Live Wallpapers, and What They Quietly Cost
A loop of falling snow looks best in the store listing, and worst at four in the afternoon on battery.
Animated wallpaper is easy to want. In a preview window it is always the most alive thing on the page: waves that keep arriving, snow that never lands, a slow drift of particles that seems to promise the machine is awake. Nothing in a still image competes with motion, which is exactly why the comparison is unfair.
The cost is not mysterious, only invisible. A moving background asks the GPU to decode and draw frames whenever the desktop is visible, and on a laptop that shows up as a warmer palm rest and an hour less of battery. Most systems quietly pause the animation when a game or a full-screen video takes over, which is the system admitting the wallpaper was never the point.
Then there is the honest arithmetic of how long you actually look at it. The desktop spends most of its day underneath windows; you see it in the second between closing one thing and opening another. A still image is entirely sufficient for that second, and it has the advantage of doing nothing at all for the rest of the day.
