Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

Apple’s history, trust, and throttling fears

• Multiple comments link Liquid Glass to Apple’s past iPhone throttling: people worry visual effects will be used to make older devices feel slow and nudge upgrades.
• Defenders say the battery-related CPU throttling was a technical necessity to avoid random crashes and data corruption; critics say the real issue was secrecy and lack of user notice or service guidance.
• Some note Apple has improved slightly on repairability (selling parts, manuals, allowing more repairs) but suspicion remains that changes are regulator-driven, not user-centric.

Native vs cross‑platform UI and design strategy

• Some suggest Liquid Glass is a way to differentiate native apps from cross‑platform frameworks; others counter that frameworks like React Native can use native views and support it.
• Another view is that this is primarily about a unified design language across devices (including Vision Pro), not about kneecapping third‑party UI stacks.
• Others think Apple likely chose it as a marketable “headline” feature rather than for ecosystem strategy.

Performance, GPU cost, and power usage

• Debate over how “expensive” Liquid Glass is:
  • One side: modern GPUs handle these shaders easily; the bottlenecks are usually elsewhere.
  • Other side: the expense isn’t raw compute but blur-induced damage propagation, extra passes, and pipeline stalls that keep the GPU awake longer, hurting battery and thermals.
• Detailed sub‑thread explains how blur overlays force more frequent re‑rendering and block on underlying content, especially in layered interfaces.
• Some report iOS/iPadOS betas feeling sluggish; others say all betas are slower due to logging and early debug code, not necessarily Liquid Glass itself.
• Several ask for real measurements (wattage, performance) rather than speculation; consensus: impact is still unclear.

User control and defaults

• Multiple commenters confirm the effects can be reduced/disabled via accessibility settings like “Reduce transparency,” which significantly tones down the glass look.
• However, others emphasize that “defaults matter”: most users will never change these settings, so any performance or battery tax will apply broadly.

Assessment of the article itself

• Many see the article’s style as “LLM‑like” (short punchy lines, rhetorical questions), some calling it “AI slop.”
• The author later explains it was dictated and then lightly AI‑edited for punctuation/structure, which explains the mixed human/AI feel.