The battery icon sucks, but you’re missing the forest for the trees.

It looks like a baby bottle. Which might be an inside joke, since it’s sipping power?

Looks more like a partially depleted uranium fuel cell to me... I hope that isn’t the final design

Oh wow, that looks shockingly like the battery widget[plasmoid?] from KDE 4.0. Unfortunately I can't find a screenshot of it, but I recall it being huge, bright green, and very round. What the hell were they thinking?

They went too far on that one.

Do designers consider how expensive the gpu rendering is for skeumomorphism or neuromorphism?

What? It is? Forgive my ignorance, but isn't it just bitmap rendering? E.g. rending a flat icon should take approx the same GPU toll as a skeumorphic icon

Flat design lets you make smaller 9 slices I guess. Smaller textures take up less ram but even that's a stretch.

I wasn't talking about icons alone in my second statement. :/

The design trend require soft shadows to be rendered on many elements in layers which I exaggeratedly pointed out. I apologise.

Shadows lead to overdraw I suppose, but I don't believe most UI frameworks draw front to back anyway. They end up accelerating it by making large, multi-element bitmaps of the final render. It ends up being a very small cost.