[dkarl]

More likely it's a result of pressure to ship highly visible "improvements," combined with a lack of ideas that could improve the experience in a meaningful way. What do you do in that situation? Ship an obvious UI update that wouldn't have performed on the last gen hardware.

[Someone]

I haven’t used the new UI, so don’t assume this to be an endorsement of it, but even if you have good ideas about UI improvements and implement them, there still is pressure to make the UI look different because that, at a glance, shows users that they get something new.

And yes, “looking different” doesn’t have to mean “requires faster hardware”, but picking something that requires faster hardware makes it less likely that you will be accused of being a copy-cat of some other product’s UI.