Comment by dimal

> 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.

This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.

Early iPhone hardware was barely keeping with rendering the UI with a total ban on transparency. Even on iPhone 4 which improved the hardware a lot had the issue that it also increased amount of pixels to be pushed around.

And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.

Yes! And it was frustratingly patented! 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.

iOS 7 made the iPhone 4 practically unusable.

“Supported” and “works well” ain’t the same. Do you remember how your iPhone 4 crawled when that effect was enabled?

Surely it's a performance nightmare because whatever is behind the frosting has to be rendered in full. Without this it can see that it's occluded and not have to render. Or does MacOS not do that?

Anyone who's ever written a blur shader knows that blurs aren't cheap.

> Apple loves their battery life numbers

For devices currently being sold, primarily.

> Apple loves their battery life numbers

...under pressure of consumer protection and e-waste laws. As it should be, I hope the other phone manufacturers are experiencing the same pressure.

Vista was dogged by issues caused by migrating display drivers from NTDDM to WDDM 1.0, something that was only finished by 7 (which dropped NTDDM fully and introduced WDDM 1.1) and 8 (which afaik had mandated WDDM 1.1 only).

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.

Yeah one of the easiest ways to make windows vista+7 perform better was to simply disable all the fancy UI graphics that add nothing. I don't care if my window title bars have a gradient and animated transparency. It's actually a bit distracting and makes the system perform worse, so I just turned it off.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

20 years later and they're building the start menu in React Native.

I think probably a much bigger problem is app bloat. Devs are usually using very recent if not brand new top end devices to test and develop against which naturally makes several types of performance degradation invisible to them (“works on my machine”). Users on old and/or low end devices on the other hand feel all of those degradations.

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.

More likely it's a result of pressure to ship highly visible "improvements," combined with a lack of ideas that could improve the experience in a meaningful way. What do you do in that situation? Ship an obvious UI update that wouldn't have performed on the last gen hardware.

And you base your first sentence on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard?

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.)

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No matter what happens in the world someone will blame it on a top down conspiracy decided in some smoke filled back room.

In the late 90s/early 2000s desktop computing was moving at such a pace that an 8 year old PC was near unusable. Overtime progress slowed and its not unusual to have a decade old desktop now. The problem is thinking that mobile has slowed that much too. Mobile is still progressing quite rapidly so yeah an almost decade old device is going to feel slow.

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?

How can you get overheating and better performance? Is it just using the big cores for basic OS functions now?

> MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18

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

how is battery-life?

There's a difference between something like a transparent background (you can run i3/picom on a potato) and having to composite many little UI elements to render a frame.

The reality distortion field is back, it seems.

Thanks for this insight. It's very counter intuitive. Normally transparency is additional work for a GPU.

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!

Did suppressing transparency also turn on processor throttling or something too? Like putting the device in a power saver mode?

It runs on iPhone 11 and later.

It may not be overt, but it also seems they are working to justify the hardware with the software.

you just proved that MSFT released slow OS to force people refresh hardware.

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

It's almost like they said the same thing: Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..."

oh wait. it's not like they did. they did say it.

They switched the positions of the codename and version this time (macOS 15 Sequoia to macOS Tahoe 26). I'd give it one more version cycle until the codenames go away.

Thought you guys were just being whiney until I looked at the linked “beautiful new design” page and saw the screen shots they selected. Literally gives me a headache to look at the first sample and I am one of the people that miss the candy coated look of early OS X.

The section on macOS only used the name Tahoe, like the 26 idea hadn’t made it to the copy for that section.

Rounded corners vex me so much.

I can barely cope with their being no option to turn them off on Mac, especially for windows. I literally had to make my background pure black because the few pixels of backgrounds always showing pissed me off so much.

You know something that almost never has rounded corners? Glass.

What is the reasoning behind this comment?

It's not something you rush out at the last minute, but it might be something you plan a long time ahead as "our interesting stuff might not work out, so let's do a huge redesign too to be confident we can pretend to be releasing something excitingly new either way".

(I don't particularly have an opinion that this was their line of thinking, just pointing out that for a company like Apple they would have been thinking "what if X isn't ready in time" months or even years before the point of actually knowing if X is it isn't ready on time.)

Because everything else looks worse instead. That's one way to solve it, I guess.

Fully agree with your sentiment, and it was kinda sad to see the demo going there.

"And this is how easy I can replace this custom component with a new glass component...".

The whole thing is just wild.

There was plenty of UX enhancements which looked solid, but just for them to be paired with a design choice of N=1 elements is... well let's see if it pays off I guess?

Autistic people tend to have very different sensory sensitivities than neurotypical people. Most are very highly sensitive and tend have trouble picking out a signal when there’s too much noise around it.

To me, being socially awkward is kind of a secondary, less important trait, but that’s the one everyone seems to notice. We’re weird on the outside because inside, we’re dealing with overwhelming sensory input.

Check the parent comment.

You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products.

It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.

I think you're holding it wrong

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

Yes, I think they would do that.

Lots of historical examples of Apple making weird design choices for decades now. I'm old enough to remember the hockey-puck mouse on the original iMac.

Also, here's a list of bugs I've personally observed over just the last two months: https://gist.github.com/BenWheatley/29a3c22203d90ae80465cdb1...

3.3 trillion dollar market cap, and the *clipboard* is no longer reliable. The mail badge is an unreliable count. The wallpaper sometimes disappears. The alarms don't play out of whatever speaker or headphones you're using for all your other audio.

