All the friggin' shaders we have to run to waste GPU cycles, just to get those blobs pretending to refract light. Don't even get me started about the ever-increasing border radii!?
Then why is battery life terrible on iOS 26 and the device is heating up just doing basic stuff with the UI. And it stutters a lot too in places even with a 16 Pro.
It would be an interesting napkin problem to do. Yes it's relatively trivial, but multiply it by 1B smartphones running for many hours every day and how many cities worth of power are you wasting on extraneous shader cycles?
It’s still very little energy. Probably way way less than a bedside lamp per phone.
Phones aren’t a good place to try to save aggregate energy use at a population level. They already use vanishingly small amounts of energy compared to just about anything in your house.
One could suppose that they need to justify the GPU/NPU hardware bloat originally intended for "Apple Intelligence" now that "Apple Intelligence" seems overblown and under-delivered. Though they'd need a lot more shaders beyond just "glass" to really make a dent in the cycles available from all that hardware.
This rounded corner change feels very off. Since Apple has that same radius across all its products (software and hardware), it could be signaling a broader upcoming shift in their hardware, perhaps driven by industrial design needs for future AR/VR/MR glasses.
What I find comical is that the same people praising this on various networks are often the same that hate on cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or AI because of the energy usage.
Apple has 1bio devices out there, if each of them consumes 10% more energy due to this change, that's a massive energy consumption increase - and this change offers no functional benefit at all.
