Fast Fashion of UI and UX

I feel like I’m at a big Thanksgiving dinner. Thank you! Thank you so much! No, I won’t eat the sixth turkey leg. No, it’s okay, I don’t need yet another plate of mashed potatoes. Some Pecan pie? Sure, I do love those, but the last one can’t fit in my throat, and I’m definitely sitting on what has become the first one.

(AI-generated image: a person at a massive Thanksgiving table piled with screens and devices. Caption: “Thanks, Apple, I’m enough with this giving”.)

The only difference is that everyone is feeding me up with the new UI and UX guidelines by Apple, Samsung, but I don’t really care who else has come up with yet another take on some x-design.

Long-short history of the UI

The problem is that this insanity turns into fast fashion. Let’s do some calculations.

Everyone is drooling about Apple’s new design guidelines. Sure, it’s so awesome to see a lot of background effects and glossy gradients. And your phone is equipped with a state-of-the-art GPU that can render all those effects in a split nanosecond.

In the good old times, we used to spend so much time and optimizations just to ensure that a window in Windows XP running on an old 333MHz Pentium 2 processor shows up not in 1 second but in 1/10th of a second. (And before that we used to “draw” the “UI” by a means of symbols on a screen in a console.)

Yet, we have GPUs! Why should we not use those? Indeed. Now, since we harnessed the power of a GPU, we can draw an animated window in 1/100th of a second. I remember when Windows Vista was praised and rebuked for that. Glossy windows, what a waste. But Windows 7 turned that waste into a normal occurrence. Windows 8 suddenly dropped everything and made the UI look like an eyesore just on the whim of one person. Yet it never stopped using GPUs to draw very simple square windows. Windows 10 came back with a vengeance and returned some of those half-gloss surfaces. With Windows 11 doing nothing but loading your GPU with some gloss effects for no particular need.

Meanwhile, the world of cell phones changed drastically. In 2003, all those little handhelds used to race in “the least battery-consuming UI”. And then 2007 came and the iPhone showed up. Now if you want to compete in the market, you have to follow totally self-made trends. Not that anyone urgently needed that semi-gloss, but Apple said they do. So Google had to follow. So now we have all those spinny-whiny effects for what? So we can carry on with the battle of giants, started utterly and only by those giants.

At the flip of a switch

In the real world of living people, not a single person has come up with a better design for a light switch than a light switch. But listen, it’s okay that we have had those light switches around for almost 100 years by now. I won’t find a human being who will die because of the design of a light switch. In fact, we have two designs: European and American light switches. One is good to be triggered with the side of your palm and the other one is better for pressing on. Awesome.

In any normal house, when you come into a room, you expect to find a light switch to be by the door, 4–5 feet away from the floor. Have you ever noticed that when the light switch is not there, it feels weird? I’ve been in some poorly-organized buildings. At times it’s creepy when you walk into an old garage and can’t find the freaking switch.

So we have JUST a light switch. And any AI augmentation of that switch is okay, as long as I can just walk in and hit the switch rather than expecting some computer to decide for me when to trigger the lights.

In fact, the best take on a light switch that I’ve seen in my life was: “Yet another light switch” you can trigger while lying in your bed so you can turn off the lights in the bedroom without getting up.

So it’s okay when we have JUST a light switch. Those are cheap, nice, and we got used to them.

Back to the phone land

Now, when I used to use Pocket PC 2002, we had this little awesome thing — an X on the top right of any window. And once you click that X, you close the app. If you want the app to stay in the background, you just press start and carry on launching another app.

With Windows Mobile 2003, we had to change this behavior for whatever reason. Now, pressing the X sends the app into the background. And it consumes system resources for no particular reason. So you had to install a service app that allowed you to terminate other apps by long-pressing X on them.

When the iPhone and Android came out, we had no multitasking whatsoever, because we did not need it. It’s a phone after all, not a handheld computer. So they skipped multitasking and went on to develop their OSes. But at some point, we realized that this is not just a phone, so let’s add the multitasking back.

Now we have a million and one ways of switching between the apps. Should I tell you about the sour destiny of a back button? Who did not take a chance to do yet-another-almost-sexual-perversion with that poor button. Let’s change its position. Let’s swap the buttons altogether. Let’s make the home button be the back button, but let’s remove it. Even as a long-term Android user, I can’t figure out the way of closing an app on different models of Samsung. (Not even mentioning the fact that Samsung, an ANDROID phone, had to do a take on the UI, creating their own UI.)

