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

Summary

So, Apple just dropped its new "Liquid Glass" design language, and yeah, it looks slick. Translucent, fluid, subtly animated. The kind of thing that makes you nod and say, "Yep, that’s Apple." But while everyone’s drooling over the aesthetics, I’m sitting here having a serious Vista flashback. How many CPU cycles is this beauty actually costing us? Let’s be real: eye candy always comes at a price. Remember macOS’s dynamic video wallpapers? Gorgeous when you login to a couple windows open on your screen. But open a few Chrome tabs, a Figma project, and a Docker container? Suddenly that serene mountain vista starts stuttering like a flipbook. I’ve had it freeze outright mid-scroll, crashing back to a black image more times than I can count. It’s a microcosm of the problem: When the system’s stressed, the pretty things break first. Remember Windows Vista’s Aero. That glassy transparency and window animations? A notorious resource hog that brought mid-2000s hardware to its knees. Fancy compositing effects, reflections, blurs, fluid morphs. They chew through GPU/CPU time. Always have. I have this little web app I built for my kids to help them manage their day. It has those tiles that animate when you hover on them. Looks buttery smooth on my Ryzen 9 and NVIDIA laptop where I develop it. But the app runs on Raspberry Pi 4. The moment a single tile wiggles? The entire UI crawls. Why? Because the tiles blur the background. Now a blur is nothing compared to physics-based animation like Liquid Glass suggests. Here’s my hot take: Apple knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re shipping Liquid Glass now because the M4 (and M3, M2...) is absurdly overpowered for what 90% of users actually do. Checking mail? Browsing? Streaming? Your M4 is bored out of its silicon mind. Liquid Glass is Apple’s way of saying, "Fine, you’re not pushing the CPU? We’ll burn those idle cycles to make your dock shimmer." It's stealth bloat. You might not feel the drag today. That’s the point! The M4’s...