"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.
It has been like this for every Apple release for over 20 years.
Also, they do listen to feedback and do gather it. They won't change entire design language now tho.
WebKit sounds like the kind of scrappy startup Apple might want to acquire and gain some hard-earned engineering knowledge.
But apparently they still welcome app-crashing bugs and UI-stalling code!
Screwing with the battery life on a mobile device would be a showstopper bug if Steve were still around.
I's also true that iOS 7 made the 4/4S seem much slower, but the frosted glass effect still ran at 60FPS - that was my point. It was really impressive at the time. Though unless you spent hours sliding the control center up and down, it's hard to blame the blur effect for the reduced battery life, as it rarely appeared inside apps. Most likely the result of increased OS bloat and proliferation of background services.
And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.
I just want everything to look like Windows XP. I don't get it.
The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried.
(Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)
Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.
Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.
Okay, but what about the battery connected to the GPU? The battery in my iPhone has already degraded below 80% health in the 2.7 years I've had it, so I'd rather not waste its charge on low-contrast glass effects.
I don’t know, just kidding :-)
If GPUs can handle it, I guess why not. It’s some people will notice and say “wow, looks pretty, glad I upgraded”
3:30–3:45 in the video is painful. Describing “giving you an entirely new way, to personalise your experience”, while showing… white. White white white. Oh, and light tinted backgrounds to set your white on. I hope the personalisation you wanted was white.
But it is worth remembering that dark mode does actually get you some things; it’s not all bad: the restrictions do have some value.
Full customisation became paradoxically limiting: when you give too much power to the user, the app is essentially operating in a hostile environment. Of course, a lot of it was laziness on app and UI framework developers’ parts, but it really did limit innovation, too.
Dark mode gets you a pair of themes that you can switch between easily, and an expectation that there are only two themes you need to consider, with well-defined characteristics. This is a much more practical target, a vastly easier sell for app and framework developers.
The funny thing with monochrome icons is that in some ways they were actually a better fit for a full-customisation environment, where you had arbitrary background and foreground colours. Once it’s just mundane light and dark themes, you could more safely have full colour in two variants.
Certainly light mode and dark mode does not mean things need to be monochrome.
I made a comment about this a couple of years ago, but I fudged the explanation of it. 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.
And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.
Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achieve double digit FPS. Even if this 'liquid glass' effect is heavier to compute, on the hardware we have today it will be a negligible performance concern.