iPhone had dedicated hw to render the screen while in idle/locked or something like that, in order to avoid waking the main cores. 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
arnaudsm 1y ago
We need numbers. Can someone benchmark the wattage difference of using Liquid glass vs disabled ?
froggertoaster 1y ago
This is very clearly written by ChatGPT. See: https://www.seangoedecke.com/chatgpt-house-style/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/chatgpt-house-style/
nunez 1y ago
It'll probably be something you can disable in Accessibility Settings, so there's that at least!
rsynnott 1y ago
While you could certainly question the _taste_ of the 'liquid glass' stuff, I doubt it's at all expensive. Modern GPUs are good at this sort of thing.
MatthewWilkes 1y ago
It's certainly not my experience that the M3 is overpowered for browsing. With the proliferation of SPAs for everything from messaging to word processing, my Macbook Air reminds me of a Chromebook in more ways than one.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
znpy 1y ago
Compiz was doing similar things (actually more and better things) in 2011 on the integrated intel gpus… i don’t think it’s much of a burden on modern gpus

70 points by luismedel 1y ago

they already got caught artificially slowing older iphones on ios updates, remember that? this is a way to slow older models and get away with it.

theshrike79 1y ago
It was a choice between two options in phones with bad batteries: - Slow down the phone so that it still works - Crash phone immediately Seems like the majority of people would've wanted option 2 for some strange reason? 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.
- 1oooqooq 1y ago
  do you work with technology and you swallowed that crazy excuse? "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.
- phoronixrly 1y ago
  Remind me, was the slowdown communicated in any meaningful way, and were the affected users directed to service their phones at the nearest apple store? '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?
- ACCount37 1y ago
  The issue was always that of communication and trust. 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.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    How has Apple improved on repairability?
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      They now actually sell some parts online, and offer official repair manuals and tools. That only covers a few basic repair types, the tooling is clunky (for a reason - those tools are designed to allow cheap-and-replaceable official employees to perform basic repairs to an Apple-acceptable quality) and the parts are hilariously overpriced. But it's considerably better than nothing. They also enabled a few repairs that were previously hard blocked by software, and required some incredibly complex hardware workarounds because of it - like FaceID replacement. Make no mistake - I have zero faith in this being Apple actually trying to be better. It's much more likely that this was them walking back their "no third party repairs never ever" stance under pressure from consumer rights activists and regulators in places like EU. But it's a change for the better either way - and it would be good to see more of that in the future.
  - foldr 1y ago
    The issue has always been that people who don’t trust Apple interpret everything that Apple does in the worst possible light. I make no comment here on whether such suspicion is justified. But let’s imagine that the current behavior (showing the battery warning) had been the original behavior. Then people would no doubt have complained that Apple was trying to pressure people into unnecessary battery replacements.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      Ahh, the Misunderstanding Olympics and Apple's local CSAM scan implementation <3
- nani8ot 1y ago
  > Seems like the majority of people would've wanted option 2 for some strange reason? 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.
- thefz 1y ago
  > It was a choice between two options in phones with bad batteries: > - Slow down the phone so that it still works > - Crash phone immediately Three, actually: - Inform the user and provide decent repair and parts.
can16358p 1y ago
Great. Let's not slow down CPUs coupled with aging batteries and instead have a full system crash suddenly at the most demanding moment. Sure that would be much better.
- hu3 1y ago
  None of that was communicated previously which made many customers buy a new iPhone instead of replacing the battery. I wonder why... /s
  - ErneX 1y ago
    True, but it’s no longer the case.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  On top of that, hard crashes and partial brownouts due to undervolting can and do lead to data corruption on all sorts of storage, no matter if eMMC, straight NAND or microSD cards. 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.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > Most phone PCB designs do not account properly for the scenario "battery gone bad leads to undervolting of components" We were talking about Apple here. If they don't know that a battery can get discharged, maybe they shall do something else. For a SWE might be ok. For a HWE no.
bslaq 1y ago
[flagged]

hulitu 1y ago

> Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for 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.