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

Yes, and where have you been for the last two decades? :) The last time Apple did actual UX research must have been in the late 1990s.

Of course they would. Have you used Sequoia? It's a hot dumpster fire that's caused me unending frustration with how they've broken the bluetooth and networking stack, introduced unprecedented instability (anyone else's macbooks suddenly crashing and restarting while the lid is closed and it's in sleep mode?) and a host of other issues. Apples has been taking one step forward and two steps back with their software and design for a long time, and they have increasingly preferred form over function, and hidden, obtuse UX.

If their hardware wasn't so damn good for my professional work, I wouldn't go near this child slavery enabling shitshow of a corporation. I don't know if I've ever felt as trivialized or patronized as watching someone in formal dress talk to me about how many new ways I can express myself to my friends via emoji or whatever else as I have when watching Apple keynotes. It feels like they've tried to commoditize interaction even more than Meta. It all feels so hollow. You can tell Steve is gone.

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

We are talking about the same company that to make a the MCP a little bit thinner released that crap with only two USBC ports, forcing everyone to carry fucking dongles everywhere.

And let's not forget that awful butterfly keyboard.

So much usability, so much accessibility. No vibes, no sir.

Absolufuckingloothy.

The Apple of today is nowhere near what the Apple of Steve Jobs was.

Bugs galore, UX issues galore. Overall it's a mashup of various staff egos over everything.

I have no complaints with the UI settings I use on iOS: reduce motion, reduce transparency, differentiate without color.

Given the huge change and sensitivity to accessibility I'm going to guess the opposite -- it will be designed to look nice without transparency.

the autistic user base is vastly smaller than the neurotypical user base. So it makes sense to ship settings that most people would like.

It’s simply a matter of “which settings would MOST of our users want enabled by default?”

I do agree that the accessibility settings can make ios pretty ugly though. It’s a real shame. :(

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so all they had to do to get people to quit bitching about the flat look was to introduce the translucent look!

updating ticket to closed

My 70 year old relatives seem to have no problem finding the setting that makes everything on the phone 2x bigger. Probably because Apple is good at this and offers it up as an option in the OS onboarding and after every major update.

It’ll be fine.

On Mac OS the first significant thing on screen after turning it on for the first time are the accessibility settings with screenshots and animations to explain every option. You can also access those options with the Spotlight search, typing "tran" will give you the "reduce transparency" toggle directly in the search results without having to open settings first (though to be fair the search indexing is a bit lacking, like on iOS - the animation toggle is called "reduce motion" and so it can't be found via typing in "animation").

Apple designs stuff this way on purpose. They think it's neat to "discover" something that should be obvious. The new camera app is a perfect example of this. No indication that swiping up from the bottom brings up a menu for camera controls. The fact any of these obviously terrible design and implementation choices are praised is baffling.

> You can also disable animations on iOS.

No, you can not. You can reduce _some_ animations, but most of them actually remain. Including the most annoying ones like the slowwwww screen switching, or the bottom sheet animation.

An amusing anecdote: I have animation turned off entirely on my Android phone, and I was demoing an app on it. People commented how amazingly fast it felt compared to iOS, simply because there were no animations.

I'm just as annoyed by this, but from what I understand, the animations are used to hide loading times, so the delay is not optional.

macOS is awful in so many places. I would prefer if they had an option to disable only some of the animations. "Show Desktop" is so sudden and zoomy I almost get motion sickness, but Mission Control is more subtle and really helps me figure out which window is which.

My strategy for multiple desktops is to not use them at all. But I'm enjoying the comfort of a 43" screen, so all the windows I need just fit.

IMHO iOS strikes an almost perfect balance. It animates things in response to continuous drag gestures (notification centre, app switching), but almost nothing else. Maybe macOS could take a page from that book? E.g. dragging the menu bar; the animation plays out in direct response to user action.

The way you phrased it makes it sound like everyone will have to turn it off to make the OS “usable” - which is clearly false.

That is actually a feature. An UI should never be, under any circumstances, in line with a trend, fresh or different for the sake of being different.

It should, however, be as invisible as possible. Being only functional is a compliment.

It's Aqua 2.0, or at least, I hope it's going to be like that.

Disagree on almost all points. Glass and the relative absence of color, texture and patterns make it look cold, detached, almost inhuman and absent of anything your eyes could rest on. There are ways to make this approach look cool and futuristic, but it suffers from the same downside as a lot of the white/glassy modernist architecture: the human eye abhors lack of detail and natural/organic patterns and texture. (It makes for a great canvas for graffitti though...)

Meanwhile, Android's Material You/Expressive design language is taking almost an opposite approach. Personally, I prefer it to Liquid Glass by a wide margin.

there is a setting labeled “increase contrast” under Accessibilitt > Display & Text Size. That may help? i haven’t tried it.

Presumably the display can fade opaque, or translucent to give a readable background to text or when desired.

Many applications for see-through screens: HUDs, AR, literal camera viewfinder, tile-ability, low-weight.

Also just the general flex and coolness that a "no visible seams" (I mean no visible wires/metal) approach will bring - a case of form meeting function - the screen in the abstract sense is an abstract - a general portal through which anything can appear. A "pure screen" is the physical realization of that.

Which is why the gaussian blur was invented...

People pretend this isn't a solved problem.

Let's also not ignore that, whether apple has actually achieved this or not, the highly-accessible version of something necessarily excludes many design idioms and either looks worse or relegates one to a limited range of creative expression. As such, most designers will not want to design for that by default.

Not so.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/zoom-in-iph3e2e367e/i...

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/customize-the-text-si...