I think this feature is not minimalist at all. Smooth scrolling consumes a lot of battery and processing power.

> In my experience a minimalist design often requires more effort behind the scenes.

Why ? When I say minimalist I essentially means less useless fancy features. Minimalist focuses on the useful, not on the feeling, so it can leave more room for other new features. The iPhone has a power of a 1995-2000 full fledged desktop PC or maybe more, yet it's using a lithium battery and it's 1cm thick.

This applies to all hardware: it's not worth it anymore to invest into new hardware if you're unable to exploit current hardware to their full potential.

You can throw money at chip technology, but at some point you also have to try throwing money at software and OS developers. Computers have always been about software, not hardware.

We have two different definitions of minimal here.

My take on a minimalist design means that life is made easier for the user. E.g. process data so the user has conclusions to interpret instead of raw data (that fits a minimalist design, but takes more processing).

I see now that your take on minimalist design is to remove unnecessary features from software. I'd argue that nobody wants "useless fancy features", unfortunately, what may be useless for me is necessary for you (otherwise why build those features anyway). So, it's all good to say let's keep to minimal designs (by whichever definition you mean), but in the end I don't see how that solves the problem that returns on hardware improvements is slowing, and frankly you haven't made the case that minimalist design solves the problem either.

> unfortunately, what may be useless for me is necessary for you

I don't understand that, I think I meant the opposite.

> and frankly you haven't made the case that minimalist design solves the problem either

You gave the example of the iPhone. The apple platform is one of the least flexible platform. In many places it requires to learn an unpopular language, objc, which is not used on existing, non-apple platform for many reasons, first one being that nextstep is owned by apple. Then it requires approval from the apple store.

John Carmack talked about those "layers of crap", they're present in most OS.

And what do you mean by "solving the problem" ? Having a minimalist designs allows you to leave more resources for other things, it doesn't "solve the problem", it just leaves room for more improvement.

> life is made easier for the user

So basically you're forcing everyone to walk on paths, and forbidding everyone to explore forests. I understand that it's better for the mainstream customers because they're not able to learn how to walk in forests, but flexibility is good too: you should still enable it.

In the end, when you buy hardware, most of the time you use the default feature set of the OS, nothing else. Web apps just use a sluggish, unreliable networking protocol which was designed to view static webpages.

So to sum up, people buy hardware to use facebook and twitter, listen to music, play a game, and that's what it is, a fancy, expensive gameboy color with chat. Except the hardware is 1000 or 100000 time faster and batteries last just as long.

I'm not making the case of solving a problem here, I'm just talking about the absence of improvement.

But there's a difference between a minimalist design and a design that looks minimalist. A minimalist design wouldn't need a physics engine because the things that need the physics engine are glitz effects. iOS 7 merely looks minimalist.

Yes, the parallax effect on the background image is glitz. I'd argue, however, that the physic's engine is not glitz, but rather makes the device easier to use, because when things work and feel as we expect it reduces the amount of mental effort we have to spend thinking about how to accomplish a task. E.g. when you can swipe a view to the side, and it 'feels' just like swiping a piece of paper to the side then you don't have to think about how to use the device, it all just makes sense. That's a smart design, minimalist in appearance, yet processor intensive.

maybe we could introduce the concept of "resource minimalism"