Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for Author: Ibrahim Diallo Published: June 16, 2025 Source: iDiallo.com --- Overview Apple has introduced the new "Liquid Glass" design language, featuring translucent, fluid, and subtly animated visuals. While visually impressive and unmistakably Apple's style, this aesthetic upgrade raises concerns about the computational cost, reminiscent of past resource-intensive UI flourishes like Windows Vista's Aero. --- Key Points Visual Appeal vs. Performance Cost: Eye candy such as Liquid Glass demands significant CPU and GPU cycles. These animations and effects consume resources that might otherwise handle more critical tasks. Historical Lessons: macOS video wallpapers stutter or freeze under heavy multitasking due to GPU demands. Windows Vista's Aero transparency and animations notoriously slowed down mid-2000s PCs, requiring extensive hardware resources. Real-World Impact: The author's own experience developing a web app showed that even simple blur effects can heavily tax modest hardware like a Raspberry Pi 4, degrading UI responsiveness. Apple’s Strategy: The M4 chip is extremely powerful relative to most everyday tasks like browsing or mail-checking. Apple leverages this surplus power to enhance the user experience aesthetically without apparent performance loss. Liquid Glass is a way to “burn” these idle cycles. --- Implications Hidden Costs: This design approach is a form of "stealth bloat." Although users may not immediately experience drawbacks, ongoing costs include: Battery drain from continuous animation processing Increased heat and fan activity Potential performance degradation in future, especially as system demands grow Reduced performance during intensive workloads when combined with animations Trade-offs: While not a deal breaker, Liquid Glass increases load on hardware for purely cosmetic gains—much as Vista Aero did, but with Apple's signature polish and subtlety. --- Summary Liquid Glass is an elegant but computationally expensive interface enhancement enabled by Apple’s powerful M4 CPU. It exemplifies a trade-off between aesthetic innovation and hardware resource consumption. Users currently benefiting from M4’s overhead may enjoy the feature without noticeable issues, but the author warns to remember that such fancy visual effects demand significant processing power, impacting battery life, thermals, and long-term performance. --- TL;DR: Liquid Glass looks great but comes with hidden performance and power costs. Your M4 chip can handle it—for now. Fancy pixels mean fancy math behind the scenes.