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iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

macrumors.com

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Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

#201

Post by throwaway48476 »

constantcrying wrote: post #198
throwaway48476 wrote: post #13

In big engineering programs engineers are paid bounties for every kg they remove from the design. We need software developer bounties for removing CPU cycles and memory.

In the car industry this is the case because there is a direct incentive for the company to make a vehicle lighter. A single kg is enormous likely saving tens of dollars per car, which sounds like nothing, but if a million of these cars are made the cost saving are in the tens of millions. What does a software company save by their software running 10% faster on user hardware. Exactly nothing. In the case of apple th…

If it was marketed it would be successful. Users are keenly aware of the lag modern programs have, even with top spec new hardware.

Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

#202

Post by itopaloglu83 »

monster_truck wrote: post #34
dabinat wrote: post #28

It’s technically impressive that they’re simulating the way light travels through glass. But a lot of the time it’s so subtle that I wonder if they could have just used simple semi-opacity and it would have had 85% of the same effect at a fraction of the CPU cycles.

I feel like this is a big miss for them. Am I really supposed to believe that the company making its flagship phones burn at 14W to simulate the travel of light through glass for a UI actually cares about the planet?

For those who hasn’t seen it, just dropping down the control center consumes 14 watts of CPU/GPU power as demonstrated by various YouTube videos.

Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

#204

Post by 10729287 »

mouse_ wrote: post #142
aylmao wrote: post #50

IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen. When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot wh…

I'd love to see 3DS-style lenticular 3D display with the power of modern Apple hardware + FaceID hardware eye tracking. I bet they'd be able to do it seamlessly.

It was very tricky to get the effect on the 3DS but already way better on the New 3DS, so i can definitely think it would work flawlessly on such a powerful device as iPhone.

Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

#205

Post by constantcrying »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #201
constantcrying wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the car industry this is the case because there is a direct incentive for the company to make a vehicle lighter. A single kg is enormous likely saving tens of dollars per car, which sounds like nothing, but if a million of these cars are made the cost saving are in the tens of millions. What does a software company save by their software running 10% faster on user hardware. Exactly nothing. In the case of apple th…

If it was marketed it would be successful. Users are keenly aware of the lag modern programs have, even with top spec new hardware.

>Users are keenly aware of the lag modern programs have, even with top spec new hardware.

Which is always a combination of many factors.

I do not believe that you can market performance to anyone but a niche audience. The metrics are often difficult to comprehend and do not mean much. The one industry which does this is gaming and they usually do not go above giving specs at which a certain graphics quality at a certain frame rate is achievable.

I do not see how e.g. productivity software could be marketed like this. Except for unverifiable claims about "good performance".

To be honest, I do not think most users even care. They are annoyed at it, sure, but they will use what they have always used.

Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

#206

Post by potato-peeler »

aylmao wrote: post #50

IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen. When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot wh…

> When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles

But if you close one eye, you can still make out the depth. Brain is still able to tell what is glass, what is on top of glass or below it.

Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

#207

Post by constantcrying »

hu3 wrote: post #126
kcplate wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I spend hours of my day using a device I should be able to theme it exactly to my taste. The customer is always right in matters of taste. You are supposed to serve your customers not the other way round. This attitude always cracks me up. Only with tech products and among techies do we hear these demands of infinite customization of the products and tools we use. Can you imagine any other vocation or industry m…

What you call "demands of infinite customization" is a basic thing on Windows and Android since forever. Users can change the theme however they want.

>Users can change the theme however they want.

Windows has extremely limited customizability compared to what is available on Android and Linux.

The key feature of both Linux and Android is that the main interface "Desktop Environment" or "Launcher" can be replaced by the user.

Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

#208

Post by burnt-resistor »

All 26 OSes thus far fall into the same shit gambit Microsoft plays to constantly ruin hardware to later act as a Karma Drama Triangle "hero" either by some future promised software upgrade or payment for hardware. The root cause is unrestrained greed and a customer-unaligned, bureaucratic orgchart pyramid of having too many designers constantly trying to justify their existence instead of leaving things alone. The problem is they sometimes do their job too well and create Microsoft Vista instead.

Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

#210

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

antinomicus wrote: post #9

I just want to pile on, to any Apple engineers here that might have some say: PLEASE STOP with the Liquid Glass. My god, what an unbelievably stupid ‘feature’. Warren Buffett famously talked about how Apple is so valuable because their moat is so strong. That if you were to pay someone 10,000$ to switch from iPhones - they wouldn’t. No other brand is like this. I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from m…

Not to be that guy but I switched to Android a few months back for the first time in my life.

It took some getting used to here and there, but over all I've been happy with doing something new on this front.

I suspect I'll be looking at hopping back over a couple summers from now when they figure out how to make this design language work.

The Liquid Glass aesthetic isn't bad, it's just rough around the edges. It'll be a nice effect once reality reigns it all in. That's what happened around a year or two following iOS7.

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