theshrike79 1y ago

IMO the actual reason for Liquid Glass is that they can do it natively. 3rd party UI frameworks can't copy it without a massive performance hit. This brings a more clear divide between fully native iOS applications and React Native -style "build once and cross-compile" -platforms.

darcien 1y ago
I get where you're coming from but React Native(RN) is a bad example. RN is actually native and uses native components. So any native view will be supported, including Liquid Glass. e.g. https://expo.dev/changelog/sdk-54-beta#ios-26-and-liquid-glass https://expo.dev/changelog/sdk-54-beta#ios-26-and-liquid-gla... or https://github.com/callstack/liquid-glass https://github.com/callstack/liquid-glass
zarzavat 1y ago
If the native apps end up looking worse than the web apps then they played themselves...
aatd86 1y ago
Any third party UI frameworks which does NOT reuse the platform. There are different views on this. Perhaps that in the long run, that may make more sense since you may want to facilitate the same user experience across devices anyway. Especially for branded apps. So Liquid glass or not would not matter that much, especially if this is simply a design fad like the numerous ones before it. 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...
maxvij 1y ago
I wrote about this topic earlier, I believe there is one main reason for Apple to go in this direction: universal design language (spatial computing, Vision Pro). Of course, there can be many side-effects (or reasons) that can be the actual main reason instead, such as 'innovation' or like you mention, guiding people to use the native systems, we'll never know. In my eyes, the universal design language is the main reason. Apple is and always has been design-focused.

api 1y ago

Isn’t this stuff mostly rendered by the GPU, and pretty efficiently? 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.

SoKamil 1y ago

Has anybody tested it yet? It is computed as GPU shader. I wonder if it is that less efficient compared to frosted glass blur effect that was there for at least a decade.

SoKamil 1y ago
I suppose we have to wait for official release. Beta builds have some debug stuff which makes OS slower. This has always been the case with all previous macOS beta versions that felt slower.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
arghwhat 1y ago
Blur is expensive because it propagates damage and has to wait for all previous rendering to be complete. 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.
- artemisart 1y ago
  No, you never compute individual pixels because you never need to, and it's always faster to it in bulk (vectorization, memory access...) and so over an area you take the same number of pixels as input (or a little bit more with padding) and the blur will only increase significantly the compute.
  - arghwhat 1y ago
    You misunderstood, this is not about computing individual pixels but only selective rerendering graphical elements which have been changed, and in turn figuring out the total area of change. This propagates through the entire stack to let the GPU scanout hardware know which tiles have changed, and allow partial panel self refresh updates (depending on hardware). Rendering is still done in bulk for the changed areas, avoiding rendering expensive elements (e.g., transformed video buffers, deeply layered effects, expensive shaders). It's a fundamental part of most UI frameworks.

depr 1y ago

I'm inclined to believe what 'mitchellh wrote: "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." https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1933314816472723728 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1933314816472723728

conradev 1y ago
I agree with Mitchell. 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!
- ccapitalK 1y ago
  Gaussian Blur isn't the most efficient way of doing a frosted glass blur effect though. IIRC the current state of the art is the Dual Kawase blur, which is what KDE uses for its blurred transparency effect, I've never observed performance issues having it running on my machine.
- arghwhat 1y ago
  The problem with these kinds of blur effects is not the cost of a gaussian blur (this isn't gaussian blur anyway as it has a lens effect near the edges). It's damage propagation and pipeline stalls. 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.

echelon_musk 1y ago

As long as it can be disabled it is a complete nothing burger. 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.

maxvij 1y ago
It can be disabled (or at least tuned down) via accessibility settings.
robin_reala 1y ago
It can be disabled: reduce transparency in the accessibility settings.
latexr 1y ago
> As long as it can be disabled it is a complete nothing burger. Defaults matter. Most people never change them.

bradhe 1y ago

Anyone else get strong GPT5 vibes from this article?