But, in addition to all that, the Qtek 9090, the flagship of smartphones in 2004, had a 1500 mAh battery, while the Samsung S24 Ultra has a 5000 mAh battery and Pro Max 15 has something on the scale of 4500 mAh. And Tom’s Hardware Guide shows that all contemporary phones work about 12 hours on one charge.

The Qtek 9090 was able to survive much longer. But of course! It did not feature all of those annoying and totally useless features, like flashes, dashes, and things that bring epilepsy warnings to our contemporary phones. It just worked. It allowed me to open web pages, chat with my friends over several different messengers, play music, and watch videos.

(photo of the Qtek 9090 with its slide-out keyboard — Oh, have I mentioned that it had an awesome keyboard? It did.)

Well, in addition to the fact that it looked like a prop from some space movie of the 1980s. It was awesome.

So, now what?

We have seriously upgraded those devices, added more power and CPU with GPU, and fighting over the market, showing flashier and flashier images.

According to https://avada.io, there are an estimated 3.6 billion Android devices in the world. I was not able to find any decent estimate, but there should be around 2 billion iPhones in the world. So we have around 5.6 billion devices in operation right now. A very rough estimate, but nevertheless. Let’s imagine that all those have 2000 mAh batteries. (Again, some rounding here). Now, let’s calculate the amount of power needed to charge all of those phones.

With my very rounded calculations I have gotten a number: 44 GWh. Let me give you an idea of what this number means in terms of regular humans: 2 decent-size power plants running entire day to feed this amount of cellphones.

Or, it’s about $1.4 million per day to charge those phones.

Quite a number. I’ve decided to use some math-inclined GPT bots to check this number and I have gotten several different estimates. Your electric bill will be between $1.4 to $3.5 million a day to charge those.

Providing most of the time your cellphone is awake it is tasked with rendering, we can estimate from $700000 to $1000000 a day every day to satisfy the needs of all those GPUs to render fancy buttons and create special effects on our screens.

This might seem like a lot for a science lab. I doubt that most of the people in the world will be able to imagine this amount of money. Still, it’s a drop in the modern economy and we are willing to spare it, in order to make sure that our phones look fancy. Let’s not forget all the marketing, engineering, production and other resources that make you into a happy owner of yet-another-Apple-UI. But for what?

All those “amazing” things will live for 1 year maximum to be replaced by the new Wow effect. So why do we bother, spending millions of dollars per day on the research and upkeep of all those flashy buttons?

(AI image of a dumpster piled high with old UIs — Those UIs are just going into a big UI dump.)

Apple already knows about this and releases different battery-optimizing charging models, allowing power grids of large cities to take a break from charging everyone’s iPhone at once in the morning.

But why bother, if in any case we spend millions of dollars per day to display a nice interface where a usual one will suffice? For no particular reason but Apple (or Google) telling us that we have to have it, when a regular light switch is just what we want. Not a single person is going to be hurt if all phones display a static “back” button in one place on the screen.

So what can you do?

I’m not asking all of you to do the same thing that I did. I’ve switched to Fairphone (hoping it is going to last me more than 2 years that every Samsung does). My app launcher is a very basic one. It just shows 6 lines of text for the 6 most used apps on my phone. Also, I’ve disabled all animations on my phone. I don’t really use those. Now I can charge the phone only once in 2 days. I’m keeping it in power-saving mode since I don’t really require instant notifications at all times. And I’ve installed de-googled Claryx-OS on it. And since now my phone isn’t tasked with tracking my body 24/7 at any given second it further reduces the battery consumption.

I understand that a regular user of a phone isn’t going to take all those complications to save some milliwatts of electricity.

I’d rather hope that one of those who read this article might become an engineer at Apple or something like that and drive the UI development in a different direction. All those effects are getting “old” and “useless” every year. And every year tens of thousands of engineers are working on some new wow-flashy-thingy just to please the eye of a customer. Allow me to remind you that Mars is still un-colonized, we are still burning fossil fuels for electricity, we have wars, and global warming is getting real.

We have better problems to solve in the world than drooling over yet another flashy-thingy-magic. And, despite what others tell you, the world would not have turned into a living hell if this

(image: a simple button on a phone screen — It’s okay. It’s just a button.)

had been a button on your phone.

Just remember that something can be done about it and do whatever you can.