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"?
Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
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Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#32IMO 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.
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...
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#33they 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.
None of that was communicated previously which made many customers buy a new iPhone instead of replacing the battery.
I wonder why... /s
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 repl…
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…
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.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#35Doesn'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.
> 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.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#36I'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 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…
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.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#37I 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"?
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.
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#38Nobody mentioning the Vision Pro ?
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#39More importantly, why did the version jump from 15 to 26?
Consistency throughout the OS versioning: https://www.theverge.com/news/679221/apple-ios-macos-watchos...
Re: Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for
#40That'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.