firefoxd 1y ago
Author here. No the article is not generated, it's dictated. This was more of a shower-thought (car thought I guess, since i was driving) that I dictated and fed to deepseek to punctuate and structure for myself. When it's a quick, short, unrefined article, I post it on the byte size section of my blog. So no, these are my words, and you can find it on some of my old comments where I mention how I've been testing AI editing and it's a hit or miss.
artursapek 1y ago
the TLDR especially
yellow_lead 1y ago
Yes, either the author writes like AI, or this was written by AI. Either of which are not great
Telemakhos 1y ago
Not really: as much as I despise AI slop, LLMs do a much better job than this author of making sure I have the information needed to understand a point. For example: > 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.
abhaynayar 1y ago
Yea. I was not going to say that because apparently it's bad etiquette - and we're supposed to look at the substance. It happened to my writing once where someone said it was AI written and it did hurt me. :'( 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.

mmcconnell1618 1y ago

Doesn't MacOS already render as 2x resolution and downsize in order to do font smoothing? Looks are important to Apple and I think they are willing to add custom hardware capable of handling these type of effects without killing battery life and CPU cycles.

jsheard 1y ago
> Doesn't MacOS already render as 2x resolution and downsize in order to do font smoothing? 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.

koakuma-chan 1y ago

More importantly, why did the version jump from 15 to 26?

maxvij 1y ago
Consistency throughout the OS versioning: https://www.theverge.com/news/679221/apple-ios-macos-watchos-ipados-26-name https://www.theverge.com/news/679221/apple-ios-macos-watchos...
mcphage 1y ago
To match the year.
abtinf 1y ago
Because they switched from release number to release year.
fatata123 1y ago
[dead]

danielfalbo 1y ago

Nobody mentioning the Vision Pro ?

maxvij 1y ago
I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658103

lupajz 1y ago

I haven't tried any of the beta releases, but would like to hear an opinion by somebody who did. Is it possible to turn the effects off? I mean something like accessibility settings to tone down the transparency and "glassiness"?

maxvij 1y ago
Yes, I've been on all the public beta's so far and yes, you can turn it down. You can turn on 'reduce transparency' in the accessibility settings. It breaks most of the effects, but text is definitely more legible. Haven't noticed anything performance wise (when Liquid Glass is turned on), but then again I might not be the best test candidate as I just got a new phone.

delta_p_delta_x 1y ago

That's what your M4 *GPU is for 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.

weikju 1y ago

Written before any beta showed up. Works fine on my M1 Macs sooooo whatever.

adamors 1y ago
I don’t see the point in posting a 3 month old article either, especially without any updates.

ErneX 1y ago

If anything it’d more taxing on the iPhone because some of the effects are tied to the gyroscope of the device. We’ll see. I wonder if OP at least tested macOS Tahoe to base his impressions upon.

Tiberium 1y ago

It's sad that HN top nowadays has articles that are completely AI-edited or AI-generated, with the default style that's obvious to anyone who has used them for enough time.

andai 1y ago

The article says "M4 isn't using much CPU so let's add fancy effects." 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.)

rickdeckard 1y ago

The article is already 3 months old. Wasn't that even before the beta was released...?

Luker88 1y ago

I was under the impression that the iPhone had dedicated hw to render the screen while in idle/locked or something like that, in order to avoid waking the main cores. 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

arnaudsm 1y ago

We need numbers. Can someone benchmark the wattage difference of using Liquid glass vs disabled ?

froggertoaster 1y ago

This is very clearly written by ChatGPT. See: https://www.seangoedecke.com/chatgpt-house-style/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/chatgpt-house-style/

nunez 1y ago

It'll probably be something you can disable in Accessibility Settings, so there's that at least!

rsynnott 1y ago

While you could certainly question the _taste_ of the 'liquid glass' stuff, I doubt it's at all expensive. Modern GPUs are good at this sort of thing.

MatthewWilkes 1y ago

It's certainly not my experience that the M3 is overpowered for browsing. With the proliferation of SPAs for everything from messaging to word processing, my Macbook Air reminds me of a Chromebook in more ways than one.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

znpy 1y ago

Compiz was doing similar things (actually more and better things) in 2011 on the integrated intel gpus… i don’t think it’s much of a burden on modern gpus