More importantly, why did the version jump from 15 to 26?
To match the year.
Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
41–50 of 122 posts
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#42Has 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.
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 effe…
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.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#43Anyone else get strong GPT5 vibes from this article?
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.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#44I'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
I'm inclined to believe what I have experienced. I have never before experienced my 2020 iPad Pro to be remotely slow. I use it for some web browsing and YouTube viewing, so I really don't need a lot of computing power.
Now that I'm running the iOS 26 beta, I frequently feel animations going slowly or hitching. It's not terrible, but for the first time, I have the feeling that my experience using my iPad would be noticeably improved if I bought a new and more powerful one.
But I guess this makes me an idiot according to Mitchell?
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#45More importantly, why did the version jump from 15 to 26?
Because they switched from release number to release year.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#46IMO 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.
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.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How has Apple improved on repairability?
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.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#48As 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.
It can be disabled (or at least tuned down) via accessibility settings.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#49As 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.
It can be disabled: reduce transparency in the accessibility settings.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#50they 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.
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.
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.