One Second of iOS Animation vs. The Entire Apollo 11 Moon Mission

Get ready for a take that will make your brain do a kickflip. It turns out a single, one-second animation on your iPhone might require more computational juice than the entire Apollo 11 mission to the moon. No, that's not a typo.

Let's look at the tale of the tape. The legendary Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC), a machine that literally guided a metal can of humans to another celestial body, could handle about 40,000 instructions per second. Over its entire ~76-hour trip to the lunar surface, that’s a whopping (but generous) estimate of about 11 billion instructions. Impressive, right?

Now, hold my space-juice.

Consider a single toggle switch animation in Apple's fancy new "Liquid Glass" design system. On a 120Hz display, your phone redraws the screen 120 times a second. That little switch is made of thousands of pixels, and each pixel has red, green, and blue subpixels that need instructions on how to shine. Some quick napkin math suggests this one animation requires calculating values for about 10.8 million subpixels in that single second.

To beat the entire Apollo 11 mission, each of those tiny subpixel calculations would need more than 1,000 instructions. Given that the "Liquid Glass" effect uses complex shader programs (think of them as digital artists painting with light) to look so slick and shiny, it's not just possible—it's likely. The math needed for those glassy reflections is way more complicated than the simple sums the AGC was built for.

So, while one computer was busy making history, the other is busy making a toggle switch look extra pretty. It’s a hilarious and humbling reminder of the absurdly powerful supercomputers we now casually use to watch cat videos and argue with strangers.

The next time you toggle on Do Not Disturb, give a little nod to the Apollo 11 astronauts. Your phone just did a workout that would have made their groundbreaking computer sweat.