Developers, we need to talk.¶
We’ve normalized burning through compute like it’s free. It’s not. My MacBook battery used to last all day. Now it’s dead by lunch. And I think we’re all part of why.
This started right after upgrading to macOS Tahoe. At first I thought I had a hardware problem. Turns out the problem is the software itself. The new “liquid glass” design looks beautiful in marketing photos. On an actual screen, it’s a nightmare to read and apparently costs enough GPU cycles that my laptop gets warm just navigating folders.
Open Apple Maps to drive somewhere. Watch it render every single building in 3D along your route. Gorgeous, unnecessary, battery destroying.
Open a Google Doc. Gemini sidebar appears instantly with suggested questions about your document. Which means it already ran the entire thing through an LLM without asking. Thousands of tokens, just sitting there, ready to be helpful. Nobody asked for any of this.
This is unsolicited compute. Features that burn through CPU and battery whether you want them or not. Because someone decided more is always better.
The cost isn’t just my battery. It’s electricity. It’s the environmental toll of manufacturing replacement batteries faster than we should need to. It’s rare earth mining operations and the communities they destroy.
The math isn’t complicated. Small inefficiencies times billions of devices equals massive impact. And it scales fast.
We obsess over algorithmic efficiency in our code. Benchmark everything. Argue about Big O notation. Then we ship operating systems that render 3D buildings nobody asked for and fire up language models in the background of every document.
Because it’s virtual, we pretend it’s free. But every animation runs on physical hardware. Every background process consumes real energy. Every unprompted AI feature contributes to actual environmental damage.
The solution isn’t complicated either. Give users control. Make features opt-in instead of opt-out. Ask whether something justifies its computational cost before making it default behavior.
Minimalism shouldn’t be a design trend. It should be an engineering requirement.
Sigh…